There is a shift in the UK’s Talent Pool with employee experience playing a key role alongside new ways of working which is impacting both recruitment and the ways employees perceive their current or future employer.

Organisations need to look at different parts of their business and ensure that they are in the best position to recruit top talent in front of their competitors, or they will find themselves being left behind and being over looked by the available talent pool.

We take a look at what you can do to use Technology as an ‘enabler’ to both help retain existing staff and attract new talent to your business.

There are some major trends that are affecting how businesses recruit that should be considered:

• In the wake of COVID-19 pandemic, 84 percent of employers* said they were set to rapidly digitize working processes and in turn expand remote working. The main takeaway is you can now consider employing people outside of your normal office location catchment area
• More and more people are now ‘gig workers’. In the US alone, more than one third of workers (36%)** participate in the gig economy and more than 90% would consider freelancing.
• 75% of the workforce will be represented by millennials by 2030*** Millennials are very comfortable participating in the gig economy with almost half of all millennials use the gig economy platforms to find work

Improving the employee experience

Whether you’re hiring employees, contractors, remote team members or office based staff, you want your workforce talent to stay within the business. And if you want people to stay for a good period of time you need to provide a great employee experience.

Employee experience is different than employee engagement, although a good employee experience obviously leads to higher engagement.

The employee experience encompasses everything that occurs in the employee life cycle, from the recruitment process to the final day working for the company. You could consider the employee experience using the following areas:

• Organisational culture
• Technology
• Physical work environment

I’m going to expand on the technology aspect as that is we’re helping our clients deliver within side their businesses.

Having the right technology in place

If people don’t have the tools they need to do their job, their motivation will fall off a cliff. Therefore this aspect is all about enabling people do their jobs successfully – but also providing the technology that enables employees to work in the most efficient way. Organisations need to embrace the tools that support the ‘work anywhere, any time, any device’ strategy.

It is very important for someone in your business to understand and evaluate the digital effectiveness that currently exists for the overall business, individual teams, business units and employees and how they could be improved. Has your management team or you ever sat down and truly engaged and understood how your application(s) enhances your business processes (staff effectiveness/productivity) or is the staff member fitting the process to suit the application?

If you have staff engaging with customers out in the field do they have the most effective technology, do they have more than one device that could be combined leading to increased ROI (Return on Investment)? Is their device out dated and there is newer leading technology available that could save time, money and give the customer a better experience.

What other areas of upcoming technology could you use to retain and attract potential new talent to the business? A good example of that and very topical at the moment is artificial intelligence. Any business that has a sales team should be looking to use this technology to help its sales team generate 70% of a proposal for example using Microsoft #copilot that takes actual data from sales meetings, past documents and CRM for example. It shouldn’t replace the value and idea generation that your sales team generates but it can be used to help them become more effective, increasing their output and productivity.

Not only will your existing team(s) be delighted that your embracing new technology to help them, but you can showcase the business’ technology investment to that potential new candidate.

If they are interviewing with you, they could also be with your main competitor and that could be the one detail that persuades them to join your business rather than one of your competitors.

Downtime / Operational IT Issues

Downtime isn’t merely an inconvenience; it’s a significant financial and operational challenge for businesses. The cost of downtime extends beyond the immediate loss of productivity—it affects customer satisfaction, revenue streams, and employee morale. Every minute of system unavailability can translate into substantial financial losses and erode customer trust. Moreover, the process of raising a support ticket during such instances can compound these challenges by consuming valuable time and resources.

As a simple exercise have a look at the number of tickets you’ve raised in the last 3 months. If you know what the cost is to the business for a typical member of staff per hour, and you multiply the two it gives you some idea of the cost to your business. If you do suffer from any downtime then you can also add in any related customer costs, such as lack of billing etc. If you then add your monthly bill from your technology partner you can see the true cost. It’s always important to include the soft costs when your evaluating supplier partnerships by the way.

On the employee front, downtime not only disrupts workflow but also impacts morale and job satisfaction. The frustration stemming from technological hiccups can cascade into decreased productivity and heightened stress levels. Additionally, the process of reporting issues through support tickets might add to this stress, creating a sense of helplessness when quick resolutions are needed.

Understand the critical importance of minimizing downtime and streamlining support processes is critical. Our focus is not just on providing robust solutions but also on ensuring a seamless support experience for our clients, reducing the impact on their operations and empowering employees to get back on track swiftly. If you staff feel than when they do have an issue it’s resolved quickly they value that and thank the business allowing your top formers to keep on producing.

I’m amazed that not many people do this when interviewing potential candidates for positions within their business.

On the first interview we talk about our investments that have been made into the business such as applications and the infrastructure because we want our teams to have the technology that helps them achieve great things for our customers. We talk about our current footprint but also what we have planned for the future. This gives the potential candidate confidence that we have and will continue to invest into this area of the business.

On the second interview or when we’re getting close to offering a potential position we will go into more depth around how our digital framework differentiates us in more depth.

Some of the additional discussion points could be around your digital transformation and framework could be:

• Adapting company culture to embrace change
• Employee training and skills development
• Integrating technology into systems and processes
• Updating and modernizing infrastructure and software platforms
• Redefining and optimising processes
• Building cross functional teams
• Developing and communicating strategy

An often over-looked aspect of digital technology is how integrated the different devices are, do they work well together. Alongside this the back office element is also critical to ensuring the efficient running of IT and Communication systems. There is no point having the best endpoint devices such as laptops and phones, if your wide open to a cyber attack. That really would stop your employees in their tracks whilst also setting your business back and negatively impacting your customers.

We hope you have found this article useful and thought provoking. If you would like any more information please do not hesitate to reach out to us sales@digital-origin.co.uk

SOURCES:

*The future of Jobs Report 2020; World Economic Forum; http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2020.pdf

**Gig Economy Statistics:The New Normal Workpace; Fortunly; https://fortunly.com/statistics/gig-economy-statistics/

*** Employee Experience: Components, Importance & Strategies to Improve; Vanatage Circle https://blog.vantagecircle.com/employee-experience