Why the workplace matters

Millennials are now the largest generation¹ in the workforce. They're bringing in a whole new set of expectations around the definition of a "great place to work.” That’s why the workplace matters. Especially in a tight labor market, the actual facility has a huge impact on productivity and a company’s ability to woo and retain talent.

What will the incoming generation of employees, who were born with ubiquitous smart phones and AI, expect from their workplace?

As companies look to hire more digital natives, they need to understand that these new workers expect convenience from their workplace, have no patience for mundane tasks that take time away from their goals, and demand modern user experiences like the ones they get as consumers. So it’s not unexpected that workplace experience has a huge impact on employee productivity and satisfaction.

think that senior leadership could be doing more to improve employees’ experiences at work.

In addition to a changing workforce, companies are facing a talent shortage. According to Gartner’s latest Emerging Risks Survey, “staff shortages” is the top concern organizations face globally. That’s why forward-looking companies are looking for ways to creatively attract and retain employees.

These new environments are designed to make employees happier, but workers aren’t the only ones who benefit. Employers gain, too, from a better workplace, with real productivity boosts.

"Finding place to meet is one of the biggest time waster for workers"

Facility managers often struggle to fulfill workplace “responsiveness” through the right mix of services and spaces. With success, though, comes:

Increased productivity

Better service quality

Improved workplace experience

That’s why today’s facility managers are looking for new ways to increase productivity and optimize their services delivery — and intelligent IoT provides a solution. A connected building that also harnesses the power of AI has the ability to optimize operations and remove needless friction in employee experiences.

Recognizing the impact experience has on employee engagement and productivity, companies are taking a more comprehensive view of how to influence it.

To improve the employee experience, adopting the employee perspective can provide an important starting point — using data and analytics to identify needs and measure impact on business outcomes. Understanding key milestones in the employee journey can further refine insights into areas where experience may be lacking and what actions can be most effective.

Employee experience is created by interactions across three spheres: their physical environments, their social connections and the work to be done.

During an employee’s work day, these spheres of interaction often overlap, creating six facets of the employee experience. Understanding these facets is key to elevating employee experiences.


Click To learn more about each facet

Strategy and culture

An organization must consider each of these six facets of employee experience in light of overall business goals and culture.

The business goals and objectives of a software company may be quite different from those of a retailer, while the culture of an entrepreneurial startup may differ from that of a large multinational corporation. For a hospitality company, the need to provide high-quality guest services may serve as a guiding principle in the design of employee experience; for an oil company, the emphasis may be on occupational safety. Clearly defining these underlying tenets is necessary to designing experiences that not only match the needs of the individual, but are aligned with organizational priorities.

Likewise, once a company defines its strategy, it must help ensure that leadership behaviors, people practices and management systems — formal drivers of organizational culture — consistently support the employee experience. Informal practices matter too; if the culture is fear-based or hierarchical, employees may struggle to collaborate on open, social platforms.

Personalization

Work is rarely a one-size-fits-all proposition. Many companies recognize the importance of balancing the needs of the organization with the unique characteristics of individuals and work groups. Therefore, they are looking for ways to tailor employee experience.

From a social perspective, this could include enabling employees to develop profile pages on a collaborative platform. At the physical level, this could include empowering individuals to configure their work areas and their tools to match both their work requirements and their personal tastes.

Transparency

Much as individuals are looking to gain a greater understanding of what goes into their food, clothing, and other goods and services, they are also seeking to understand their own organizations’ workings. They want to know how their efforts contribute to larger goals.

Social platforms give individuals a forum to raise concerns, contribute innovative ideas and maintain an ongoing dialogue with leadership. Social platforms can also reveal informal networks and identify influence leaders. We are even seeing organizations increase transparency of physical interactions, using the Internet of Things to observe collaboration patterns and interactions with customers.

Simplicity

Many individuals in large organizations struggle with two forces that make the flow of work increasingly challenging. On the one hand, years of mergers, acquisitions and technology changes have turned work processes into convoluted sets of procedures and regulations that contribute to frustration and poor customer responsiveness.

At the same time, organizations are bombarded by new sources of information that often conflict and lack the necessary context to improve decision making. Simplification efforts, like removing non-value-add process steps and providing easier access to effective knowledge bases, can create a more positive work environment.

Authenticity

The importance of aligning employee experiences to an organization’s culture and value system is becoming increasingly evident. Organizations can express corporate values in numerous ways, from the physical design of corporate headquarters and local offices, to the establishment of corporate events.

Responsiveness

Feedback is quickly becoming ubiquitous in our consumer and professional lives. Not only do individuals want to provide input into their working environments, they expect companies to respond to their ideas and concerns.

Companies are beginning to incorporate responsiveness into their ongoing performance management systems. They are also gathering input about individuals’ perceptions of environmental conditions. For example, employees may report issues on demand from anywhere on campus. Information would be visible to all employees, as would resultant actions taken by management, facilities staff and others.

Meet Sarah. She is a project manager at a large company with a global footprint. Let's see how IoT and AI come together at her employer's facilities to make her day go smoothly.

So how does an organization decide on the right mix of services and spaces to elevate the workplace experience and improve productivity?


Tune in to the voice of the employee with analytics

Enhancement efforts should start with analytics. Your organization can apply similar techniques to gauging employee experience as those you use to measure and evaluate customer experience. Traditional employee HR information and unstructured comments from internal and external social platforms can provide insights into potential solutions to challenges. IoT can generate useful data about working conditions and personal wellness. Analytics can help you develop insights, identify changes, amplify employee voice and address issues.


Invest in key touchpoints where employee experience has the greatest impact

Think about the points in the employee lifecycle that truly make a difference — for employees and the organization as a whole. For some, particularly those in traditionally labor-intensive industries, recruiting and on-boarding processes have a significant impact on attracting and retaining top talent. For others, experiences related to project assignments and career development will more notably impact retention and productivity. Understanding the relevance of different experiences, and taking into consideration your organizational strategy and culture, will help you better target investment.


Build an employee experience coalition that crosses traditional silos

Designing integrated experiences around the physical, social and task spheres requires a multi-functional perspective. In addition to tool design and development, IT needs to provide the hardware and help desk support. Facilities and real estate services need to deliver workspaces that enable individual productivity and collective innovation. Marketing must help consolidate the connection between employee and corporate branding. Most important, leadership at the line-of-business level must oversee day-to-day activities and the overall work environment.


Design employee experiences using rapid, iterative design principles

Apply agile design principles to enhancing employee experiences. First, develop an understanding of your user population based on quantitative as well as observational data. Second, document the stages of the employee journey, highlighting physical, social and task-related interactions, as well as approaches for addressing limitations or bottlenecks. Third, rapidly develop solutions that solve parts of the puzzle over short time periods rather than creating one larger solution that may take much longer. Finally, capture feedback and refine the original solution on an ongoing basis.

Applying these principles to the design of employee experience can generate quick successes and prevent larger, more costly challenges in the future.

With AI and IoT, leaders can drive greater operational efficiency and engaging workplace experiences across all aspects of their connected facilities.

IBM offers AI and IoT driven capabilities that drive real business outcomes for connected facilities across the lifecycle.