The most valuable asset for any business is their talent, i.e. the employees that work there. Staff expense is one of the highest expenses as well, considering how much a company spends on recruiting and training these employees. Therefore, creating an environment where one’s employees are able to work at their full potential is a top priority for all organisations. 

In today's competitive world with an all out ‘war for talent’, it is extremely challenging to retain talented workers and keep them satisfied in their job for the long run. This is why companies are actively incorporating employee experience tools to their repertoire to make employees feel heard, reduce their non-value-added work, and help them focus on fulfilling work. 

Many such new age employee experience tools have been built keeping in mind a hybrid and distributed workforce, especially since the lockdown normalised the hybrid model. Even though the pandemic is almost over (hopefully), it is well known that hybrid and distributed workforces are here to stay.

When looking at the future of the workplace, employee experience tools and software help to assign, track and monitor work as well as employee wellness and overall satisfaction, thus creating an environment which makes work easier, transparent and scalable for employees irrespective of their location and shift timing.

The vital role of employee experience tools in Hybrid Working

The end goal of employee experience tools is to enhance the quality of work of employees. For instance, automated workplace tools remove many unnecessary and repetitive tasks from the hybrid working arrangement such as booking meeting rooms, diary scheduling, maintaining physical records of employees data, to name a few. 

Furthermore, the increasing involvement of artificial intelligence algorithms and security systems in HR, Facilities, and IT make powerful additions to creating accurate data and predictive insights.

IT Helpdesk

Software including chatbots help with redundant assignments such as essential "how-to" guides, requests for resetting passwords, and hardware orders. This can help remote working IT helpdesk resources to concentrate on solving new issues without distractions.

Additionally, through robust encryption software, autofill forms can be created to enable employees to fill those automatically. Further, e-signing tools can secure and monitor one's documents with secure signatures.

HR Tech 

One of the primary duties of HR teams is to understand employees’ expectations and meet them adequately to enhance the employee experience. Such tasks can be more efficiently done in a hybrid working environment if they include tools that can automatically extract employee and candidate data and provide actionable insights to HR. 

One commonly used example of this technology is when recruiters actively use job hiring websites and their AI services to train their desired candidates based on recommendations. Some even include automated applicant tracking software to select and access their resumes. This frees up a lot of the team’s resources.

Employee satisfaction 

Preventing burnout is why many companies include employee experience technologies in their services. Their main intention is to maintain motivation and productivity among their team. Employee experience tools can help significantly to increase the digital wellness of employees.

These tools will help provide necessary improvements and reduce the workload of repetitive and manual tasks that often drain employees' energy. Furthermore, for a hybrid workplace, intelligent tools will be able to offer real-time insights and highlight pressing problems which can then be solved. 

Performance and productivity estimations 

Performance management software and tools help communicate business objectives and priorities and clarify organisational strategies. New age AI-driven tools can be deeply interconnected with business strategies, career plans, and succession plans at each specific employee level. These can further provide line managers multiple opportunities and touchpoints to connect with their hybrid workforce and give each employee actionable feedback which can be documented. 

The software can further help the employers by giving real-time dashboards and reports that enable them to monitor the performance of each employee individually and accurately.

Conclusion

The onset of many new AI tools has brought some doubts about their services and effectiveness as well. However, this skepticism is unfounded and the benefits have already surpassed initial expectations.

Hence, it is not surprising that humans are increasingly relying on and accepting digitised tools to take over non-value add chores completely, shifting their daily work and business operations. Many industries now believe that the worldwide adoption of such tools is inevitable.

Similarly, employee experience tools have become a key component in leading hybrid working towards success. Hence, they are bound to grow and eventually create a workforce where humans and software will perform their respective tasks side by side, complementing each other.