By For organizations both big and small, a “new normal” poses new challenges.
In the United States, 24 million people quit their jobs between April and September 2021.1 As employees leave in droves, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for organizations to attract and retain talent. This phenomenon, dubbed “the great resignation,” adds an extra layer of difficulty to the human resources equation.
It's not enough to offer an attractive compensation package, perks, and the option to work remotely. To engage a workforce that is only getting younger and more discerning, organizations must adopt technology that meets the expectations of its employees and helps them do their jobs with ease.
Read on to learn three ways in which technology influences hiring and retaining top talent.
1. Technology shapes your culture
In a world where a hybrid at-home and at-the-office work situation is the new norm, the technology at an employee’s fingertips has never been more important. When the pandemic hit, organizations were forced to pivot overnight, and it exposed the cracks in their digital foundation.
Large enterprises staggered VPN usage to ensure essential employees had access to required systems, and some even had their employees lug their desktop computers to their home office.
All of a sudden, it became abundantly clear that manual, paper-based processes, like adding a beneficiary to a mortgage or transferring an RRSP from one bank to another, wouldn’t be able to continue as usual. Organizations learned that if they didn’t update their technology, not only would their productivity and customer satisfaction suffer, but so would their culture.
Ninety percent of leaders said they paid attention to their people’s needs when selecting new technology, but only 53% of staff agreed.2
Technology affects how employees feel about their job—it connects employees who are working remotely and acts as a collaboration tool. And, in the digital age where people are always connected and enjoy the convenience of e-commerce technology in their everyday life, they want to come to work and have access to the same kind of tools.
Technology affects how employees feel about their job—it connects employees who are working remotely and acts as a collaboration tool.
Eighty percent of Gen Z employees want to work with cutting-edge technology, and 91% say that if they had multiple employment offers, technology would influence their job choice.3 Employers need to keep this in mind if they want to hire—and retain—young talent.
"Gen Z accounts for more than 60 million people, making up over 30% of the U.S. population and outnumbering millennials. This generation grew up on Google Maps and Snapchat, and their expectations of employers vary more dramatically than perhaps any generational shift before."4
2. Technology increases job satisfaction
Organizations can’t have people in high-impact roles wasting time on manual tasks. For example, pharmacists shouldn’t be saddled with paperwork in order to administer vaccines, and customer-care employees shouldn’t have to navigate multiple tools and processes to input customer information. The fact is, nobody wants to work with stale technology.
In a recent study, 30.2% of the respondents said their biggest concern with work-related tech is outdated systems that are cumbersome or slow5.
Ensuring that employees have the tools they need to do their job can increase motivation and enhance performance. For example, organizations that add a low-code process automation solution to their tech stack can enable their business teams to automate complex processes and, as a result, bring the organization one step closer to achieving end-to-end automation.
The pharmacist spending time inputting customer data into an ERM can now focus on helping more patients and less time on mundane tasks. In a contact center with a low-code automation solution, teams are able to digitize and automate legacy, document-centric workflows. This results in the creation of clean, structured data and frees up customer-care agents to focus on solving customer issues.
And, when customers are satisfied with the service they’re getting from the technology that’s being implemented, it translates into a better work environment for employees too.
3. Technology empowers employees
Automation technology can also positively impact employees by providing them with ownership on a product from ideation to implementation.
The traditional way of delivering projects often takes months to implement and involves large teams of people across several departments. By contrast, solutions like low-code process automation enable employees to deploy new workflows that work for them—without waiting until IT has the time to help.
With the right technology, manual processes and paper-based workflows can be transformed into digital experiences that capture data and deliver it however it's needed, without the skills of highly-specialized talent.By 2025, it’s expected that half of all low-code clients will come from outside of IT6.
For example, BMO updated their small business credit card process in just two weeks, and instead of needing four or five developers, a project manager, and a UX designer to handle the transition, they only required one internal SME. Citizen developers on fusion teams can:
- Collaborate on solving a problem that the whole team is working towards.
- Spend less time in meetings and requirements-gathering sessions.
- Have more time to enhance processes that will improve their day-to-day and make customers happy.
- Work with technology and make an impact across the organization, across any business unit, instead of having to report into IT.
Low-code process automation platforms also help solve for talent shortages you might have in your development and engineering departments. More specialized talent can focus on larger, multi-stage projects, and citizen developers can take on the complex processes that have been put on the digitization back burner.
When you adopt the right technology, your employees feel like knowledge workers—not paper-pushers.
With a robust low-code solution, organizations can automate the daily grind of manual tasks and streamline the employee and customer experience—helping your organization stand out from the crowd.
Sources and credits
1“Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, accessed Dec. 6, 2021, www.bls.gov. The data represents seasonally adjusted quits for total nonfarm employers in the U.S. from April through September 2021.
2 Our status with tech at work: It’s complicated
3 Dell Technologies Research: The Gen Z effect
4 Technology Is Critical To Recruit And Retain A Workforce That Is Only Getting Younger
5 The Connected Workforce: What Workers Want to See More (and Less) of in 2022
6 Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Low-Code Development Technologies Market to Grow 23% in 2021
