Roundtable Recap: Trends Shaping Employee Experience with 3CLogic

This Tuesday, we had the pleasure of collaborating with 3CLogic on an early morning roundtable all about the exciting shifts taking place in the realm of Employee Experience. If you’re not much of an early bird, don’t fret! We’re here to recap all the insights from Tuesday’s roundtable in this blog while you wait for that second cup of coffee to brew.

As always, you can watch all of our webinars back on demand. Here’s the link to our ServiceNow Roundtable: Exploring Trends Shaping the Employee Experience & Workplace.

We were joined by our own Kirsten Keller, Employee Experience Lead here at Acorio, and Guillaume Seynhaeve, 3CLogic’s VP of Business and Alliances. With years of experience in the HR world, Kirsten reflects on the shifting landscape of the relationship between IT and HR. 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.

The Great Resignation

The buzzword of the last quarter of 2021 has to be 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. So what can replace 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

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.

Guillaume adds that where 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 on the whole, he also 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, Guillaume has noticed that service desks are now getting more calls, not less. 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.

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.

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.

Lastly, Kirsten touched on the most immediate issue at the top of most HR professionals’ minds: the nationwide Vaccine Mandate. Sometimes there isn’t time for a drawn-out strategy, and implementation needs to start now, which is why Acorio offers a Vaccine Mandate Compliance offering designed to deploy in only a few weeks.