“Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” – Simon Sinek, best-selling author, leadership guru, and professor at Columbia University

By now, it’s no secret that highly engaged employees make a dramatic impact on organizational success. Employee engagement is a buzzword for a reason: analysts and businesses alike have figured out that an engaged workforce translates to everything from a better customer experience to increased productivity to greater profitability. The question these days isn’t if to focus on employee engagement, but how.

The proven power of engaged employees

First, let’s look at the why of employee engagement. Why, specifically, must businesses prioritize their employees’ connection to their work and each other?

Highly engaged business units result in 21% greater profitability

A Gallup study found that “Engaged employees are more present and productive; they are more attuned to the needs of customers; and they are more observant of processes, standards and systems.” In particular, engaged teams demonstrated:

• 41% reduction in absenteeism
• 17% increase in productivity
• 59% less turnover in low-turnover organizations, 24% less turnover in high-turnover organizations
• 10% increase in customer ratings
• 20% increase in sales

All of these effects taken together significantly increased one of the most important metrics for any organization: a 21% boost to profitability.

Better performing companies have more engaged employees

Given the Gallup statistics, it’s no surprise that companies with more engaged employees perform better financially. The Temkin Group, now part of the Qualtrics XM Institute, uncovered that 82% of employees at companies with strong financial results are “highly” or “moderately” engaged, as opposed to only 68% at under-performing companies.

Disengaged employees cost U.S. companies up to $5.5 billion per year

On the flip side, employees who are NOT engaged cost their organizations in very quantifiable ways. A report by the Engagement Institute detailed what employees need to feel engaged—compelling missions, trusted relationships, well-designed jobs topped the list—and the financial implications of failing to deliver on those imperatives.

Employee engagement directly impacts the customer experience

Customer experience futurist Blake Morgan compiled a compelling list of statistics in an article for Forbes that clearly demonstrates the connection between the employee and customer experiences. They include:

• Companies that excel at customer experience have 1.5 times more engaged employees than companies with poor customer experience.
• 87% of customers’ affinity towards Starbucks is driven by the way the company treats its employees.
• 79% of employees at companies with above-average customer experience are highly engaged in their jobs, compared to 49% of employees at companies with average or below average customer experience scores.
• Business units with engagement and connection scores in the top 25% had 10% stronger customer metrics.
• Companies that invest in employee experience are four times more profitable than those who don’t.

These numbers are even more relevant when you consider another statistic from her article: 89% of companies expect to compete primarily on customer experience.

How to improve employee engagement

It’s clear that employee engagement is not a “nice to have”—it’s a serious competitive differentiator. Which brings us back to the how: what does it take to foster an engaged workforce?

The answer is multi-faceted, and includes must-haves like:

• Committed leadership
• Strong company culture
• HR support
• Many more

Some of these components are intangible, but some are also concrete, including business technology that enables and empowers your employees at work.

Today’s employees expect their workplace to deliver the same intuitive platforms, interfaces, and interactions they experience in their everyday lives. As more digital natives enter the workforce and the digital IQ of older employees goes up, the gap between business and consumer technology gets smaller. To work efficiently, effectively, and in an engaged manner, people need solutions that feel like the apps they use at home—a seamless, unique experience that just works.

BMC Helix Experience for more engaged employees

Delivering that consumer-style experience requires that business technology should be:

• Intelligent
• Conversational
• Personalized

We used these characteristics as driving principles behind BMC Helix Experience. Comprised of BMC Helix Digital Workplace and BMC Helix Chatbot, BMC Helix Experience makes it easy for employees to get consumer-grade experiences with flexible, personalized access to services that shields them from complex backend systems.

BMC Helix Experience is:

• Intelligent. BMC Helix Experience offers proactive suggestions that guide users through request and work streams, so they can make and act upon decisions quickly. It automates routine tasks so IT can proactively resolve events and employee issues. And it makes it easy to embed cognitive capabilities into service delivery across the enterprise.
• Conversational. AI and Machine Learning power immersive and conversational chatbot experiences. Using Natural Language Processing, BMC Helix understands intent, context, and even tone to help employees get to the right knowledge, services, or apps exactly when they need it.
• Personalized. BMC Helix Chatbot also creates a personalized end-user experience, fetching relevant info, predicting employee needs, and seamlessly transferring to other LoB bots (HR, Facilities, Finance, and others). Additionally, users can choose to engage through their channel of choice, including web, SMS, Skype, Slack and more.

When employee engagement is paramount, look to BMC Helix Experience for a technology partner that exceeds the expectations of the modern workforce.

Remote work is nothing new. Nearly two-thirds of American workers telecommute at least occasionally and the numbers continue to rise. But while a gradual shift to working from home is the norm, the current situation with the coronavirus is definitely not business as usual.

Because of COVID-19, organizations across industries, locations, and size are asking their employees to stay out of the office. Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have all told their workers to stay home. For both workers and their companies, this unexpected paradigm has significant consequences. More people telecommuting translates to much higher demand for more and different IT services. More tickets are coming in requesting new hardware, access to systems, and forgotten passwords. IT staff, who are often also working from home without their usual resources, must navigate this additional strain on their time, resources, and systems.

What does that look like? A comprehensive approach that incorporates tools, technology, culture, and strategic service management.

Tools and technology: How to outfit the new home office

With a fully remote team, leaders must replace both the formal and casual interactions that typically take place at the office. That means setting up and/or codifying the use of channels for communication, collaboration, and conferencing. These may include Slack, MS Teams, or Skype for Business; the important thing is to choose a tool and stick with it so everyone knows where to go to find their people.

Multiple types of available communication help too. Think about the types of conversations that happen at the office. There are small, one-on-one chats, whose digital equivalent is instant messaging (IM). There are informal group conversations that occur in the break room or at someone’s desk; for those, look to group chats or meeting spaces. Whiteboarding sessions can be replaced by collaboration tools. Official meetings require a more robust solution that should ideally include video and recording capabilities, like Zoom or WebEx.

Security is another important consideration for a successful remote workforce. You need to create a secure digital workplace, which may include everything from a VPN environment to BYOD policies to secure online spaces for document sharing and collaboration.

Finally, new remote employees often require hardware to work effectively from home. Depending on the type of work, team members may need docking stations, monitors, keyboards, and/or standing desks. That means organizations must account not only for how to get the right hardware to the right place, but how to track and manage it moving forward.

Company culture: How to keep employees connected and productive

Tools and technology, of course, are only half the battle when it comes to creating a positive remote working environment. The company culture that differentiates your organization at the office should carry over into the new digital landscape. Achieving this goal starts at the top. Ensure that executives are fully engaged in the designated digital channels. They should demonstrate the desired usage and tone of each tool; set healthy expectations around working hours, taking breaks, and work-life balance; and show empathy and compassion during what can be a tricky transition.

Video is your friend here, both live and recorded. Video conferencing helps employees feel connected and reduces isolation. It also encourages workers to dress for “real work” and bring their best selves to their new work environment. From prerecorded tutorials to team meetings to one-on-one discussions, video brings your office community into your employees’ homes.

With a fully remote workforce, you may also need to add or reconsider company policies. What do sick days look like? Can you offer reimbursement for internet and/or mobile data? What are the rules around which tools to use for what, when? Decide on your new policies quickly and communicate them clearly to keep everyone on the same page and reassure employees that you continue to have their best interest in mind.

Service management in the digital workplace: How to handle the influx of requests

Significant change to your employees’ working environment will translate to an increase in service request volume. People will have questions, and in a period of uncertainty and transition, they need to have a positive experience finding answers. That requires a service management solution that enables users to easily find answers themselves and, when necessary, work with agents efficiently and effectively.

What does that look like in practice?

• An intuitive user interface that makes it easy for both users and IT staff to get what they need and maintain productivity
• Robust knowledge management that helps users help themselves – self service that makes employees’ lives easier, not more frustrating
• Intelligent capabilities like intelligent swarming and ChatOps to streamline and accelerate solutions to complex incidents
• Virtual assistants via chatbots to address lower-level employee questions and requests, enabling quick resolution and freeing up IT resources for more value-added work
• Cognitive automation capabilities to optimize agent work and maintain employee satisfaction

Different employees will need different levels of support during this type of transition. With a strong service management backbone, you can focus on culture, communication, and collaboration – not resetting passwords and getting new hardware up and running.

What’s next? Moving forward in a work-from-home world

While we don’t know the implications of the coronavirus and its effects on the workplace, we do know that remote working isn’t going away. Whether your organization sends everyone back to the office post-coronavirus or sticks with a partial or complete work-from-home workforce, IT must have tools in place to support the modern digital workplace.

BMC Helix Digital Workplace delivers exactly that. With a fully responsive design, employees enjoy a consumer-like experience that works on any device, anywhere, any time. Intelligent omni-channel experiences connect to key remote work technologies like Slack and Skype, allowing workers to access services on the tools of their choice. A single pane of glass consolidates portals and catalogs to give employees a true one-stop-shop that streamlines service management for users and IT staff alike. And easy, drag-and-drop service creation means that users can focus more on getting work done and less on requesting services.

In addition, BMC Helix Digital Workplace incorporates cognitive capabilities that offer faster, more accurate service. The BMC Helix Chatbot allows organizations to quickly and easily embed cognitive capabilities into existing services to boost responsiveness and automate services – and it can be trained and set up in just a few clicks.

Work is changing at a never-before-seen pace, punctuated by events like the coronavirus. Every organization’s first priority should be keeping its employees safe and healthy. After that, it’s up to business and IT leaders to put solutions in place that keep creativity, productivity, innovation and communication flowing, no matter where their employees spend their days.

Employee engagement is a top priority for today’s business leaders, and for good reason. Research clearly demonstrates its importance to individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole. According to Forbes:

• Highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability
• Disengaged employees cost U.S. companies up to $550 billion per year
• Employees who feel their voice is heard are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work

We know that employee engagement plays a significant role in everything from company culture to innovation to the bottom line. But is engagement the end goal, or one piece of a more all-encompassing experience? What do employees need to truly become engaged? And how do you operationalize something that’s so human and complex?

EXTech: Employee Experience Technologies

Enter EXTech, one of the hottest new technology categories that brings together employee experience and technology. What is EXTech? Gartner defines employee experience technologies as “a diverse collection of employee-facing solutions designed to influence and improve the employee experience and organizational culture.” EXTech pulls from fields like neuroscience, behavioral economics, and positive psychology to motivate individuals and encourage desired behaviors. The analyst firm notes that EXTech isn’t just about engagement, although that plays a role in it; EXTech solutions are meant to support the entire employee experience.

How does EXTech differ from current solutions that focus on employee experience? First, it means reevaluating existing approaches that focus on a single silo, like productivity or sentiment. It also requires building a program for the emerging future of work, not yesterday’s highly structured roles, teams, and departments. EXTech solutions, according to Gartner, “seek to increase adoption, engagement, and performance through such elements as recommendations, nudges, mindfulness, and connecting workers to others as well as to common purposes.”

What does this look like in practice? EXTech solutions may enable employees to:

• Engage in regular feedback, coaching, encouragement, competition, and more
• Give input into things like their work schedule and working conditions
• Participate in volunteer, social, or wellness events

These are just a few ways to EXTech can benefit both employees and their company by creating a more employee-centric culture.

BMC Helix Digital Workplace and BMC Helix Chatbot

Employee experience plays a fundamental role in the BMC Helix platform, with EXTech capabilities designed to deliver consumer-grade experiences that empower employees. With omni-channel self-service that allows users to access knowledge, services, and products from their channel of choice, including Slackbot, Chatbot, SMS, and Skype, BMC Helix helps organizations step into the future of work.

Two products in the BMC Helix portfolio specifically support EXTech initiatives:

• BMC Helix Digital Workplace provides a single pane of glass for your employees to access what matters to them. It’s a one-stop-shop for all the products and services employees need to do their work, streamlining their experience to improve agility, productivity, and efficiency – all critical elements of their overall experience.
• BMC Helix Chatbot makes it easy for employees to find information and request services using natural language, so they can do their jobs more quickly, effectively, and with less friction. The experience is predictive, conversational, and personalized, improving user satisfaction while easing the burden on service desk staff.

EXTech is just beginning to revolutionize how we think about and improve the employee experience. Gartner rated EXTech a “High” benefit level in its Hype Cycle for the Digital Workplace and here at BMC, we couldn’t agree more. We’ll give Gartner the final word: “Worker motivation and engagement are key in work environments that demand ever-increasing levels of innovation, creativity, imaginative problem solving and collaboration across teams. EXTech solutions that use these techniques to support an ever-improving experience can help drive motivation and engagement, thus contributing to business performance and outcomes, and a broader pivot to a more agile culture.”

We live in a multi-device, multi-channel world where consumers move effortlessly from laptop to mobile phone to voice assistant to chat app and more. Make no mistake: Your employees expect the same elegant, consumer-like experiences at work, too. Yet too many companies are stuck using antiquated IT and HR systems that create inconsistent, incomplete, and ultimately dissatisfying employee experiences.

This is a big problem: A top-notch employee experience helps attract and retain the best people—and helps them be as productive as possible in their jobs. Employee experience has become a major priority in recent years: 84 percent of organizational leaders and professionals surveyed by Deloitte rated employee experience as an important issue, but only 9 percent believed they were highly prepared to address it. In addition, only 38 percent were satisfied or very satisfied with their work-related tools and technology.

Attract and Retain the Best People: Why Employee Experience Is a Top 2019 Business Initiative

Employee experience is increasingly a competitive differentiator. This issue is gaining urgency around hiring and retaining talent, especially as younger generations move into the workforce. Millennials now make up 35 percent of the U.S. workforce—surpassing Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers—according to a Pew Research Center analysis. When evaluating a potential employer, 71 percent of Millennials in a CompTIA study said that an organization’s embrace of technology and innovation is a factor. Moreover, professionals across every generation are increasingly using modern technologies: Gartner predicts that 25 percent of digital workers will use virtual employee assistants daily by 2021, rising quickly from the current 2 percent in 2019.

If your company’s workforce has to send an email to request service—and then wait a day or two for an agent to respond—that’s simply not going to cut it. Ditto for phone-only interactions with the help desk, which overtax your agents as ticket volumes rise and lead to frustrating outcomes and dissatisfied customers. Whether an employee is submitting vacation time to HR or logging an IT help desk ticket or requesting facilities support, accurate and rapid resolution is crucial to an elite employee experience.

Ways You Can Improve Your Employees’ Experience

Fortunately, there’s a better way: By embedding cognitive technologies and automation into your organization’s service portfolio, you boost employee experience while keeping costs under control. Here are three examples of how greater cognitive capabilities and automation make a difference:

1. Consumer-like self-service: Employees can get service or information any way they want, via web, mobile, SMS/text, social, or intelligent chatbots.
2. Cognitive automation: By leveraging the power of AI and chatbots, your workforce gets what it needs quickly, leading to higher levels of satisfaction.
3. A single, unified experience: Get rid of service and data silos with a single catalog of services and information across the organization that extends to other departments like HR, without extra burdens on IT.

How BMC Helix Can Help

To access these benefits, tap the power of BMC Helix, an end-to-end platform that delivers Cognitive Service Management for the modern workforce.

Powerful and flexible solutions like BMC Helix Digital Workplace enable you to deliver easy-to-use, intelligent, consumer-grade experiences wherever, whenever, and however your employees want to work, from their first day on the job.

With BMC Helix Business Workflows, you extend these capabilities throughout the organization. This transforms and scales the way you deliver service to lines of business, including HR, without burdening the IT team with additional manual effort.

By unlocking the potential of AI and automation, BMC Helix improves employee productivity and engagement and reduces costs—and becomes a foundation for a better employee experience.

The modern workforce expects consumer-like experiences at work across all of their devices and apps.

Employee experience takes a hit when they get clunky, siloed service instead.

Step into the future of work, the BMC Helix way. Learn more about BMC Helix Digital Workplace.

A Day in the Life of an HR Leader

Human Resources plays a critical role in today’s enterprise. From sourcing top talent, to supporting managers and employees, HR is continuously working to create an environment where the employees are treated as their most important customers. Although we know the role of an HR professional goes beyond simply hiring and firing – what does the day-to-day of an HR professional look like? Let’s walk through a day-in-the-life of one of the most crucial roles in the enterprise.

10:00am | On-Board an Employee

Several new employees start today. For many HR professionals, this means requiring employees to complete a new hire packet that includes various forms including benefit forms, legal forms like W-4s or I-9s, and payroll documents. In addition to requiring new employees complete new-hire paperwork, it is likely that HR will need to help employees set up their workspace – this means assisting employees with a new desk setup, phone, and computer, as well as ordering peripheral devices like keyboards, monitors, or a computer mouse.

The Traditional Way:

If the HR department is no longer using paper, the digital versions of these highly confidential forms are usually passed back and forth via email or other methods of electronic delivery that do not protect privacy and do not provide a streamlined process from start to finish. Because HR controls the process manually, on-boarding new employees can be slow, and requires dedicated time and resources to complete. In addition, using disparate systems makes the on-boarding process more difficult, negatively impacting the relationship between the organization and new employees, and can fail to set new employees up for success in their new roles. In fact, Gallup has found that only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job on-boarding new employees¹.

The BMC Helix Way:

With BMC Helix Business Workflows, HR departments take advantage of a streamlined and automated on-boarding process. Manual processes from new-hire form completion to submitting a request for a new desk setup are automated. New employees can select the equipment they need from BMC Helix Digital Workplace, a one-stop shop that allows departments across the enterprise to offer their services, devices, and more. With BMC Helix Business Workflows and BMC Helix Digital Workplace, employees are empowered with an easy-to-use, self-service experience that allows them to place an order for their new devices with a few clicks. With a smooth and automated on-boarding process, new employees feel prepared to do their best work, and are empowered with the right tools to get their job done. BMC Helix frees HR professionals from cumbersome and time-consuming processes while enabling a an engaging omni-channel experience and driving employee productivity.

1:00pm | Deliver a Performance Improvement Plan

HR has been asked to help deliver a Performance Improvement Plan to an employee. Managing performance improvement can be an overwhelming and labor-intensive task for HR departments. Confidential information regarding employee performance will need to be collected and stored. Depending on the evaluation criteria, performance information will need to be reevaluated and the process repeated multiple times as an employee works to improve their standing. The process typically involves multiple levels of management with reviews and approvals at each stage of the performance management journey.

The Traditional Way:

Conducting performance management with manual and paper-based processes can become a deeply cumbersome and time-consuming task for HR departments, especially those within a larger enterprise. It can be difficult to collect and maintain employee evaluations, goals, and performance feedback as it often requires cooperation from various Lines of Business and HR leaders, as well as employees. Without automation, HR can prevent the organization from maintaining an effective goal-setting process and the ability to effectively track progress on performance objectives. Manual processes can also pose security, data privacy, and compliance issues when employee information is stored in spreadsheets or delivered via email.

The BMC Helix Way:

BMC Helix Business Workflows lays the foundation for powerful HR automation while providing a single source of truth throughout complex, inter-departmental processes, like those regarding employee performance. BMC Helix Business Workflows allows HR leaders to easily create workflows that unify tasks between multiple Talent and Employee Management Systems, enabling HR to maintain a straightforward and comprehensive management solution that drives alignment between HR and the rest of the enterprise. This is crucial and provides a way for HR to have a powerful impact on the business: Establishing an effective performance process that supports on-going feedback to employees can help increase employee productivity by 12%, according to Gartner²

3:00pm | Prepare for Open Enrollment Period

The open enrollment period for employee benefits begins today. And while HR professionals are tasked with benefits enrollment activities all year long, open enrollment often means an influx of benefit-related questions and requests. For HR leaders, this means their teams must be prepared and ready to answer questions and emails regarding any changes or updates to employee benefits. Keeping employees informed is of utmost priority, Aflac’s Annual Workforces Report found that 30% of employees say they need more information surrounding their benefits³. How does this get done?

The Traditional Way:

A large part of preparing for open enrollment is accessing and developing the HR team’s knowledge around benefits information and keeping them up to date as plans and details change each year. HR is also responsible for effectively communicating plan and benefit information out to enterprise employees and making them aware of open enrollment dates and deadlines. For many HR departments, email is the only channel that benefits information is communicated through, often leaving opportunity to reach employees in other, more effective ways.

The BMC Helix Way:

HR leaders using BMC Helix Business Workflows can effectively communicate and support their benefits open enrollment period. BMC Helix Business Workflows provides a central place for knowledge articles. Enterprise employees can quickly and easily search benefits information while intelligent technology recommends the right articles to employees. Enterprise employees can also engage with BMC Helix Chatbot via text, Skype, Slack, and online to answer their questions any time and on any device. Providing this flexibility to employees helps streamline a hectic enrollment process for both HR and enterprise employees, decreasing the number of calls to the HR hotline and preventing floods of emails. Making benefit enrollment information accessible on demand and from various channels can increase enrollment rates, helping HR to meet their annual enrollment goals.

Taking a look at a typical day of an HR professional, it is easy to see why HR has a huge impact on the rest of the enterprise. With such a crucial role to play, HR can provide value and drive innovation across the enterprise, while benefiting from streamlined processes and leveraging new technology to automate time-consuming tasks.

HR leaders can stand at the forefront to lead digital transformation in their enterprise by embracing new ways to complete their everyday work. Through a modern service management solution like BMC Helix, HR is empowered to deliver services, manage their own processes, and provide superior service to their employees.

Learn more about BMC Helix Business Workflows.

About BMC Helix Business Workflows

BMC Helix Business Workflows is an intelligent service management solution for HR that empowers business leaders to manage, automate, and scale service delivery to drive peak efficiency.

HR can leverage cognitive capabilities like intelligent case categorization and optimized knowledge recommendations. HR leaders can easily build workflows without writing code to streamline processes and automate tasks easily without the help of IT.

Chatbots recognize natural-language requests and deliver immersive experiences to end users with BMC Helix Digital Workplace and BMC Helix Chatbot integrations.

Additionally, BMC Helix Platform integration provides powerful customization, so each Line of Business can tailor applications based on their specific requirements.

Sources

• https://www.gallup.com/workplace/238085/state-american-workplace-report-2017.aspx, 2017 ↩
• https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/motivate-employees-with-ongoing-forward-looking-feedback/, 2018 ↩
• https://www.aflac.com/docs/awr/pdf/2018-overview/2018-aflac-workforces-report-employee-overview.pdf, 2018 ↩