Unily the future: Fit for the employee experience era

The EX era is here

If the last decade was characterized by a laser focus on customer experience, the next will be typified by a relentless focus on employee experience. This was the resounding message delivered at Unite 23, Unily’s landmark employee experience conference.

It’s been a long time coming for those of us immersed in the space. For years we’ve heard enterprises talk about employees being their greatest asset while investment is poured into transforming the customer experience. It’s not that enterprises didn’t believe in the value of an engaged workforce, just that the consumer world was changing so fast, customer experience transformation had to take priority.

But, today, the tables have turned. Now it’s the workplace that’s going through a period of flux, and it’s the employee experience that demands our attention.

According to Gallup (2023), just 23% of the global workforce is engaged and low engagement is costing the global economy 8.8tr annually – 9% of the global GDP. Business leaders are being called on to move the needle and lean into the engagement opportunity as a route to solving global economic challenges.

The era of employee experience has arrived. And, at Unite 23, we witnessed that tide change. Never before have so many influential business leaders gathered in one space, united by a shared recognition of the critical importance of employee experience.

Where once the question was ‘why should we invest in employee experience?’ now we’re asking ‘how do we excel at it?’. And that’s where Unily is positioned to make a difference…

The forces shaping the EX era

Before we can embrace the opportunities to elevate employee engagement and enhance the employee experience, we must understand the forces shaping the EX era. Unily recognizes three key drivers at play:

#1. Workforce dynamics have shifted

Today, employees want more from their organizations than a simple paycheck. They want to feel aligned to a mission, connected through shared values, and confident in a common purpose.

According to a 2022 study by Deloitte, 84% of employees surveyed consider it important to work for an employer that provides meaningful work, makes them feel proud of the organization they work for (83%), and plays a role in creating a better future for the next generation (80%).

Despite this, only 52% agree that the values their organization project externally match with internal practices.

Enterprises need to do better at communicating a compelling purpose internally. A revived approach to strategic communications that accounts for increasingly dispersed workforces with expectations molded by consumer trends is required.

#2. The rise of the employee voice

Employees now have a louder, stronger voice that extends beyond the walls of the workplace. The advent of social and online platforms like Glassdoor has unveiled more ways for employees to share their experiences, both negative and positive. This has increased transparency into workplace environments, often putting more power in the hands of the employee.

Today, employees seek workplaces that embrace diversity, stand up on social and environmental issues, and demonstrate care for people and planet.

According to Edelman's 2022 Trust in the Workplace report, 69% of global workers say that having societal impact is a strong expectation or deal breaker when considering a job.

Delivering a winning employee experience that attracts and retains top talent has taken on a new dimension, one that thinks as much about what happens in the world as the workplace. 

#3. Impact on business outcomes

Where previously the ROI of investing in EX has been up for debate, there is now a demonstrable link between employee experience and revenue. As far back as 2017, analysis from the Godfather of employee experience research, Jacob Morgan, found that companies that were investing in employee experience were four times more profitable than their peers. In more recent times, research from Harvard Business Review found that retail stores could uplift profitability by as much as 150% by making improvements to the employee experience.

Research like this underpins the link between customer experience and employee experience, proving what talking heads like Simon Sinek have been saying for years: "Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first."

And it's not just those at the helm of the EX revolution that are recognizing the bottom-line benefits of investing in EX; enterprise leaders are waking up to the opportunity, with Citrix finding that 74% of executives anticipate significant ROI from an improved employee experience.

Today, enterprises understand that investing in EX is a precursor to success. 

All of this underlines the need for a revitalized approach to employee experience transformation.

Unily’s vision for the future

Over the last two decades, Unily has worked with hundreds of brands across the world to power employee experience transformation. Through these partnerships, we have come to identify four cornerstones of employee experience success:

The four employee experience cornerstones:

• Alignment
• • Ensuring that the whole workforce is collaboratively working towards a common mission
• Enablement
  • Providing access to the expertise and knowledge needed for employees to unlock their full potential and thrive in their role.
• Engagement
  • Connecting employees to others, the company culture, the mission, and ensuring that they know how they can support that mission.
• Simplicity
  • Making the digital world of work seamless through easy-to-use tools that work effectively together and result in better outputs of work.

To deliver EX excellence, businesses must succeed across these four areas. Unily is evolving to help make it happen.

Unily’s roadmap: Designed to jumpstart the EX era

We’ve been working hard to bring new firepower to the Unily platform that will arm our customers with the capabilities to take the EX era by storm. Each of our new capabilities is closely aligned to the cornerstones, which we believe will be critical to making the biggest impact.

From AI-powered employee experiences to a more intuitive CMS, and enhanced analytics that will unlock a deeper understanding of engagement trends across the workforce, here’s what we’ve got in store to take on the era of EX:

AI Publishing Assistant

The recent arrival of Unily’s AI Publishing Assistant puts the power of generative AI into the hands of enterprise communicators. As organizations strive to find new ways to connect a digitally minded workforce with rich, personalized stories, our AI Publishing Assistant is the enterprise comms companion that will elevate enterprise storytelling and alleviate resourcing pressures. With this extra firepower to hand, even the smallest teams can make a big impact. 

AI Search

Unily will soon enhance an already exceptional search offering with AI-enabled search. Integrating AI capabilities into Unily search functionality will enhance discoverability through greater relevance and user experience within a tailored context for the employee.

Generating intuitive answers from a mere few words, AI Search scans through all material across the employee experience platform to locate a specific answer. This cuts out several clicks and stages of sifting through content for employees, saving time for your people, and empowering them with relevant, accurate information – fast.

AI Summarization

Another exciting development on the horizon for Unily is AI summarization. This sophisticated technology condenses lengthy articles, documents, or other content into concise and coherent summaries, giving employees quick access to the highlights they need to stay informed. Summaries can even be personalized to suit an employee’s role for ultimate relevancy.

Employee Experience Insights

Difficulty measuring engagement has been a longstanding thorn in the side for those at the helm of employee experience transformation. Unily wants to empower organizations to move away from messy data towards actionable insights with this new development.

Our upcoming release, Employee Experience Insights, marks a departure from surface-level analytics like content view counts. Instead, we will be providing enterprises with rich dashboards that go deeper, interpreting sentiment and offering smart recommendations to move the engagement needle.

The best businesses know their audiences inside out, and Unily’s going to make that a whole lot easier.

Intelligent CMS

Unily’s enterprise-grade content management system is getting a boost in power, and a slicker user experience. Our intelligent content management improvements are focused on empowering platform admins to unleash the full power of Unily, intuitively. AI support will simplify content creation, giving admins the intuitive publishing tools they need to craft consumer-grade experiences with ease. A centralized ‘Create Content’ flow, instinctive widget guides, featured widgets, and enhanced CMS search will inspire the creation of engaging, thoughtfully designed, and high-quality content that will take employee engagement into the next decade.

New Site Level Analytics

With Site Level Analytics, Site Owners can oversee the performance of a site with month-on-month changes, allowing organizations to adapt behavior and better understand where gaps are, or where the next opportunity lies.

With this exciting release, administrators can easily access valuable performance data like clicks, traffic, and views, in an aggregated format. Site administrators will have greater visibility over the content mix at play, as well as having the tools to make more informed content ideation decisions. Reporting is also made significantly easier with the ability to share an exportable monthly report as needed.

Future of AI Development

As we stay committed to providing enterprises with an Out-of-the-Box (OOTB) platform that offers unmatched extensibility, Unily is actively exploring how we apply AI capabilities within developer workstreams to expedite the creation of bespoke experiences.

Harnessing the power of generative AI, Unily is working on expanding beyond simple text generation and into use cases such as generating code, for example, using prompts to dynamically query the Unily Graph. This will enable super admins to create tailored employee experiences that extend Unily’s OOTB functionality more quickly and easily. This is another example of Unily applying AI to employee experience use cases to automate and simplify workstreams.

Unily: Your partner for the EX era

With these exciting upcoming platform releases, Unily will continue to enable organizations to align, engage, enable, simplify, and ultimately thrive in the new era of employee experience excellence. It's time to think big and act boldly.