Recently updated on September 1st, 2023 at 11:35 am

Insights that will redefine how you work

This is the last blog in our three-part series of everything you need to create a workplace that is so inviting it feels like home! Today, we will talk about the data available that you can use to tap into insights which can unlock employee productivity and help you understand how to engage them better. Apart from that, we also talk about how you can make new talent feel welcome in this hybrid model set-up.

Creating a human-centric culture for your employees

Gartner analysis shows that 16% of employers are more frequently using technologies to monitor their employees through methods such as virtual clocking in and out, tracking work computer usage, and monitoring employee emails or internal communications/chat.

While some companies track productivity, others monitor employee engagement and well-being to understand employee experience better.

Touchpoint mapping to improve employee experience

Touchpoints are an employee’s multiple contact points with the organization. They take many forms — human, physical, virtual, formal, and informal — and include many that the organization doesn’t “control,” such as group chats on external services like Whatsapp or reviews on sites like Glassdoor.

Touchpoint mapping allows you to get a holistic, visual representation of an employee’s multiple contact points with the organization. The goal is to make sense of how different parts of the system affect one another to yield an employee’s final experience.

The elaborate touchpoint nexus

These touchpoints make the process of designing employee experiences more efficient, iterative, and likely to yield a final product that addresses the needs of both your employees and the organization.

Each one emphasizes something different (interpretation, quantification, objectivity) and has different time and resource requirements. Different data-interpretation tools can allow us to observe the problem from different angles (user personas focus on the employees; touchpoints focus on the channels).

Think about your objectives and choose the set of tools accordingly.

Learning from Veris

A super-app that super efficiently manages employees’ workplace experience

Challenge

Managing a diverse workforce in a post-pandemic, hybrid work environment often puts pressure on workplace enablers to know what is functioning well for people and what are the stumbling blocks. There is a need for a simple yet effective tool/ platform that allows for all this organization-wide data to be pooled centrally.

Solution

A super-app allows enablers to observe patterns of employee functioning in real-time and over time. For example, how effectively is the ‘flexibility’ of a hybrid work model being practised? Where is it getting under-utilized, and where is getting over-utilized? A simple check-in/ check-out dashboard on the app can help answer that. Similarly, data patterns around meeting room and desk utilization can help understand how overall space is being leveraged productively. The app thus allows HR leaders, facility leaders and CXOs to map overall employee experience and well-being.

Giving new talent a promising onboarding experience

For workers, onboarding can be draining, even in the best circumstances.

With new challenges created by the changes in work over the past year, companies need to overhaul their onboarding strategies to address long-standing shortcomings.

As we settle into this new era, how employees onboard must evolve along with every other aspect of how employees work, communicate, and collaborate.

Emphasizing personal connection over paperwork

In the pre-COVID-19 era, employees often learned more about their new company and colleagues during informal conversations around the workplace versus in official information sessions.

This dynamic doesn’t exist to the same degree in the hybrid work era because organic opportunities for interaction are harder to come by. For many new employees, even a small question asked via Microsoft Teams or Slack can feel like an intrusion on a colleague.

Especially in an employee’s first few days, focusing on connections over processes can greatly impact morale and relationships.

For example, employees hired in the past year may have never come into the office or met their boss and co-workers in person. Calling out for new kinds of mentorship programs, like matching new hires with an established employee they can talk with every day to become better acclimated to the company’s culture.

Virtual team welcome events and coffee dates should be part of any remote ramp-up process to prevent early feelings of isolation. This is also the time to connect new hires with affinity communities and to assign mentors.

Think about both people and places

In this new world of hybrid work, the workplace is treated as a more deliberate destination used for specific purposes like collaboration.

Employers of a hybrid or on-site workforce must be more conscientious about how workers and workplaces come together. The physical workspace has become an essential factor in employee experience.

Both new and existing employees must feel safe, and it should be easy for them to navigate buildings, building services and building procedures. The intersection of people and places is a new priority for orienting new hires and all employees.

Some emerging workplace priorities include reserving a desk or conference room and providing guidance to help employees navigate an office.

For example, when an employee books a desk, digital tools can ensure they are placed near their new teammates, trigger learning on health and safety policies, ensure cleaning services before arrival, and provide an interactive map guiding them to their destination.

Onsite team members can also be notified of the new hire’s whereabouts so they can greet them in person.

Real-time feedback is vital as an employee moves through the various onboarding processes. For example, after signing up for benefits, an employee can be prompted to rate the benefits process on a 5-star scale and elaborate via text. This allows organizations to understand what is and isn’t working and make updates in real time.

Learning from Veris

Challenge

Ensuring a smooth and welcoming onboarding experience for new joiners is the first big step towards building employee-organization connect.

Solution

Deployment of the Veris visitor management system and work app can ensure that new joiners are treated as a special category of visitors who are provided temporary access that gives them special benefits like wi-fi access, meal coupon passes, travel desk assistance, navigational support, etc. This ensures that their on-campus experience before getting permanent access is smooth and disruption-free so that they can effectively mix in with the organization and the workplace. This in turn, ensures that the first impression is always the best impression.

Get the blueprint for a work culture that rocks with our ebook!

Section Summary

Conclusion

And that wraps our epic journey through this three-part series. We learnt everything from how to maintain DEI practises in a hybrid work model set-up, the measures we could take to make new talent feel more welcome, creating moments that matter, and so much more!

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