Employee Experience Platforms – A silver bullet?

Optimizing the modern workplace is a permanent challenge for any company. The pandemic has further reinforced the previous trend of introducing the modern workplace. The global development of digitization to move more and more data to the cloud leads to another challenge which was barely addressed in the past: information overflow.

Information overflow describes the effect of providing more information to employees in modern working environments than they can handle. Therefore, organizations must reframe their approach on how they relate to their employees, if they want to enable a sustainable working environment.

Therefore, organization must reframe their approach on how they relate to their employees if they want to enable a sustainable working environment.

In the past, modern workplace environments had the target of digitalizing processes and providing employees with information. However in matured IT environments this development is completed. Advanced companies are already one step further and introducing so called employee experience platforms. The goal of these platforms is to separate relevant information from non-relevant information (noise). But why is this even necessary?

Each individual can process only a certain amount of information per day. Exceeding this limit not only has a negative impact on employee efficiency, but also on motivation, satisfaction, and resilience. The goal of an employee experience platform is therefore to make the most of the potential for information that every employee can process. Therefore, Employee Experience Platforms separate relevant from irrelevant information, ensuring the potential of processing information is used in an ideal way.

Figure 1 illustrates the flow of information without an employee experience platform.

As can be seen, information is accessed and/or processed unfiltered by the employee in a scenario without employee experience platform. As a result, the employee must also process irrelevant information (noise), which affects efficiency and resilience.

However, the situation is different when information is filtered through an employee experience platform as shown in figure 2:

The employee experience platform can suppress noise by providing only relevant information to the employee, functioning as a layer between the employee and available information. To achieve this, artificial intelligence is often used whereby the algorithms constantly analyze the user behavior to distinguish relevant from irrelevant information.

In addition to the pure segmentation of data, another added value of Employee Experience platform may be that they additionally process and aggregate relevant data. This further reduces the quantity of data to be processed by the employee and therefore increases efficiency.

The employee experience platform can suppress noise by providing only relevant information to the employee, functioning as a layer between the employee and available information.

Summary:

Within modern IT infrastructures, employees have become the limiting factor in terms of information processing. Employee experience platforms are the next logical step in the field of modern workplace environments and can help to make the most of these limitations – in this case, maximizing the potential of information an employee can process, by filtering irrelevant information. But employee experience platforms are not only able to filter information, identify correlations, relations and dependencies, they can also process and aggregate them. Thus reducing search costs and the average information evaluation time of employees.

In the future, however, it will depend on how well the algorithms of employee experience platforms will work in the real world and how reliably they can process, aggregate and filter information. Today, these technologies are still relatively in their infancy and are not yet reaching their full potential.

This is also since modern AI based technologies like employee experience platforms reaching the limit of ethical foundations. Companies with modern IT infrastructures are already faced with the challenge of how many and which employee data should be processed and used to increase their modern workplace efficiency. In addition, there are regulatory requirements that further restricts the usage of employee data.

In addition, employee experience platforms will only be able to generate added value if they are used in homogeneous infrastructures, as only here they could access a uniform data structure where their algorithms work best.

Employee experience platforms can be considered as step in the right direction, but (today) they are not a silver bullet. They are more of a shot in the right direction. The key will be how they can scale inside the modern workplace and regulatory requirements delivering real impact on employee efficiency.