Infosys TechCompass #25 - Digital Workplace Services - Employee experience

January 25, 2023

Contrary to conventional wisdom, trust is far from a soft skill. Our research shows employees respond predictably and positively when companies implement initiatives that serve employee needs. However, traditional approaches to develop trust and engagement are no longer sufficient in the age of distributed, always-on cloud and AI.

Enterprises are transforming their systems, processes, and tools to best suit employees living and working in a digital and flexible age. This has seen a tremendous shift in focus toward building digital experience platforms that blind the boundaries of work/physical/social ecosystem of employees.

Earlier, most organizations were happy to have the point solutions with a siloed employee experience, more often provided by packaged enterprise product experience or custom point solution experience. Enterprises migrate fast into the new era of digital experience, where business apps/platforms or custom web or mobile applications enable enterprise-centric and unified employee experience. Enterprises were quick to adapt to the cloud ecosystem and provide experience solutions that can address the new talent trends of gig/hybrid/flexible working.

Our data reveals that gig working is becoming popular. But its adoption differs by industry and region. We also find that an increase in gig working usually comes at the expense of other contingent worker models. So, rather than reducing the number of full-time workers, a surge in gig working seems often to be from a shift of part-time and contract workers into a gig model.

Some of the early adopters have focused on hyperpersonalization and unified human centric experience. The focus is on using experience to enact positive change in the employees and culture. As Infosys Knowledge Institute’s Tech Navigator Report emphasizes, organizations need to create digital experiences that are not merely efficient and user-friendly but those that connect and engage employees on an emotional level.

• Trend 1: Transformation toward unified and human-centric mobile-first?experience

The key pillars of employee experience transformation are human centricity (adopting a human-led approach), unification (having a central platform to drive engagement), inclusivity (removing traditional accessibility barriers), hyperpersonalization (driving engagement with contextualized experiences), transparency (bringing employees along on the journey), and measurability (uniting employees through shared successes).

A leading Europe-based logistics company partnered with Infosys to design and build leading workplace experience, where the office becomes a tool to support the happiness and effectiveness of employees, and a space that employees actively want to engage with. The solution enabled mapping every aspect of the employee experience, both at home and at work. This cocreated a variety of solutions to support productivity, culture, and the wellbeing of employees.

• Trend 2: Wellbeing and sustainability at the core

A healthy workplace environment positively impacts employee happiness and loyalty, which increases productivity. Sustainability performance is getting embedded into companies’ practices as employees are more socially and environmentally conscious now. An integrated experience across ecosystems, wherein employees can experience a seamless experience across partner ecosystems and consume products/services is crucial for employee retention.

Our data shows companies that are reducing office space and increasing coworking are more likely to improve staff retention and, in turn, revenue. More broadly, 41% of companies plan to increase remote working hires in the next two years, compared to 37% who did since the start of the pandemic in 2020. The need here is to hire strong talent that is driving this shift — and it looks like it’s here to stay.

With the core concept of the employee at the center of the experience, ability to respond to employee interactions and provide sentient AI-first experience is gaining momentum. Intelligent knowledge networks that turn structured/unstructured data into findable and actionable knowledge to provide sentient, responsive, AI nudges and “Live” user experience – an evolution toward a Live Enterprise – is getting adopted as part of H3.

Going forward, the possibilities are endless with the human and machine symbiosis. H3 will stretch beyond collaboration between human and digital bots, to augment human potential with their digital avatars and virtual assistants to operate and thrive in the metaverse.

• For a Europe-based logistics company, Infosys developed an experience solution with the gamification feature comprising sustainability leaderboards, where employees earn points based on positive environmental actions at the?workplace.

Find more about these trends and their use cases here .

Read our 2022 DWS TechCompass to know more about the key trends.