The changing role of IT managers & their influence on employee experience

While IT leaders may not typically think of themselves as cross-functional collaborators, in our changing work environment, collaboration is more important than ever. 

IT leaders must become much more collaborative, not just managing technology infrastructures, but really helping to play a more crucial role in partnering with Internal Communications and HR to drive business success.

How can they do that? Today’s workforce requires that you go beyond things like single sign-on, and adopt technology that really helps to streamline communication and productivity.  IT leaders play a critical role in supporting those business goals by selecting the right technology to ensure employees are working efficiently and productively. 

 

Starting on day 1 of employment, employees touch both HR and IT during onboarding – HR managers do the formal paperwork side and IT sets up accounts and hardware. But to truly support the employee experience, these two teams should start working together way before an employee’s first day at work. 

When these two teams work together during the buying process, they can choose software that allows for a robust experience, syncs everything into a centralized location, and utilizes existing sign-on accounts. This type of collaboration between teams gives employees the sense that they are set up to be productive and successful in their role. 

That’s why many businesses are moving to employee experience software in order to facilitate this robust, centralized workplace hub. We used to call it an intranet, but now it's so much more. 

Employee experience platforms, like LumApps, include even more ways to streamline communications and streamline workflow with tools like secure videos and self-service elements to help employees with tasks like IT tickets and HR queries.  

When IT and HR work together...this type of collaboration between teams gives employees the sense that they are set up to be productive and successful in their role.

— Lisa Capra, Product Marketing Manager at LumApps 

We all know that streamlined and effective communication is essential for a good employee experience, and it should be multidirectional, right? It shouldn't just be top-down. Our employees talk to one another, and if they don't have an employee platform on which they can share resources, they're going to find one. This causes a shadow IT issue. 

Instead, IT leaders can help facilitate this flow of information by setting up technology platforms that allow for knowledge sharing. 

For example, the global sales team may have competitive intelligence to share about a market competitor. If everyone in your sales team belongs to a centralized group on your communication platform, they can get a notification, whether through their web or mobile device. This type of knowledge-sharing space allows the sales team to respond, collaborate, and strategize ideas and best practices. If you have an employee experience platform, you have a centralized location for all of your employees to share these resources instead of resources like pitch decks getting lost in disjointed applications.
 

A digital headquarters is a place where employees can gather to learn information, chat with colleagues, and share wins – we like to think of it as the virtual water cooler. 

Taking that a step further, your digital headquarters, or your employee experience platform, centralizes everything into one place to drive employee engagement, streamline communications, promote inclusivity, and keep employees engaged with what’s going on at the company. 

To be most effective, an employee headquarters really needs to provide the right information, to the right people, at the right time, and across applications. Case in point, let’s say Company X is a global company and needs to send an announcement to only the European team. The technology should support the ability to do that. The team in Latin America and in North America should not receive that communication if it is specifically targeted for the European team. The technology needs to support that, and IT leaders should be asking those questions when selecting employee experience software.

As an IT manager, it’s critical that you select tools that can support your workforce from wherever they are – frontline workers, deskless, remote, and hybrid workers. Most of those employees are mobile, and may not even have credentials to sign in. So we want to provide them with a mobile app that's going to allow them to connect and stay connected to the internal comms and the HR in their organization, without even having Microsoft or Google credentials. LumApps, for example, can connect with your existing collaboration suites, like Microsoft or Google, but you can also set up access for those frontline workers that may not have a Microsoft account, without needing to add more seats. 

Let's say you have an electric company. An employee has run into an issue out on site, but management is almost two hours away. That employee can record a quick video and upload it through their employee experience software to get help from the company’s main base right away. These are the types of things IT managers can be preparing for when selecting software that can evolve with the growth of our company, and take the steps to create a tech stack that supports employee experience that includes those remote and hybrid workers. 

A lot of times IT staff members are stuck handling support tickets rather than doing the innovative work that can really help move the company forward. What if your employee experience platform had the ability to help automate some of that work? LumApps has an integrated chatbot, for example, to help automate processes like password resets, so employees can “self serve” these tasks and your IT staff can get back to their innovative work. 

Something else to consider when you're selecting an employee experience platform is the opportunity to create resource centers. Whether they're powered by Google Drive or SharePoint, a strong search function is so important. Look for one that goes across various apps so it can search from all of your workplace integrations to help boost findability.

Now that you know how an employee experience platform can streamline productivity, let’s talk about the must-have features you need in your tech stack. 

IT Leader's Checklist: 9 Steps to Build an Employee Experience Tech Stack

Follow this 9-step process created to evaluate your tech stack and thoughtfully present an organized plan to your team. 

1. Your employee experience platform should be intuitive. 

The content management process within your platform should be intuitive and easy to designate permissions and roles. The LumApps platform, for example, is what we call a no-code environment, meaning anyone can manage, edit, and create content no matter their technical experience. This is an easy way to support autonomy in the workplace and again, get back to your innovative IT tasks rather than managing a website all day. 

LumApps is set up specifically for your HR and internal comms teams to be able to support, build, and manage their own sites within the platform so they can continually keep them fresh for their users. 

2. Your employee experience platform should include multi-language support.

Our global workforce requires that your employee experience platform supports multiple languages. When teams are working across the globe and have to speak in languages that are not their primary language, one “small” thing that can improve their experience is to give them technology tools in their native language. This one “simple” thing can make their day a little bit easier, which can directly impact their experience, satisfaction, and productivity. 

3. Your employee experience platform should include a centralized employee dashboard.

A good employee experience platform will include a centralized dashboard, like a homepage, where employees can quickly see top news and customize the page to their needs. For example, a dashboard could include their email, the latest calendar events for the day, any updated messages from their manager, or relevant community posts. 

4. Your employee experience platform should include secure video management tools. 

There are many ways you can present video, like public social media platforms, for example. But, sometimes you need a little more security than that when you want to protect proprietary information from being leaked externally.  

 

A truly great employee experience platform will include built-in secure video management capabilities.  built into the platform. LumApps Play allows you to centralize video across the organization, secure video with automated encryption files, and control download rights. You can even enrich the video with subtitles, automated transcription, and calls to action. 

5. Your employee experience platform should include dynamic analytics to monitor success.

Platform analytics will enable you to adopt a data-driven approach to measure and analyze employee experience. You can then use that data to drive improvement and really help to track progress over time.

LumApps dynamic analytics dashboards allow you to measure and track content consumption over time in order to make informed decisions when adjusting use cases and content strategy. Even the video function is set up for tracking such as when a video is consumed and how long someone spends watching the video. 

IT Leader's Checklist: 9 Steps to Build an Employee Experience Tech Stack

Follow this 9-step process created to evaluate your tech stack and thoughtfully present an organized plan to your team. 

We would love to know more about your goals. How can we help?