The fast-paced business world of 2024 is more competitive than ever, and employee experience is critical to keeping your company’s productivity and morale high.
Unfortunately, according to Kincentric’s Global Employee Experience Trends 2023 Report, almost half of employees feel their employers aren’t receiving the experience they were promised. As any business owner can tell you, employee dissatisfaction can have dire consequences, including chronic absenteeism, dwindling retention rates, and more.
Another recent UK survey revealed that unhappy employees tend to take more time off compared to their happier co-workers — almost two working weeks more. This much missed work has a substantial impact on the economy — an estimated £11 billion yearly, to say nothing of the impact on individual businesses.
With that in mind, it’s imperative for employers to put more focus on improving employee experience and happiness. Though there are a number of ways to go about this, one of the most practical means is through the implementation of an HR help desk system. An HR help desk can enhance communication, automate workflows, and generally make life easier for employers and employees alike.
Features of an HR Help Desk
Your organisation’s HR department is central to managing your employees successfully. HR helps bring new employees on board, handles leave requests, and aids in improving employee engagement. But HR departments are often under pressure to do a lot with limited resources. That’s where help desk software can be particularly useful.
Let’s discuss some of the ways an HR help desk can assist with improving the employee experience.
Workflow Automation
When it comes to getting things accomplished, anything that can reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks is a benefit. Automating tasks such as leave requests, payroll processing, or performance appraisals can free up HR teams to focus on more complicated, strategic tasks. Automation also means faster response times to employee requests and queries, which improves employee experience.
Smart Ticketing
A major feature of HR help desk software is “smart ticketing,” which means employee requests and queries automatically get routed to the proper department or individual. These requests can also be prioritised by urgency, which means the most important issues are dealt with first. This can go a long way toward reducing employee frustration.
Artificial Intelligence
One way in which AI can be useful is in responding to requests that require simple, rote responses via a chatbot. What is an AI chatbot? It’s a software application that can respond to things like questions about holiday entitlement, company policies, or other issues. Not only does this take pressure off HR personnel, but chatbots are available 24/7, meaning employees can get answers at any time of the day or night.
Self-Service Portal
However, chatbots are only a small component of a larger self-service portal, which lets employees handle their concerns without the need for HR personnel. A self-service portal gives employees access to important documents, payroll details, request forms, and more. This both aids efficiency and gives employees a sense of greater control over their work lives.
In addition to these features, an HR help desk also provides substantial utility to HR in the form of reporting and analytics. With analytics tools, HR can gain valuable insights into such issues as chronic absenteeism, resolution times, and more. With these metrics, HR can make more informed decisions about their long-term strategies. Quality HR software also has strong cybersecurity protocols to ensure employee data is protected from unauthorised access.
Using an HR Help Desk to Improve Employee Experience
Now let’s discuss the myriad of ways an HR help desk can enhance employee experience as well as increase workplace efficiency.
As previously mentioned, the key benefit of an HR help desk is the high-speed resolution of common processes. Onboarding new employees, approving leave applications, and resolving employee queries can all be handled through automated processes rather than taking time from HR personnel.
Self-service tools, such as document repositories, resource libraries, and employee portals, can also speed up common processes, as well as placing more power and agency in the hands of the employees themselves — which in turn leads to greater employee satisfaction.
There’s also the issue of remote access, which is more important than ever in today’s global economy. Remote access allows employees to perform tasks wherever they are, meaning fewer delays and better efficiency across the board.
An HR help desk also provides personalised service, not only from the AI — which learns and adapts according to the input it receives — but from HR teams as well. Personalisation improves both the speed and relevance of HR responses, which in turn helps employees feel valued.
Finally, it should be stressed once again that metrics and tracking are vital to identifying problems with employee performance and satisfaction. Issues such as high absenteeism or suffering performance can be indicators of workplace stress or unhappiness with company policies. By using the tracking data provided by an HR help desk, these problems can be pinpointed and addressed before they become a major issue.