With more digital tools, businesses expect more success and happier employees. However, this is not always the case. Companies should look for the right tools that can relieve employees and make processes more efficient, but the wrong ones have the opposite effect, in other words: watch out when choosing tools.

The job market has been changing at an astonishing pace for the past two years. Where many companies had to lay off employees at the beginning of the pandemic, the tide has now turned completely. In fact, the majority of companies are desperately looking for qualified personnel.

Top HR Tech News: Mystery Raises $18.5 Million to Build a One-Stop-Shop to Proactively Engage Employees

So with that in mind, organizations should look to focus on how they can improve their digital tools to fulfill employee satisfaction.

A Global Digital Overload

What at first seems paradoxical, is a reality in many companies that have developed primarily in the wake of the pandemic. In many cases, existing digitization backlogs had to be made up in a hurry from March of last year, which in some cases resulted in the introduction of countless tools for a wide variety of work steps. 

Employees can feel overwhelmed by this flood of tools and disrupted in their everyday work. A boost to digitization is undoubtedly necessary across the globe, but it is about much more than the mere provision of software and hardware. For companies, it is about relieving their employees of routine activities and supporting them with more complex tasks. If this succeeds, a classic win-win situation arises, as the company grows thanks to the more efficient work processes and the employees have more space and resources available to advance their tasks in the best possible way. 

Choosing the Right Tools

From a company perspective, employees must be at the center of digital transformation. The decisive factor when implementing digital tools is therefore an open communication culture. Board members and team leaders not only have to ask themselves but also their employees, where digital tools can be seamlessly integrated and relieve and support employees. If obstacles and problems in everyday work are identified together, solutions can be found that are then perceived by the employees as help and not as an additional to-do.

Expense management is an example of such a process. In many companies, employees still have to grapple with countless, sometimes better, sometimes worse, payment receipts for the expense report. Submission, review and processing require a lot of time, which is not particularly beneficial for employee satisfaction. Fortunately, there are digital solutions for this repetitive activity that make the entire process much more efficient and employee-friendly. 

Latest in Hiring Industry: Naukri JobSpeak Index: Hiring Trends Pick Pace in 2022; IT, SaaS and Retail Contribute Significantly

With the help of digital tools, the entire expense management process can be automated to a large extent, whereby employees only have to photograph payment receipts and transfer them to an app, which then takes care of the processing independently. This advantage brings employees in financial accounting and those who submit expenses additional valuable time, meaning that the entire accounting process is less error-prone, paperless, and more environmentally friendly.

Going Full-Time Digital

Digitization is a mammoth project that cannot be implemented overnight. When looking at digital tools, board members, managers, and team leaders have to pay close attention to which processes they can be meaningfully integrated into. The example of expense management shows that these considerations should primarily be based on the employee’s perspective. 

Only when a tool solves a specific problem for employees does it increase their satisfaction and productivity. Other factors are compliant and uncomplicated implementation, so that the tool can be integrated into everyday work without major training and creates added value as quickly as possible, both materially and immaterially.

The goal of making working life easier can only be achieved if employees are at the center of the digital transformation. Well-chosen digital tools are essential to creating a work environment in which employees feel comfortable and remain loyal to their company over the long term. In other words: digitization, yes, but it must be employee-oriented and practical.

Recommended:

HRTech Insights: Understanding the Role of Contextual Data Science in the HR Industry

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]