Redesigning the employee experience with digital tools
What workplace challenges are best addressed with digital tools? And how can these tools be most effectively deployed? As Head of Product at Attuned, these are two questions that I have spent an incalculable amount of time exploring in recent years—as had my fellow panelists in the discussion titled ‘Using Digital Tools to Redesign the Employee Experience’ at From Day One’s virtual conference ‘Tools for Building an Engaged, Productive Team’ on April 21.
Given the backgrounds of the people speaking, it was no surprise that it turned out to be an illuminating, timely, and wide-ranging discussion. Kate Zimberg (Ph.D), VP Employee Experience & Enablement at application security specialists F5, talked about the importance of employee wellbeing and mental health, which F5 had supported via the implementation of services like virtual mental health safety training and company-wide meditation classes. Kate also talked about how the firm is using new technologies to increase team connectivity and productivity, including virtual whiteboarding tools such as Miro and Lucidspark, and applications that mimic coffee chats, such as Donut.
Gina Nebesar, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Ovia Health, talked about the large number of parents getting ready to return to the workforce, especially working mothers who have been greatly impacted by multiple crises during the pandemic. Gina went on to explain how, to combat this, Ovia is offering a suite of tools and services including one-on-one virtual health coaching with licensed professionals, pediatric sleep coaching, behavioral health support, and digital manager training to support working or expecting parents. In addition, Ovia has changed their work rules, extending remote work indefinitely while also embracing a hybrid model to support parents further.
Meanwhile, Mike Hill (Ph.D), Senior Director of Talent and Organization Development at Applied Materials, provided a great explanation of how and why they are building a proprietary internal platform that includes outsourced technologies to enhance connectivity and productivity for their 24,000 employees. And Chantal Veillon-Berteloot, VP HR – Global Product Development & Supply at biopharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb, brought up an important benefit coming out of the transition to remote work: how it has opened doors when forming internal project teams. Pre-pandemic, such teams were very local, but now they are drawing skills from any location, which has enabled the company to utilize their workforce in new and improved ways.
Another topic that resonated strongly amongst the panel was the disconnect between employees who were mostly working online even before the pandemic, and who are now facing ‘Zoom fatigue’, and the employees who have jobs that are ‘offline’. The lack of face-to-face interactions has created a new type of inclusion problem, one that companies are looking to solve via digital tools.
For my own part, I was particularly interested in the question of how digital tools can be used to aid conflict resolution. At Attuned, we believe that a lot of friction between people at work comes from a difference in values, or rather a difference in what motivates them. I provided an example of staff operating a help desk, who probably have KPIs they need to achieve, for example the number of requests processed per day. This could be highly motivating for someone driven by competition, but for a person motivated by altruism, they may get far greater job satisfaction from spending an extra half hour with a customer to ensure that they get all the help they need. This could certainly be a source of conflict within the team unless people know about such gaps and find ways to work through them—which is one of the reasons why I believe digital tools like Attuned can make such a positive and transformative contribution to the world of work.
Watch the panel discussion in its entirety here.
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