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Improve the digital employee experience in 5 steps

What is 'employee experience' and why is it important?

The definition of employee experience (EX) is the sum of all the different touchpoints an employee has with a company. It ranges from recruitment and onboarding to autonomous work. And encompasses how they feel about their colleagues, the team culture, and even what they think of the workplace tools they use.

Creating a positive employee experience is essentially how you create workplace engagement and ensure people want to work at your company. It can be measured with a range of KPIs like employee satisfaction, retention, and productivity. When employee experience is stellar, your team will be more energized and productive, which should translate into a positive culture for everyone. But it doesn’t come easily and requires proper processes, structure, and the right digital tools to be in place.

To help you get started, we’ve put together some top tips on how to improve employee experience as you grow your team, and how Qatalog’s Work Hub can support your org to build the foundation of a people-first culture. To learn more book a call with our customer team/employee experience experts.

Top tips to drive employee engagement and improve 'employee experience'

Follow these 5 tips and you’ll be on your way to building a consistent and positive employee experience across your teams.

1. Transparent and semi-automated new joiner onboarding

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Onboarding can define an employee’s experience and their chances of success. It can be tricky to get right, especially if your team is remote. Far too often onboarding processes are dominated by boring admin tasks and fuzzy details on what to expect during your first few weeks. Tasks should be automated wherever possible, allowing new employees to focus time where it matters. Automating processes like uploading verification documents, sending a welcome email, and requesting workplace tool access can be easily done with Qatalog Workflows.

New joiners should also have a clear central view of what’s expected in their first 3 months. This can be achieved by documenting the complete onboarding process, making it transparent and straightforward for the joiner. A 30-60-90 day plan together with important resources should be incorporated into an onboarding Project. And, there should only be one primary onboarding flow for an employee to run through, this can be done by merging multiple processes into one with our new nested Workflows feature!

2. Make knowledge accessible, visible, and searchable

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Learning through proximity and overheard conversations in a remote setting is no longer possible. To counteract this, work should be made visible and accessible. There should be no knowledge asymmetry, employees should be able to easily find the context and information they need to do their job.

Adopting an all-in-one search tool can help increase visibility, making it quick and simple for people to find the files and documents they want, no matter where they’re stored. Qatalog’s Search integrates with your tool stack, like Slack, Google Drive, Asana, Microsoft Office, and Outlook, and also connects to relevant work like Projects and Goals across teams. 

Not having access to the right resources is a problem that hinders employee experience, stifles employee engagement, and reduces productivity as countless hours are wasted trying to find information or the right person to get access from. Accessibility is easy to manage in Qatalog, now you can add any Google Drive file as a resource within a Project, Team, or Goal, and the right coworkers will automatically get access.

3. Instil a documentation-first culture

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To build transparency and visibility, so that crucial information is recorded, you need to create a culture of documentation. Teach employees what information should be centralized and ensure you’re providing a tool that employees enjoy using, otherwise adoption will be limited. Following in the footsteps of Amazon's widely praised documentation culture, meetings should start with a document review. You don’t have to scrap all presentations and only write documents but find a balance that works for your team. Start by running a Weekly Business Review asynchronously. Each team could write a short paragraph about the progress towards goals and initiatives, with the final update shared company-wide as a Page or a Post.

Qatalog powers this kind of async culture by providing a complete and structured way to run meetings, share updates, and jam on ideas. For example, you can use Pages to document things like design docs or quarterly reviews — and bring your documents to life with tables, images, and rich editing. Share weekly sprint planning, team updates, and project status updates with Posts. 

4. Make decision-making transparent with one single source of truth

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In remote teams, it can be harder to build trust. It requires a shift from ad hoc conversations on Slack, to structured, centralized systems, allowing all employees to quickly understand what decisions have been made and why. This is key to building a positive team culture and a high-trust environment. However, repeatedly sharing manual updates and decisions with stakeholders or having to update multiple sources can be taxing. Instead use tools that pull information into one place and that continuously document decisions, progress, and updates, within the context of your projects, goals, and teams. A Work Hub offers these capabilities and has the benefit of sitting as a coordination layer across your org, connecting the often disparate parts of work.

5. Create a feedback-first culture

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Feedback can take many forms — recognition of a job well done, constructive feedback on a particular initiative, and structured performance reviews. For employees to be empowered and happy, they need to feel valued, and that’s where positive reinforcement comes in. To grow and develop in their role, feedback on work and structured performance reviews are key. The former is often solved by implementing HR tools that sit separately to day-to-day work and seldom get used, or people revert to unstructured impromptu feedback over Slack messages, destined to be forgotten. Feedback should be baked into the context of work and this is where Qatalog’s Kudos capability can help, allowing you to log feedback directly on a person's profile.

Sharing and requesting feedback must be done in the right way to ensure it’s rich with context and gets the right visibility. For example, Threads within a Project or Team are a great way to get more sets of eyes on a decision or path you’d like to take. And comments on Posts or Pages can provide detailed feedback on an initiative you’re working on or a planning document you’re writing.

So what improvements can you expect?

Introducing the behavioral norms and values of open communication and visible decision-making is how you build a deliberate team culture. And a strong team culture creates a more inclusive and positive place for people to work. It also means:

  • Less virtual eye-rolling when a particular decision is made as employees can retrace how that decision was made and why.
  • Less missed opportunities for collaboration. Typically 2/3 of employees report missing opportunities to collaborate and 62% believe it’s difficult to figure out what others are working on. 
  • Knowledge won’t be trapped in siloed tools and employees won’t waste time digging through cloud storage systems, message channels, and cycling through tabs, saving them around 59 minutes per day! 

The bottom line is if you’re scaling quickly and you don’t put your people first your employee experience will suffer and ultimately you’ll end up with high attrition, poor onboarding, and low productivity. But don’t worry, it’s not too late, you’re one click away from making a change …

If you want more tips on managing employee experience, check out our blog on employee engagement programs. Or book a call with our customer team.

hema-thanki
WRITTEN BY
Hema
Thanki
Contributor
Hema is a Product Marketing leader — focusing on voice of the customer, finessing positioning, crafting messaging and making sure ICPs understand the value they can get out of products.
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