Achievers CEO Jeff Cates on How Technology is Revolutionizing the Employee Experience

Several areas have evolved and shifted over the last three to four years that demand HR leadership’s attention now more than ever. For instance, strategizing remote talent reviews, identifying the technologies that best empower virtual workforces, diversity and inclusion practices, and organizations taking a stance on pressing social issues. Today, technology can provide the data-driven insights needed to guide a manager to take action to welcome a new employee or recognize an existing one. The following innovative features can result in tangible steps that can improve the working relationship between managers and their teams.

1.????Reasons to Invest in Psychometrics

Psychometrics can be a powerful tool, but only if companies are willing to invest in it. Leaders who implement psychometrics into a company-wide system demonstrate that they’re thinking about the company holistically. The benefit of psychometrics is it reveals the behavioral style and profile of an employee, which helps leaders understand the employee’s strengths. The employee’s results can also help leadership identify the role that best compliments the employee’s talents. If used properly, psychometrics can increase employee engagement, while building a sense of community and belonging in a workforce.

Psychometrics also gives managers a stronger understanding of employees’ personal preferences and can adapt changes in the workplace to accommodate employees’ needs. However, psychometrics must be personalized to each individual employee to see more engagement and usage of this medium.?

2.????Giving Workplace Belonging and Engagement a Nudge

Employee recognition platforms empower organizations to adapt quickly to the needs of their ever-evolving workforces. With the flexibility and agility these platforms provide, companies can connect employees and build a culture of belonging – no matter where they are in the world. The Achievers Employee Experience Platform comes equipped with a forward-thinking strategy to increase employee recognition: nudging.

Employee nudging is a notification or signal that provides information to help leaders use their technology and time most impactfully. Serving as a real-time coach, this technology can recognize trends and offer actionable suggestions to help foster a culture of belonging, recognition, and inclusion in the workplace. Example? Nudging managers that they recognize women 80% of the time on their recognition platform and suggesting they send a “well done” to a male teammate. This simple reminder has the power to skyrocket manager effectiveness and workplace belonging, upleveling employee productivity in 2023.

3.????Combatting Tech Overload

Innovating can be overwhelming when you have multiple pieces of technology, and you're trying to remember which one you need to complete a task, how to use it, and where it is located. In general, I think HR leaders are seeing their workforces struggle with a bit of tech overload.

Luckily, for frustrated employees and HR leaders, it's now possible to take a more consolidated approach to employee management and experience platforms. For HR leaders, accessing tools in one place means the data needed to build a powerful workforce can be found in one place, too. Empowering these hardworking professionals to unlock invaluable insights seamlessly. One shining example of a consolidated suite of powerful workplace tools is Microsoft Viva. This robust solution can look at your Outlook calendar, inbox and Teams and say, "This is where you spend your time. Oh, and by the way, here are some things that you probably want to follow up on this week."

4.????The (AI-Generated) Elephant in the Room + Achievers

Of course, I can’t talk about HR technology in 2023 without mentioning AI – a topic that’s dominating conversations every workplace conversation – from the board room to Friday happy hour.

We are at this exciting point in our history where the heavy lifting of rearchitecting the Achievers’ product is now paying off with significant increases in innovation. I expect to see more usage of natural language processing (NLP) to drive user-generated content personalization, along with inclusion bias coaching. We will continue to focus on simplifying the massive amounts of data and feedback our highly active usage platform provides, as we currently do with our voice of employee feedback reporting. Lastly, you will continue to see us test generative AI in various areas to improve the member experience. Exciting times are ahead!