A Logical Next Step: Quantifying the Return on Employee Experience
Employee experience is a popular concept that’s been bandied about for years, hitting a fever pitch most recently as organizations struggled to navigate the Covid-19 pandemic turned Great Resignation turned whatever’s happening now. However, in reflecting on the idea of employee experience, it’s not only about providing positive engagements in the moment that matter – but also using technologies like AI automation to reduce the administrative burden and support productivity.
Employee experience typically refers the experience that full-time, salaried workers have within their career and, by extension, their company. The problem is that not everyone is an “employee” nowadays – nor do they want to be. “Employee” now includes freelancers, contractors or consultants. Either way, employee experience is no longer a catch-all phrase (if it ever really was).
In today’s workplace, we’re interested in seeing the return on experience, and at Socrates AI, we’re interested in evolving the employee experience to include all workers. That’s because every new idea, every completed task, and every ounce of sweat contributes to the success of the organization that worker supports – whether it is their own or someone else’s. And ultimately, our outcomes are only as good as the experience that went into them.
Back in 2001, IDC found that knowledge workers spend about 2.5 hours a day, or roughly 30 percent of the work week, searching for information. In more than 20 years, little has changed, and if we assume an average yearly salary of $80,000, the inability to find and retrieve documents will cost an organization that employs 1000 workers roughly $25 million per year. That’s a lot of money and a lot of wasted employee experience. No surprise that by making things easier for the workforce, organizations see measurable results.
What can that look like?
- 80 percent reduction of Tier 0 call center volume
- 5X increase in employee adoption of ServiceNow & Workday
- Exponential impact on employee experiences akin to consumer experiences
That leads us to the Return on Experience (ROX) we first introduced last year. In building ROX, we realized that experience is meant to include all workers, not just traditional employees – and everyone’s experience differs.
To account for workers unilaterally, organizations must employ solutions that offer intelligent interfaces and enhanced customization that connect various systems and make it easy for anyone to get the job done. Otherwise, the experience we’re talking about loses meaning and becomes nothing more than an internal marketing effort.
If we consider what researchers and analysts tell us about the “new” future of work, it’s clear that the impact of 2020 and 2021 is still unfolding. The era of hybrid work remains nascent, and work-life relations continue to evolve. Technology is part of the team now. Priorities are shifting, as are workforce classifications. But one thing is for sure. We can’t go back, only forward, making it time to expand our horizons and embrace a whole new experience – a workforce experience.