How Digital Transformation Is Changing Employee Expectations

Digital transformation isn’t just a buzzword flying around, but an approach that has been revolutionizing the way businesses operate and deliver value to customers.

This shift will completely reimagine the way organizations leverage technology, people, and processes in order to dramatically improve business performance. Although digital transformation is, in a way, the aggregation of new and innovative digital tools for solving business problems - people are at the core of its potential.

Here’s how this strategic adoption of digital technologies is changing employee expectations and what organizations can do to make the most of it.

A Streamlined Recruitment Process

Employees want more than a job that will put bread on the table and pay the bills. They want a work environment that will allow them to fulfill their potential, acquire new skills, and gain valuable experience. And since the recruitment process is our potential employees’ first interaction with your company, it’s essential to make a great first impression.

By having a streamlined recruitment process, you’ll make your company appealing to work for and attract top talent. Digital transformation will simplify and facilitate the entire recruitment journey by allowing applicants to submit their applications via mobile devices, informing them about the progress of their application automatically, and notifying them about the next steps in the process.

Such a frictionless experience will reduce the odds that the best applicants, who usually have several job offers, will opt for another employer.

At the same time, it’s equally important to ensure that your new hires are in line with your company culture. Although you can assess whether a particular candidate is a right fit by interviewing them, this approach can be expensive and time-consuming. Social media screening at scale can help you vet hundreds of applicants very quickly and easily spot bigotry, racism, or any other unwanted behavior.

This is particularly important in the current work-from-home workplace, where it’s hard to spot and prevent toxicity before it unravels and damages your brand reputation.  

With the help of digital transformation, your recruitment process will be more flexible, efficient, and fast, all of which will help you find the best candidates and impress them.

Personalized Onboarding

Even after you’ve picked the best candidates, you can’t be sure that everything will be as you planned. Your new hires need to be properly onboarded and trained in order to be able to perform at their highest potential.

With the help of digital transformation, you can show your new employees the ropes and encourage them to prepare for their roles within your organization.

At this point, new employees still haven’t formed a strong bond with your organization, and if they come across obstacles during onboarding, they can easily change their mind and leave.

If you leverage digital transformation, you can create a personalized onboarding process, thus allowing every new hire to learn when it suits them and get up to speed at their own pace. Conversational AI chatbots can be programmed to onboard new employees and fill them in on the company policies, roles and responsibilities, and necessary information.

Not only will chatbots offer a high degree of flexibility to your new employees, but they will also free up the HR department’s time so that they can focus on other, high-level tasks.

Automating Repetitive Tasks

Repetitive tasks have to be completed no matter how mundane they are, but employees waste a lot of energy while working on them. That’s where automation comes in to pick up the slack and speed up the process, allowing your employees to concentrate on more creative tasks that require critical thinking. If we bear in mind that automating your data entry, email marketing, or social media posting can also significantly reduce costs, it’s clear that this is a win-win situation.

However, the truth is that many employees worry that this segment of digital transformation will take over their jobs. This fear isn’t entirely unfounded since, according to a report, 20 million jobs might be replaced by robots by 2030. That’s the reason why it’s important to address employee concerns and be very transparent when you’re implementing digital transformation. Whenever you’re introducing a new automation tool, you should talk to your employees and invest in their training. That way, they will understand the benefits of those advanced solutions and how automation will make their jobs easier. Such tools can improve employee productivity and performance but only if properly used.

It's no wonder then that, according to HBR, digital transformation is more about people than technology. Keeping the lines of communication with your employees open and helping them adapt to this change is crucial. Digital transformation has a profound impact on employee expectations as it’s the key factor for attracting top talent, while at the same time, it can pose a threat in terms of making certain jobs obsolete. Finding the right balance and supporting your employees’ coming to terms with this new reality will allow you to make the most of such a tremendous shift.

About the Guest Writer
Jennifer Wilson is a writer at Qeedle.com She knows business processes and operations management inside and out. She understands the challenges of running a small business firsthand and it’s her mission to tackle the topics that are most relevant to entrepreneurs.