Personalization is everywhere—our apps, our wearable tech, social media, even targeted marketing. So it’s no wonder that employees expect that same experience at work.
“Everything about the way we live is programmed by relevant data and designed for our personalized consumption,” says Leapgen co-founder and CEO Jason Averbook, one of the keynoters at this month’s Spring HR Tech. “Anything that doesn’t feel that way—personalized, intelligent, relevant—will be rejected.”
In the workplace, that means the entire employee experience—driven by technology—needs to be personalized, or else satisfaction, productivity and engagement could suffer. When workplace tech is personalized, it creates a sticky experience, he notes, driving utilization, conversion and adoption; in turn, that generates significant workforce data that the organization can use to keep enhancing the experience—overall, a win-win for employers and employees.
“It’s a virtuous cycle that can create tremendous business value,” says Averbook, who notes that employers need to not only personalize their tech strategies but also ensure they are people-centric. In the last year, organizations have heightened their awareness of all that is weighing on their workers—mental health, physical health, psychological safety, equity, social values and more—and how they expect employers to help meet those needs.
So the workforce experience—and the technology behind it—need to be powered by attention to whole-person wellness, notes Averbook, who will share insights on this topic in his March 18 keynote at Spring HR Tech.
Many of the most valuable innovations that have happened in the last year in the HR space are targeted toward whole-person wellness, supported by strong technology strategies, Averbook says—from apps that help employees document their COVID status and ability to return to workplaces to tools that support mental wellness through meditation and other interventions.
“We have seen the rapid adoption of ‘checking in’ on people versus ‘checking up’ on people as a way of measuring how people are doing as well as tools to allow coaching and advice based on the response to these action-based tools,” he adds. Whole-person wellness is also being increasingly considered in efforts to build connections among distributed workforces.
“Standups, frequent team water coolers and digital games have truly kept the workforce engaged and ‘together’ in a moment where wellbeing must be placed first,” he says.
Employers need to continue to “demonstrate care in ways that really matter to people,” Averbook says—and that’s where a digital mindset can come in.
“A digital mindset can help us unlearn what we knew and the way things used to be,” he says, “making it easier for us to relearn what people need and want now.”
It’s also imperative that organizations know what their HR teams need and want in order to help them meet the needs of employees.
“Human resources produces business velocity in the form of people, and their care is the best investment of resources you can make,” Averbook says.