Checklist: 9 things to look out for when choosing your employee experience technology partner

Stand aside! EX, XM, and HXM are the on fleek kids on the HR acronym block. And if you’re in HR you’ve probably already cleared your to-do list to make place for anything and everything to do with how you can make your EX bigger, better, stronger. 

But what all this boils down to is quite simple. All the experiences an employee has through every phase of a job, from recruitment, employment, and even post-employment is summed up as Employee Experience. Everything else is about how you manage it – Experience Management, Human Experience Management – are all different ways of saying the same thing.

Businesses all over the world have realized that the EX-winner will take all, i.e. all the best talent. Which explains why the global HR technology market is projected to grow from $24.04 billion in 2021 to $35.68 billion in 2028. 

Creating a successful, smart, and sustainable employee experience or EX strategy is a long journey. And you need to find a valuable and collaborative partner to keep you on track. 

With so many options out there...how do you choose? After all, choosing an EX partner is not a decision to be made off-the-cuff because it’s a relationship that will go well beyond just adding new tech to your systems. With the right partner, you’re a mixed doubles team at Wimbledon. Without, it's more likely to be an awkward three-legged race.

To help you cut through the clutter, here’s a checklist you can use to tick off all the things you need from your employee experience technology partner:

1. A Good Strategic Fit

To create and execute an EX strategy, you’ll need to identify exactly what you want to achieve as the end result in terms of company culture, engagement, retention, and employee happiness.

While technology can be a catalyst to help you towards your goals, choosing the right EX technology partner is the secret ingredient. Your EX partner should share your vision of what employee experience is, how it can be integrated throughout the organization and what it can achieve. When choosing an EX partner, make sure you acquaint yourself well with the partner company and product and communicate your goals clearly to understand if their vision aligns with yours. 

For example, some might think Employee Engagement is the answer to amazing EX. If that’s what you think too, then it’s probably fine, but if you’re looking for benefits that go beyond engagement rates, then you need to keep looking.

2. Flexible and Collaborative

There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to creating a truly personalized, engaging, and differentiated experience across the journey of each employee within your organization.

You need a tech platform that can collect and connect employee data across geographies, platforms, and devices, create low-code, automated workflows for maximum efficiency and, above all, make life simpler. And this is not just for your employees, but also for every person across HR, IT, Finance, Admin, communications, HRBP, and even your vendors. Basically, all those involved in delivering that seamless experience.

With this in mind, ask for a customized demo with your potential EX technology partner to see how flexible and collaborative their platform is and how well it can fit into your existing stack, or expand to accommodate new applications.

3. Unified Employee Profile view

One of the pillars of creating successful employee experiences is a unified, 360-degree view of each individual employee. Your solution of choice should be able to pull all relevant data points from different apps and sources onto one dashboard. This will allow you to see any gaps or areas of improvement or intervention, opportunities for learning and growth, missing pieces that require quick action - everything that will help you better understand the individual and his/her journey within your company. 

Once you have this view, you should also then be able to zoom out to see how multiple journeys intersect and what your company’s collective EX looks like. More on this in the next point.

4. Reports and Insights

Data is the foundation for any strategy in today’s world and EX is no exception.

To create personalized, impactful employee experiences, your EX technology partner should be able to collate data, clean it and organize it so the organization can glean valuable insights.

Comprehensive reports can provide relevant insights about employee engagement, individual progress, workplace satisfaction, and productivity, based on which your EX strategy can constantly evolve. It is therefore important to ensure that your EX partner can help you unearth such insights from the bank of data you build up across all processes and systems.

5. Personalized Everything

We’ve delved deep into how personalization is the key to employee happiness. Without personalization, delivering the best EX becomes just that much harder.

Your EX solution should be able to create detailed, easily accessible, and insightful employee profiles and offer options to map critical touchpoints along each employee journey - from the candidate phase to when they become alumni. 

This includes using smart forms to collect and collate relevant information about your candidates, and a strong content management system. A good CMS will enable you to segment and target your audience, create different types of content flows and trigger automated campaigns when certain criteria are fulfilled. Good EX is when you feel like your employer has taken the time to get to know you and send you information that is relevant, timely and tailored to you.

6. Employee Engagement & Timely Interventions

An EX strategy should be geared towards many goals like employee happiness and productivity but one of the big pain points it should also be able to resolve is attrition. Employees that feel dissatisfied with their jobs, workspaces, or the opportunities they can access in an organization will usually be on the lookout for another job. The failure to recognize this dissatisfaction early enough to address it and make any changes is why organizations often lose good, skilled, driven employees. 

A good EX partner will equip you with pulse surveys, polls, one-on-one chat, and early detection systems that can give you a heads-up about how connected or engaged your employees are.

7. A Simple User Experience

We cannot stress on this enough - one of the goals of your EX strategy has to be to make your employees’ lives as simple and hassle-free as possible. But making them adopt a complex, new piece of tech, which they must spend time learning and getting accustomed to, defeats this purpose.

That’s why your EX solution must be designed around the humans it hopes to serve with an easy-to-understand, user-friendly interface. Ideally, one which will require minimal to no handholding during deployment.

8. Help When You Need It

While most EX platforms can seem very attractive with all kinds of bells and whistles, choosing the right EX partner can often come down to the finer details.

With any platform you choose, setting up and getting everyone in the organization on the platform is a significant undertaking. There could potentially be many glitches and technical problems with new software, which can be frustrating for employees. Which is pretty much the opposite of the kind of employee experience you want. So while choosing an EX partner ensure that they have a strong, responsive, and reliable tech support team that can address these issues quickly and efficiently.

9. Future-proof and Future-ready

If you’ve checked off all the items on this checklist so far, you may think you’ve found the perfect EX partner. But there is one more important box to tick.

As you use the EX platform to deliver a great experience to all your employees and put your business on the fast track to growth, your EX partner will have to keep up with a rapidly changing world.

You’re investing your money and time in EX to ensure that your organization is strong, steady, and agile in order to take on the challenges of the future. Make sure you pick an EX partner that is future-ready to take those on with you!