6 ways an employee experience platform delivers ROI

Goodbye intranet, hello employee experience platform

The intranet of yesteryear was limited to basic and sometimes manual functionality, like submitting holiday requests or finding the support number for IT. It featured uneven user experiences and required a lot of IT support, often leaving employees feeling frustrated and disengaged.

Today, first impressions are crucial – 33% of employees realize in their very first week if they’d like to stay with the company long-term. When a new employee starts and fires up their work device, laptop, or mobile, they want to feel like a brand-new world of opportunities has opened to them. They come expecting seamless consumer-grade experiences and the ability to find what they need, when they need it.

The employee experience platform of today modernizes the intranet, making it easily accessible for all users, intuitive, with a lower barrier to entry, and futureproof. It puts user experience at the forefront - gone are the days of broken links, multiple tabs, and ugly interfaces. Crucially, it empowers employees to work their own way by integrating with popular third-party applications and minimal IT involvement.

6 ways an Employee Experience Platform delivers business value

While an Employee Experience Platform is a great way to focus your digital transformation strategy on employee engagement, there are also six clear benefits to help you to achieve a rapid return on investment.

#1. Retain new starters and get them up to speed fast

Employees can experience a sense of being isolated when they start a new job, unless they have everything they need, with easy access to people who can help them. The prevalence of remote working can also compound this. From finding and connecting with your team, it can seem like the rest of their organization is clouded in mystery.

Essentially, new starters want to feel reassured that their manager and colleagues are just a click away, easily discoverable, and reachable. An employee experience platform gives you a handy people directory where you can find colleagues by their skills, ideal for striking up conversations with people who share similar interests or are working towards similar goals and projects. Alternatively, search by location to discover your nearest colleagues.

#2. A personalized workplace for everyone

With so much information to trawl through, the modern intranet can become a bit of a time sink, with employees spending hours every day searching for what they need. Having to wade through content that may or may not be relevant to them can lead to information overload and a feeling that the company is not speaking to them, personally - it’s talking to the masses. Worst yet, when urgent action is required, they may not find what they’re looking for in time.

An employee experience platform will cut through the noise, delivering targeted experiences for all your people. From departmental hub pages, like HR hubs complete with necessary and up-to-date policies, to targeted and personalized comms, your people will always access and receive the most suitable content to them. Content is king, but relevant content goes one better.

#3. Connect people to information, fast

Finding what you need should be easy, but often searches on an intranet are limited sending people round in circles. File types may not be supported, and unnecessary restrictions are put in place. Other times, an intranet simply cannot cope with the sheer amount of data and documents accumulated in an enterprise knowledge base.

An employee experience platform gets people to what they need, fast. With consumer-grade filters and configurability, an enterprise-wide search becomes like second-nature, echoing a Google-like search experience that everyone is familiar with. Together with the targeted experiences highlighted above, finding what you need at a glance becomes a real possibility.

#4. Offer opportunities to grow

Onboarding and job training are essential, whether remote or face to face. Once your new starter has settled into their role, they’ll want to be challenged, offered a career path coupled with lots of learning opportunities. An intranet might only be able to post a link to an upcoming training session, and it’ll be mostly dependent on HR managers to send manual reminders.

With an employee experience platform, you offer a more dynamic, tailor learning experience. Create a video training series and post them to your dedicated landing page. Make mandatory reading a breeze and send notifications directly from your employee experience platform to their email, intranet, or mobile.

#5. Increase productivity with a connected hub

With so many applications used in business today, user experiences can be fragmented, resulting in time spent learning the behavior of different systems and remembering countless passwords. This can cause application fatigue, which in turn leads to employees losing focus and reduced productivity.

An employee experience platforms can come with pre-canned integrations, meaning that it’s got everything you need to get your people using the functionality they require, without extra development. It can also integrate with popular third-party applications to give your people a streamlined view of the functionality they use the most.

#6. Innovate and find solutions with ideation

The best ideas can come from the most unexpected places. In a challenging economic climate, you’ll need everyone to pull together towards a shared vision. This can be incredibly difficult, with siloed teams in different locations and remote work taking away the chats people used to have around the office. A traditional intranet will offer nothing to encourage innovation.

An employee experience platform opens the door to ideation, an exciting way of getting your people to share ideas, vote for their favorites, and see them come to life. Ideation can create a buzz around your company and get people thinking outside the box to deliver new, innovative initiatives.

Upgrade your intranet to an employee experience platform

If you’d like to experience the benefits of Unily’s employee experience platform, our experts would be happy to run through a free demo. Contact us to get started.