Tips To Design A Perfect Employee Experience Roadmap Through Microsoft Teams

In 2021, organizations cannot leverage employee experience simply by increasing their remuneration and providing them with incentives. Employee needs have changed over time, and organizations need to cater to improve their work experience. 

Some of the key employee needs that need to be fulfilled include: 

• The need for flexible work hours
  
  
• The need to work remotely
  
  
• The need to collaborate with the team while working remotely
  
  
• The need for personalized employee support
  
  

Employees need to be managed effectively from the day they are onboarded to increase their engagement and productivity. This forms the base of an ideal employee experience roadmap. 

What Is An Employee Experience Roadmap?

As the name suggests, an employee experience roadmap is a set of steps that deal with different touchpoints between an employee and their organization. It encompasses a path to continuous improvement regarding the experience an employee has while working within an organization. The employee experience roadmap is a blueprint of the steps taken by a company to increase the overall productivity and engagement of their employees by managing their needs effectively. 

Steps For Creating An Ideal Employee Experience Roadmap

Although there is no standard route that an organization needs to follow, here are some of the major steps involved in creating an ideal employee experience roadmap: 

1. Identifying The Starting Point
   
   To create a holistic employee experience roadmap, an organization needs to identify a starting point. This provides the HR department with a sense of direction regarding improving the employee experience within the organization. You can identify the starting point by taking surveys and ascertaining where you stand concerning employee engagement and productivity. It is also important to assess how closely your employees' goals align with your organization's goals.
   
   
2. Developing Clearly Defined Objectives
   
   Once you have figured out the starting point, it is important to develop the objectives you are willing to achieve through the employee experience roadmap. You can define these objectives based on the insights obtained from surveys and the assessment made about the current employee experience within your organization.
   
   These objectives will guide you towards creating an ideal roadmap and provide you with an end goal in mind.
   
   
3. Ascertaining The Metrics To Measure Success
   
   After locking in the objectives, you need to ascertain all the essential metrics that would help you measure the success of your employee experience roadmap. These metrics depend upon the nature of your organization, the needs of your employees, the goals you want to accomplish, and several other factors.
   
   Ascertaining these metrics will help you measure how well you have done in increasing the engagement and productivity of your employees through your employee experience roadmap.
   
   
4. Outlining The Process
   
   Now, you need to outline the steps you would take to improve the experience of your employees, such as training them, personalizing employee support, etc. This will decide the course of action of your plan and help you take the right steps towards bringing the roadmap to fruition.
   
   
5. Executing The Plan
   
   Once you outline the process, you can start executing your plan by taking the decided steps. Always make sure that your actions are in sync with your objectives and goals.
   
   
6. Keeping The Employees In Loop
   
   Effective communication with your employees is essential to make your employee experience roadmap a success. Keep them updated regarding the effort made, steps taken and results obtained to improve their experience.
   
   
7. Evaluating The Results
   
   Finally, evaluate the results obtained from your employee experience roadmap and make important assessments to improve the same. Focus on reinforcing the positive aspects and remediating the negative ones.
   
   

Designing A Perfect Employee Experience Roadmap With MS Teams

The culture of working remotely is on the rise, and online collaborative platforms' prominence is only increasing with time. Microsoft Teams has emerged as one of the most popular collaborative platforms preferred by organizations and professionals worldwide. Especially after suffering from a global pandemic, organizations have understood the importance of platforms like Microsoft Teams and used the same to collaborate with their employees.

Especially if you have remote employees, MS Teams helps you improve their experience and increase their engagement.

Here are some of the most critical ways in which you can use the collaborative platform of Microsoft Teams for designing a perfect employee experience roadmap: 

1. Providing Automated Employee Support Via Chatbots
   
   Integrating Microsoft Teams with a modern service desk helps you provide seamless and automated support to your employees. The modern service desks make use of conversational AI to provide quick and personalized support to your employees. Unlike the traditional service desks, you can use MS Teams to resolve issues faced by your employees with a simple chat.
   
   On integrating MS Teams with a modern service desk, you can have AI chatbots assist your employees as they log into the platform. These virtual assistants replace the support agents to provide the first level of support. These chatbots can answer all the basic questions of your employees as they scan your knowledge base and come back with personalized answers.
   
   Moreover, if your employees are willing to help dedicated support agents, a modern service desk would route their cases to suitable agents and let them assist your employees in the best way possible. Here, the chatbots act as a connecting link between your employees and the support agents.
   
   Read More: The ten most important things to implement in the Microsoft Teams-based service desk
   
   
2. Auto-resolving Employee Issues Through Automated Ticketing
   
   One of the biggest issues faced by employees is often the difficulty in using the ticketing system. The traditional approach to employee ticketing often confused employees instead of providing them with quick and effective solutions.
   
   You can use MS Teams to help your employees auto-resolve their issues with the help of an automated ticketing system. Here, your employees do not need to make an effort to create, track, and close their tickets. They can raise a support ticket simply by chatting with a virtual assistant.
   
   Once the ticket is created, the platform would keep track of the same and update the concerned employees regarding the status of their case. A modern service desk would automatically close the ticket and record its details for future references as a support agent looks into the matter and resolves the issue.
   
   This way, your employees can get their issues resolved by themselves without approaching anybody and waiting for their questions to get answered.
   
   
3. Onboarding Remote Employees
   
   One of the biggest challenges faced by the HR managers in the case of remote employees are that of onboarding them effectively. How you onboard your employees is often the deciding factor in the engagement of your employees.
   
   You can use MS Teams' platform to onboard your remote employees by sending them personalized emails based on their user persona. As your employees join the organization, you can send them a welcome letter, their login credentials, company policies, contact details of their peers, and all other relevant details through MS Teams. This helps HR managers handle the onboarding process in a seamless and automated manner.
   
   
4. Getting Your Employees Trained
   
   Getting your employees trained through MS Teams helps you save money that would have otherwise been spent hiring trainers and organizing training sessions. If your employees need to be trained in specific micro-skills, you can add all necessary training resources to your enterprise knowledge base. This allows your employees to access the training materials from any location and learn the required skills at their own pace.
   
   Moreover, you can change the content format of your training materials for better retention. Using images, infographics, videos, and animations will help your employees train faster and more effectively.
   
   
5. Taking Personalized Feedback
   
   As discussed earlier, an organization needs to obtain feedback to create an ideal employee experience roadmap. You can use MS Teams to take personalized surveys and analyze the results obtained to make crucial HR decisions. Taking personalized feedback helps you understand the major pain points of your employees allows the management to work on the same.
   
   Through MS Teams, you can reach out to every employee, understand how they feel about working in your organization, and work towards improving their experience as they work with you.
   
   
6. Communicating Work Policies
   
   Instead of letting your employees go through long manuals and digital handbooks, you can use MS Teams to communicate work policies effectively and quickly. Using a modern service desk helps your employees answer all questions related to the work policies instead of spending hours reading dedicated material.
   
   The Final Word
   
   Microsoft Teams is more than a collaborative platform and can be used in multiple ways to improve the experience of your employees, whether they work on-premise or remotely. It is highly advisable for organizations operating in all major industries to switch to automated platforms for providing streamlined and integrated support to their employees.