Here’s how HR tech platforms can dramatically improve employee experience

Mentorloop is excited to announce that we were recently named a Top HR Company to Watch by HRWins. 

HRWin’s focus for 2017 was on employee experience.

It’s an honour to be recognised alongside incredible employee experience-oriented platforms like Namely and Culture Amp which are shifting the paradigm and standards of employee experience everywhere; it’s also great to see a mentoring platform (and corporate mentoring as a component of employee experience) get a seat at the mighty HR tech table.

This recognition got me thinking about the employee experience, just how important it is, and the role that Mentorloop and mentoring programs play in this sometimes-fluffy thing we call employee experience.

What is employee experience?

Employee experience encapsulates what people encounter, observe or feel over the course of their employee journey at an organisation.

As you can immediately derive, this includes a lot of stuff.

Every employee has hundreds of direct touch points with an organisation over the course of just one year; thousands of interactions with the ‘brand’; and hundreds of thousands of interactions with fellow employees who are representatives of the organisation.

This notion of an almost infinite number of interactions across the employee experience spectrum can make the thought of impacting it in any real tangible way daunting.

Equally though, it’s easy to see how many areas of this spectrum can be incrementally improved – from impacting your onboarding process and payroll to implementing development initiatives like mentoring.

But employee experience is so soft. We care about profit.

Unfortunately for companies not focused on building great end-to-end employee experience, employee experience and profits are inextricably linked (and more so than ever).

Your people are your profits. As manufacturing and repetitive tasks becomes more and more automated and capital intensive, knowledge work and the brains (people) behind creating differentiation become more and more valuable.

Most people aren’t assembling widgets anymore, they are creating value through creative thinking and problem-solving which require independent thought, collaboration, and motivation. Most people are also doing relatively intangible work. You could measure when an assembly line worker dipped below his usual X widgets per day; try measuring when your engineers write X less code per day.

Finding ways to generate a little more collaboration or motivation, or energising your unengaged employees can make an incredible difference to overall productivity.

I’m sure you have seen some of the statistics on employee experience today, but they truly are remarkable (and painful):

• 70% of employees say they’re disengaged at work.
• 34% of employees say they plan to leave their current role in the next 12 months

And the dire examples of generally poor employee experience go on forever – almost literally.

Organisations are always going to have some unhappy campers and a decent portion of turnover. That’s a fact of life and human nature, but estimates say that 75% of the causes of employee turnover are preventable. Preventable via a better employee experience.

What do HR tech platforms do for me besides cost money?

They do a lot.

Firstly, they make the manual and time-consuming HR efforts of yesteryear quickly redundant. Platforms like Namely remove the admin burden of people management (HCM, payroll, performance management etc.) which can be incredibly demanding, and centralise and consolidate it all into one neat cloud-based package; neat for both the administrators and the employees.

Secondly, they provide employees with more insight into the things they care about. They create more transparent workplaces where employees understand their pay, how much time they have accrued, and their last performance assessment.

Thirdly, they allow companies to provide great experiences in areas of their business where they are simply not specialised. HR tech platforms are massively specialised in their area of employee experience – whether that be recruiting and onboarding, core HR, total well-being, or payroll and benefits. These tech platforms have hundreds of employees working on perfecting that part of the employee experience – and it tells in the end product.

Even with a bunch of people and culture, learning and development, and HR personnel, there simply isn’t enough time in the day (or money in the bank) to build these processes and tools in-house.

Finally, the latest and greatest HR tech platforms meet the expectations of employees today. Millennials and future generations have grown up in a world of platforms: social platforms, messaging platforms, and dating platforms. They don’t expect a jarring transition from a world of easy-to-use and constantly accessible B2C technology to a convoluted and ugly antiquated world of PDFs and spreadsheets (although there will always be a place for the mighty spreadsheet).

The line between B2C and B2B technology has been drawn; B2B platforms have come to the table for you; and now B2B employers must come to the table for their employees.

Collectively, these HR tech solutions combine to completely transform the employee experience for both organisations and employees everywhere. They lower costs and improve employee outcomes for organisations – and facilitate a more on-demand, seamless, and generally more enjoyable experience for employees.

Employee experience is a culmination of thousands of touchpoints, moments, and even feelings. While you as an organisation – and as a group of 5 or 10 people leaders – can’t possibly cover the entire spectrum of employee experience alone, with the right tools (in this case, HR tech) – you actually can.

Where do Mentorloop and mentoring fit into all this?

Corporate mentoring is tricky, partially because mentoring can and does fit into every people category (HR, L&D, P&C), and also because it covers the entire employee experience spectrum – from onboarding through to company training, through to ongoing development, and then through to leadership training and cultural immersion.

This means that mentoring programs don’t have an obvious owner or program manager. Add to this the fact that mentoring programs are extremely admin-heavy (without software), and that there aren’t many professionals who have any training or experience running mentoring programs (unlike HR, culture, and L&D programs), and you have a difficult proposition.

This is where Mentorloop fits into this HR Tech equation. Mentorloop does to mentoring what Namely does to people management.

It removes the admin burden of managing all of those moving parts; it centralises and organises your mentoring efforts, and it brings transparency to the practice of mentoring for both organisations and individuals. 

Using mentoring software, any of your people leaders can maintain oversight of the program and reap all of the benefits of mentoring without doing much work at all. Mentorloop facilitated programs are effectively managed by the software, resources, and by participants who self-drive their own relationships.

We understand that organisations that sell cars, aeroplane engines, and media spots do not specialise in running mentoring programs. But their employees want mentoring. So what do they do to offer great mentoring?

They subscribe to a cloud-based mentoring platform. A plug-and-play platform they can simply use to build an effective mentoring program for their people – for the price of a few Adobe subscriptions (you can have both).

HR tech solutions like Mentorloop (and others on this great list) save organisations time and enable them to build a far better employee experience.

Thanks again to HRWins for recognising Mentorloop for its continued efforts in the employee experience sector of HR technology.

We are looking forward to making mentoring a mainstream component of all organisations’ employee experience strategies in the years to come, an evolution facilitated by the need to replace old school spreadsheet-driven mentoring programs with sophisticated, intuitive, and purpose-built software.