Forget the vanity metrics and the steady but painfully slow progress plans. HR professionals want to meet the demands of modern employees and rise to the challenge of a hybrid workforce by making a lasting change right now.
That’s the dream, right?
A happy employee stays your employee. A happy employee gets work done. A happy employee makes your company profitable. If we all had happy employees, we’d be happy.
So why aren’t we happy?
HR teams today are struggling to answer that question because they don’t have reliable data to identify employee frustrations before they manifest into bigger problems. According to Nexthink’s recent survey, most HR leaders (56%) would like to understand how much time employees are losing to IT issues. And more than half of HR leaders (52%) have access to this information but fear their data might be unreliable or difficult to access.
While HR doesn’t have the answers, they do know the impact of these problems. 77% agree that poor or unreliable IT services and equipment play a significant role in employee burnout and turnover.
And that’s where the IT department comes in.
‘We need you, IT!’
For HR’s dreams to come true, they’ll need constant communication and assistance from IT. With in-person work environments becoming less frequent, IT is the only entity that can identify specific digital frustrations that can lead to larger workplace stress and burnout.
In today’s hybrid and remote workforce, Digital Employee Experience is a huge piece of Employee Experience.
Why does putting “digital” in front of something make it an IT-only problem?
There’s no way for an employee today to get through their day without using digital devices, so if HR only focused on non-digital aspects, what does that leave?
Instead, HR and IT need to work smarter together.
68% of our survey respondents revealed that their IT and HR teams work in tandem, but 21% of respondents do not enjoy this collaboration. Now, I don’t think HR and IT teams hate each other, but based on our results, they aren’t exactly seeking each other out at the company Christmas party either.
It’s safe to say that the synergy between the two teams is missing. A mere 10% of respondents claim their organizations’ HR and IT teams have an excellent working relationship, with 36% claiming to have an average to below average rapport.
And as much as we’d like to chalk this disconnect up to a right brain, left brain difference, the reality is that IT and HR haven’t had a compelling enough project to work on together.
Until now.
This isn’t just about IT servicing HR and providing equipment to new hires or implementing new software. The shift that needs to happen comes down to each identifying shared goals, allocating resources, and finding the right work data that benefits each party.
One way we have seen HR & IT teams collaborate is through two-way employee communication. While only 7% of survey respondents receive a 75% or higher response rate, that is the average our customers see using Nexthink. Nexthink provides actionable data that HR and IT teams can act on to improve Digital Employee Experience.
So what does an ideal HR and IT partnership look like?
A great example is ABN AMRO, a popular Dutch bank that took proactive steps to stay connected with their remote employees. Their HR and IT teams crafted helpful messages and surveys to send to remote employees during Covid. These automated Nexthink campaigns received a record number of responses containing insights into how to better support remote workers. This type of campaign would have been impossible to do without both IT and HR teams working closely together.
Check out the survey report, HR & IT: The Grand Alliance, and learn how your HR and IT organization can work together to prevent burnout and attrition.
