Employees Want to Work with Technology In the Modern Cloud

(Editor’s Note: Today’s article is brought to you by  our friends at Kronos , a
leading provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud
solutions. Managing your workforce just got a lot smarter with Workforce
Dimensions, a solution designed to provide both a world-class employee
experience and unprecedented levels of operational insight . Enjoy
the article!)

In the first part
of this series about the future of work, we talked about the need for organizations and individuals to work smarter. Part of working smarter is using the right
tools. This is where decisions about technology have an immediate impact on
work.

In a study
published on Training Magazine, respondents talked about employee stress and burnout being linked to using outdated
technology. I
hate to say it, but this totally makes sense. Employees who are forced to
create workarounds because they’re dealing with old technology are quickly going
to get frustrated. They’re doing double or triple the work and still being held
accountable to the same performance standard.

According to CIO
Magazine, 93 percent of Millennials consider technology to be the most important aspect of work. And I’ll just add that I honestly
believe this feeling extends beyond Millennials. No one wants to use 2-3
programs to get something done. So, what do employees what in terms of
technology tools? Two things:

They want to work in the modern cloud. This means providing technology and tools that empower employees to reach their full potential and work smarter while working their way.It also means configuring technology to align with the employee experience so it can create better outcomes for the organization, harness workforce innovation, and deliver exceptional results.

This may sound great in theory, but it’s actually really
hard to execute in practice. That’s because legacy solutions are often hard to integrate.
I asked Mike May, senior director of the Workforce Dimensions Technology
Partner Network at Kronos why technology integrations are such a challenge when
they’re so common in today’s business environment. “While tech integrations are
commonplace in any organization, they’re often limited to batch-based data
sharing at pre-determined times. Sometimes, the entire system actually has a
blackout period where no one can use it. 
That’s just for data sharing. It’s even more challenging to embed one
solution inside another to offer employees a single user experience. Instead,
they’re still forced to master multiple applications, often left feeling
frustrated by the friction this creates with their actual priorities at work.”

Technology Partnerships Bring Together Strengths

The good news is that organizations don’t have to build a
customized solution. Technology solutions like Workforce Dimensions are
creating it through strategic partnerships and features that apply specifically
to your business and to your culture.

EXAMPLE #1: Microsoft and Google. While the Microsoft Office Suite is
widely used for business, Google’s G
Suite is also tremendously popular. Both platforms integrate with
Workforce Dimensions, giving managers the ability to work with tools they are
comfortable with.

Here’s an example of how they could be used alongside Workforce
Dimensions. Instead of tacking up a paper schedule on the breakroom cork board
or emailing the team a spreadsheet schedule, department managers can empower
employees to sync their schedules with a feature such as Google Calendar, where
they already track and plan their personal lives. This provides anytime access
to their schedule and makes it easier to plan work around life events.

Similarly, for managers who already spend all day working in
Microsoft Outlook, Workforce Dimensions integrates directly with the wildly
popular email client. This means they no longer have to leave Outlook and log
into Workforce Dimensions to review and approve time-off requests. Instead,
they get all the information they need in a special sidebar, saving them clicks
– and more importantly, time – while also responded to employee time-off
requests even more quickly. 

Instead of logging into Workforce Dimensions every time an employee requests time-off, managers can review and respond directly from Microsoft Outlook.

EXAMPLE
#2: Rodio. If you’re not
familiar (I know I wasn’t), Rodio is an artificial intelligence chatbot that facilitates
conversations (like shift swaps). In today’s workplaces, email is not the most
predominant form of communication. And everyone’s emails are not prioritized
the same way, meaning people often delete emails without reading them. In a
traditional office, this may not be a big deal…that person will go out of their
way to convey the message. But what about employees in the field services industry
who spend all day on the road, traveling from location to location with
possibly little contact with their colleagues? Think telecom installation
techs, home health givers, and janitorial workers. Or transportation and
logistics, where long-haul truckers may be on the road for days at a time.

Rodio
segments or compartmentalizes information so employees are part of the right
conversations. The ones that make sense for them. The ones they need to pay
attention to. An added benefit in the Rodio technology is that it will
auto-mute when the employee isn’t working. Then send an ICYMI (in case you
missed it) message when the employee returns to work.

Bringing Partnerships to Reality Benefits Employee Performance

We regularly talk about the need to
align talent management strategy with business strategy. Organizations can do
that through the use of technology.

A month ago, I introduced you to a company
called Passport that helps organizations increase productivity when it comes to
responsive scheduling and driving routes. Well, I recently heard about a
partnership where Passport, Rodio, Forms.com, and Kronos partnered together to build a home
health services application on top of the Kronos D5 platform, which is the
foundation of Workforce Dimensions. The app is
called FieldCentric and it brings patient administration, route assignments, and
schedules together into a single, easy to use app. Employees no longer have to
log into several apps to get their jobs done. They can focus on taking care of patients.

This is becoming a bigger and bigger
focus for a dedicated team at Kronos – they’re developing a partner ecosystem
to not just create integrations but bring together multiple technology partners
to leverage what each does best to rapidly build new solutions that solve
unique workforce business challenges on top of Kronos D5. This is exactly what
we’re talking about. Giving employees a technology experience in the modern
cloud will not only benefit them but the organization’s bottom-line.

P.S. If you want to learn more about the Workforce
Dimensions solution and how it can benefit your organization by helping your
employees work smarter, visit the Kronos website and request a demo.

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