Exploring the Future of Employee Experience Platforms

The HR world has witnessed a significant change in the past few decades, especially with the introduction of cutting-edge AI employee experience platforms (EXPs). These revolutionary technologies have steered new ways for employees to interact with businesses, providing fresh perspectives on their work terrain.

Since their appearance in the HR space, EXPs have quickly established themselves as vital factors in the HR technological structure. They’re well suited to serving the demands of both virtual and hybrid workplaces, aiming to create a formative, supportive, and engaging work environment.

In this article, we’ll explore the history of employee experience platforms, explain the benefits of using these platforms, and highlight platforms that facilitate employee experience. 

What’s the Meaning of Employee Experience?

Before we dive deep, it’s important to look into the concept of employee experience. This emphasis is necessary to support its vital role in helping HRs foster a cohesive work terrain where employees actively interact and unite.

Employee Experience (EX) is the summation of relations and connections that employees cultivate and nurture during their stay in an organization. It covers employees’ relationships with their managers and colleagues and the use of technological tools for task completion and access to learning openings. Also, It’s a reflection of the predominant culture within an organization.

The employee experience journey commences when an employee is recruited and onboarded, continuing throughout their entire stay in the organization. 

What Is an Employee Experience Platform?

An Employee Experience Platform (EXP) is a technology-grounded tool developed to optimize key aspects of the employee experience within an organization. It’s a company-wide effort to improve employees’ experiences.

The increasing awareness of employees' physical and mental health concerns in recent years has made employee experience management platforms a must-have.

In the past, most organizations' ultimate goal was having physical work surroundings that fostered a cheerful ambiance. However, with the rise of virtual workplaces in the post-pandemic era, the possibility of reduced employee interactions has become a source of concern. There is now a critical need to understand how workplace culture influences employee performance and overall welfare.

Employee experience platforms have various essential features that work in synergy to create a positive work environment and promote employee engagement. 

These features include:

• Communication and Collaboration: Numerous digital employee experience platforms offer communication and collaboration tools to promote internal communication, fostering teamwork and knowledge sharing.‍
• Onboarding and Training:  EXPs streamline the onboarding process by integrating training materials. This ensures that all employees are well-equipped with the information and tools to carry out tasks effectively.‍
• Performance Evaluation: Employee experience measurement platforms play key roles in performance management by furnishing performance analysis. Hence, they help with performance review and goal-setting refinement.‍
• Feedback and Survey: Employee experience platforms frequently contain mechanisms for collecting feedback from employees. These assist organizations in gaining a better understanding of employee needs.‍
• Rewards and Benefits: Efficient employee experience platforms incorporate frameworks by which employees can get rewards for their positive work inputs. Sections where information about programs aimed at perfecting employee health and well-being can be published.

Assembly is a top employee experience platform that successfully incorporates an effective employee reward system.

The History and Future of Employee Experience Platforms 

The foremost HR technologies were simple record-keeping and payroll systems operated using tabulating machines. However, a vital moment in HR technology occurred in 1987 with PeopleSoft's introduction of the first client-server system. 

Over the subsequent decades, ultra-modern employee experience platforms began to materialize when vendors created tools that automated the process of recruiting, onboarding, and performance management. There has been a purposeful and progressive shift from seeing employees as regular workforce members to recognizing them as important as the special guests at a picnic. 

This elaboration continued with the emergence of software-as-a-service (SaaS) HR platforms based on cloud computing. These cloud-based HR platforms enabled organizations to store their HR data on third-party servers rather than onsite servers, with vendors responsible for maintaining the servers. Cloud computing technology ushered the period of the Human Capital Management (HMC) suite, which connected vital HR processes in a single technological platform.

The future of EXPs is bright and dynamic. While the emphasis on furnishing an immersive and positive employee experience remains strong, the focus has shifted towards the complete adoption and ethical operation of AI technologies to enhance the effectiveness of these HR tools further. 

Accordingly, the revolution in the EXPs space will come into play, with augmented and virtual reality playing a vital role in developing engaging training programs, onboarding experiences, and virtual collaboration spaces.

What Are the Benefits of Employee Experience Platforms?

Adding an effective employee experience platform into your organization’s workflow creates a happier employee pool and increases company value in the long run.

The top benefits of employee experience platforms include:

1. Improved Communication
2. Enhanced Employee Productivity
3. Personalized Employee Experience
4. Promote Work Balance
5. Efficient Company Culture
6. Growth and Learning Opportunities
7. Better Insights on Business Goals

1. Improved Communication

Employee experience platforms (EXPs) positively impact organizational communication. They offer centralized digital hubs to employees across different geographical locations and time zones for information exchange, internal information, design updates, industry news, and resources. As a result, the misinformation is adequately managed.

EXPs also contain cooperative features such as discussion rooms and instant messaging, enabling real-time, effective collaboration among remote workers.

Your organization can also work on these platforms to gain employee feedback and foster a culture of openness and transparency. By integrating communication and collaboration tools, EXPs enhance communication and save precious time and resources. For example, they streamline information dispersion and facilitate task efficiency.

2. Enhanced Employee Productivity

EXPs improve the performance of employees in their roles. They can automate the entire onboarding process of your organization, reducing the need for manual paperwork and allowing employees to deflect their focus toward further productive tasks. 

To ensure effective task prosecution, EXPs also give employees quick access to essential information and resources, including documents, training materials, and procedures. Likewise, the performance evaluation features of EXPs offer nonstop work appraisals, helping employees identify areas of improvement in their skills to improve work outputs.

Also, leading employee experience platforms incorporate features for recognizing and rewarding the contributions of employees. Celebrating the positive impacts of employees motivates them to maintain high levels of productivity while actively fulfilling the organization’s goals. 

Here are 50 performance review phrases to inspire and improve your workforce.

3. Personalized Employee Experience

Employee experience platforms do an excellent job of creating work environments acclimatized to employees' requirements, sentiments, and preferences. They achieve this by furnishing customized literary paths grounded on employees’ data and recommending training and development openings that align with individual skills, learning preferences, and career aspirations.

Most EXPs allow employees to integrate their personal goals and set objectives that mirror the organization’s objectives, building a structured means for employees to track their progress. Some platforms also allow employees to select how they prefer to admit rewards and their preferred means of communication. 

More importantly, EXPs are accessible from various geographical locations and devices. This flexibility is crucial to support remote and mobile work options, enabling employees to epitomize their work schedules.

4. Promote Work Balance

EXPs are excellent for helping employees balance their professional and personal lives, helping them establish an equilibrium between their work liabilities and personal obligations. As discussed earlier, one means of achieving this is by customizing work schedules. 

Also, shared calendars, announcements, and reminders integrated into employee experience platforms foster effective time operation and prevent professional setbacks caused by stress. Most EXPs simplify leave management so employees can look up their leave balance, submit requests, track approval in real-time, and plan their leave appropriately.

5. Efficient Company Culture

EXPs serve as ideal tools for improving your organization’s culture. They play critical roles in shaping and buttressing an inclusive company culture. 

EXPs contain communication channels that promote open and direct relations between your organization’s workforce and top management staff. They create a transparent work environment where employees feel comfortable expressing their opinions and concerns, fostering inclusivity and diversity. This helps to teach a shared sense of purpose and identity among the organization’s workforce.

6. Growth and Learning Opportunities

Employee experience platforms support professional advancements by providing non-stop learning openings for employees. 

They achieve this by giving access to different learning resources, including webinars, online courses, tutorial videos, and mentorship programs. This ensures employees acquire applicable industry credentials.

EXPs also support peer collaboration by encouraging knowledge sharing amongst employees. They allow employees to set professional development goals and monitor their progress.

7. Better Insights on Business Goals

EXPs contribute to an in-depth understanding of your organization's goals, ensuring commitment to making data-driven decisions. Their pre-built analytics features make this a reality. 

In this regard, innovative employee experience HR platforms gather data on employee engagement, performance, feedback, well-being, and relations. Afterward, they aggregate, dissect, and extract valuable perspectives on how employees contribute to realizing the organization’s goals from each data set.

The insights obtained provide a dependable picture of trends and patterns in employees' behavior, engagement, and work outputs, forming a background for visionary decision-making.

What’s an Example of an Experience Platform?

Now that we’ve gone through crucial aspects of an employee experience platform, let’s look at some leading employee experience platforms. These platforms & software include:

Assembly

Assembly is an innovative cloud-based human capital management software that facilitates employee experience. It’s a comprehensive platform offering a range of features designed to provide employees with a holistic HR experience. 

Key Assembly features include;

• One-stop HCM suite: Assembly encompasses essential aspects, which include onboarding, performance management, and compensation in a single integrated suite.‍
• Employee experience platform portal: Employees can easily access their HR records, benefits, and pay information. This gives employees control over their work-related tasks.‍
• Dedicated news feed: A dedicated news feed keeps employees informed by delivering newsletters, announcements, and relevant articles directly to their employee experience portals.‍
• Continuous learning resources: Assembly has an extensive section for nonstop learning, providing valuable employee training and development resources.‍
• Analytics and reporting: Assembly offers robust analytics and reporting capabilities, providing organizations with precious insights into their workforce. These tools enable informed decision-making.

Workday

Workday is designed to create an enabling atmosphere for boosting employees’ task prosecution capabilities.

Workday automates the setting up, delivering, and analyzing employee feedback surveys. It streamlines workforce planning, offers insightful performance metrics, and provides employees with personalized dashboards. 

ZohoDesk

ZohoDesk is an experience platform primarily focused on creating an engaging digital experience for employees, particularly those acclimatized to hybrid workplaces.

ZohoDesk helps HR departments provide employees with the required technological support. It also offers valuable metrics to guide HR in perfecting the overall employee experience.

15Five

15Five is an employee experience platform with a great emphasis on using positive psychology to enhance employee performance. Its central focus revolves around daily fostering clear relations between employees and top management staff. 

15Five also provides HR departments with intuitive dashboards for real-time employee feedback. This visionary approach helps to prevent reduced employee engagement by ensuring appropriate actions are taken instantly.

Culture Amp

Culture Amp is an employee experience platform that optimizes the professional development and performance management of employees in an organization. 

Culture Amp enables organizations to integrate employee engagement into their workflows. Its AI algorithms transform employee experience data into development data, providing HR managers with analytics that track organization goals and progress.

Give Your Employees a Holistic Experience

Since arriving on the scene, employee experience platforms have shown only signs of positive impact and groundbreaking developments. Their impressive run has highlighted an invaluable component of every organization’s workflow: communication. 

EXPs do an excellent job of ensuring organizational communication is carried out optimally and professionally.

In a nutshell, as technology advances, so should the employee’s experience. If an organization resists change, it becomes less attractive to new talents and clients in time.

Communication is critical for any company to be successful, and platforms like these will help pave the way.

Assembly is the perfect platform for improving organizational communication and providing a holistic employee experience. Book your employee experience platform demo with Assembly today!