Trends Shaping Employee Experience with 3CLogic

While IT programs have traditionally been function-first, HR programs have always been built from the ground up to think about people first. With the pandemic, both facets have experienced a change in the landscape: HR and IT are integrating more and more and focusing on a streamlined and seamless employee experience.

This was the topic of a round table hosted Kirsten Keller, NTT DATA employee experience lead and Guillaume Seynhaeve, 3CLogic’s vice president of business and alliances.

Analyzing the Great Resignation

The last quarter of 2021 introduced the buzz word the Great Resignation – but it’s not just a catchy phrase, it’s a real phenomenon that employers have to contend with now. What were once perks of a job (a foosball table, free lunches, etc.) no longer make an impact in a remote-first workplace model, Guillaume says.

What employees value now is different. Flexibility and work-life balance are at the top of the list for employees. How can we bridge the gap that trendy amenities left in the employee experience space? Kirsten sees personalizing not just HR functions, but IT functions as a key to gaining an employee’s trust in an age where newer hires may have never even met their manager in person.

Hybrid work is here to stay

While many may have thought the remote and hybrid work models were flashes in the pan, it’s become increasingly obvious that hybrid work isn’t going anywhere. Kirsten urges companies to look at hybrid work as a long-term situation that requires long-term solutions and strategies.

Digital transformation has traditionally been focused on providing a seamless experience for customers, the pandemic has accelerated the movement to think of employees as deserving of a personalized, customer-service experience as well.

While this trend is positive overall, Guillaume warns about the dangers of over-digitization. Some connections between employees and company culture can’t be made purely through self-service or AI chats; In the remote work age, call centers and service desks are frequently the only human-to-human connection an employee may experience outside of meetings, making them all the more key.

At 3CLogic, service desks are now getting more calls, not fewer. The age-old “ask your neighbor in the next cube over” culture doesn’t work in the age of remote work, so service desks are now receiving calls that never would have made it past an employee-to-employee conversation before. This added call volume only emphasized the need for efficiency, and protocols for how and when to escalate a ticket from an AI or chat to a real human on the other end of the line.

Delivering an enterprise experience

Keeping with the theme of the service desk as a more important tool for employee experience than ever, Kirsten sees the growing desire to merge HR and IT services. While HR has always been focused on making employees feel supported, IT platforms are increasingly becoming people-oriented with supportive experiences much like HR. Where there used to be a division in who you’d call if you needed a password reset vs information about benefits, employees want both those questions to be answered in an intuitive, personalized way.

We see this consolidation in ServiceNow’s Employee Center offering, where there is a single central page so that employees always know where to go to receive accurate information and receive a seamless experience.

This emphasis on enterprise-wide experience can introduce challenges for multi-national and global companies. Kirsten sees clients stumbling over global rollouts, where policies must be adapted specifically by region, and translations must be accurate to language and dialect in order to avoid employees becoming frustrated or being unable to adequately access or understand where to get their information.

Companies focused on automation

Companies are focusing more and more on automated solutions, Guillaume finds. At 3CLogic they often see an assumption that AI and self-service will replace real people. However, he finds the service desk to be even more critical as employers want to still provide a human connection to company culture. Additionally, there may be circumstances where employees may not reasonably have access to an online portal or SMS chat, like in the case of 3CLogic’s client, a large auto manufacturer, where workers on the factory floor are far more likely to look for assistance by making a phone call.

However, automation still can reduce the number of tickets where a human is necessary. Instead of replacing a traditional service desk, AI allows the service desk to focus on call quality rather than quantity, establishing a human connection. This is borne out in the numbers: Guillaume has only seen call lengths increase over the past 18 months.