In its 2019 report of the future of HR, global professional services firm KPMG reported that 85% of HR executives surveyed consider employee experience and engagement the most valuable capability they can deliver. That stat seems great… until you discover that only 24% named employee experience as a priority for the next one to two years, and only 16% reported their organizations considered this to be a top HR priority.
“Given the page of change, this disconnect is concerning,” KPMG stated in the report.
Enter 2020 and the mass work-from-home (WFH) movement that came with the COVID-19 crisis, and now that seems quite an understatement. As many businesses have discovered, maintaining a positive employee experience, keeping everyone engaged, and ensuring efficiency for a dispersed workforce is tough.
Half the battle is making sure employees have instant access to the information they need to do their jobs, as well as are easily able to discover who within the organization they ought to be engaging with at any given time, said Mike Hicks, CMO at
Beezy, in a briefing with WorkSpace Connect. The goal should be to make employees “feel like they’re part of an organization that cares, matters, and drives engagement,” he said.
Traditionally, HR has relied on corporate intranet to serve this knowledge management function. But Beezy takes this to the next level, offering employee engagement software as part of an enterprise digital workplace solution that also supports communications and collaboration. Beezy’s software is specifically for companies using the Microsoft 365 productivity suite; it built the app on SharePoint for knowledge management and integrated it with Teams for communications and collaboration, Hicks said.
When working with HR leaders, Beezy advises using a newsfeed to keep employees up to date on company communications, Hicks said. In addition, Beezy stresses the importance of bringing cultural aspects from the physical environment into the digital workplace platform, he added.
For example, “I always love to see when organizations close a deal and ring the gong,” Hicks said. Well, when workers are remote, and the person ringing the gong is also remote, no one hears it. It’s important to bring that piece of a company’s culture into the digital world so that everyone can share, participate, and celebrate, he said. Likewise, a digital workplace platform should give employees a safe place for social conversation and to make internal connections so that “everyone feels included,” he added.
Through its digital workplace platform, Beezy aims to enable three key types of connections inside the business: people-to-people, people-to-process, and people-to-information. In other words, a digital workplace tool should make it easier for people to connect with one another, determine what workflows they need to get their jobs done efficiently, and find the information necessary to do their jobs, Hicks said.
Over the years, corporate intranets like those built on SharePoint have gotten the bad rap of being “basically places where information went to die,” Hicks said. With its digital workplace platform, he added, Beezy hopes that’s no longer the case.
