The key to a frictionless workforce experience? Meet employees where they are

The best thing I took away from this year’s HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas was not an awesome piece of swag (which there were many), or insights into an innovative technological breakthrough, or even Mike Rowe’s hilarious firsthand experience with “AI”—no, not the AI you are thinking of. It was the collective agreement from thought leaders, analysts, attendees and vendors that successful HR operations need to meet employees where they already are.

At PeopleDoc, we talk often about how employees expect and deserve the same consumer-grade experiences they have in their personal lives, in their professional lives. This belief is present in everyday conversations we have with clients and prospects, messages we deliver to analysts, and every internal product and roadmap discussion we have. And it’s not just talk, the benefits of a great employee experience for both employees and employers are well documented.

But stepping outside our PeopleDoc bubble, being at the world’s largest and best attended HR technology event and hearing thought-leaders like Jason Averbook and Josh Bersin talk about the importance of providing a “frictionless workforce experience” and the “employee experience platform” was great to see. This new “layer” provides HR with the opportunity to deliver service to their employees wherever it is most convenient to them—whether it’s on a workplace productivity application like Slack or Facebook Workplace, your HR Service Delivery platform, or another business application.

The Frictionless Workforce Experience

I found Jason Averbook’s presentation “The World Known as HR Technology Has Changed Forever. Are You Ready?” extremely insightful. He talked about how, before HR invests in technology, they need to have a vision for what they want to achieve. If your mission is to provide the workforce with a customer-like experience, map out the experiences you want employees to have in their moments of need and how HR can measure success and continually improve the services delivered to employees.

Part of offering this frictionless, customer-like experience is meeting employees where they already are. Instead of forcing employees to use another point solution they don’t like using, or making them use your legacy enterprise systems to talk to HR, meet them in the systems they live and breath in.

Now that’s not to say HR shouldn’t continue to invest in best-of-breed HR technology. The current rate of innovation in the HR tech market is remarkable and can make a huge impact on organizations. But employees don’t care that you switched vendors or added another application to your tech stack, all they care about is that their HR needs are met in an environment they are already comfortable with.

Technology, like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), incorporated into your employee experience platform enables HR to orchestrate processes in one place—no matter if that’s within the ATS, HRIS or HR Service Delivery Platform—and deliver service to employees in their channel of choice.

Find out how PeopleDoc is improving the employee experience and helping HR work in a new way with the help of RPA. Read our RPA overview: