What Is Employee Experience Technology and How to Use It

As employee priorities change, so do technological demands. The pandemic drove newly remote teams to use employee monitoring software — but with it came concerns about work-life balance and mental health, opening companies’ eyes to employee experience technology.

This is a good thing. The concept of a positive employee experience has always existed, but it’s never been more prominent than it is now. That’s due in part to the growing amount of employee experience software.

On the flip side, you can’t just pick random tools from the shelf and expect the best results. The key is building a tech stack that covers all your needs and processes but doesn’t overwhelm your team.

What is employee experience technology?

Employee experience technology is software that helps companies manage engagement, culture, relationship building, and overall employee well-being. These tools provide everything employees need to be at their best.

Good employee experience technology covers all aspects of the employee’s relationship with the rest of the company. This includes:

• How they collaborate with teammates
• How easily they can voice their concerns to managers
• How they can handle personal requests like paid time off
• How they pursue career development opportunities

In other words, your company’s employee experience technology shouldn’t be confined to just one app. It’s a set of tools that allow them to reliably provide a pleasant and valuable experience to their employees daily.

Why does it matter?

While the concept of employee experience has been around for many years, it has recently become more prominent as workforces transitioned to remote work.

It makes a lot of sense. But for remote teams, it’s impossible to observe their everyday dynamic and determine if their experience at work is optimal.

Managers can’t walk up to employees and ask if they need assistance. On the other hand, team members can’t tap their colleagues on the shoulder to collaborate on a small task. These are just a few of the many remote work challenges that employee experience technology aims to solve.

What should you include in your employee experience technology stack?

Building an employee experience tech stack sounds hard, but it’s easy if you foster an environment of open communication so you can learn about what your employees face. When you gain a glimpse into employees’ day-to-day lives, you’ll see how you can improve their experience.

Your goal is to remove all complex processes from your employees’ workflows so that they can pour 100% of their energy into producing high-quality work.

Some projects will inevitably be more difficult than others. However, processes like sharing files or submitting timesheets should require minimal effort.

Employee engagement tools

Did you know 47% of employees have quit a job (and 57% have considered it) when it negatively impacted their well-being? On average, it costs 50-60% of an employee’s salary to replace them if they do. 

Your bottom line shouldn’t be the only reason to care about employees. Just because they’re handing in work on time doesn’t guarantee they’re engaged or happy.

Employee engagement tools allow you to check on your employees as people first. Whether it’s 1-on-1s, surveys, or tangible data, any glimpse into the mental health of the people you work with helps everyone involved.

Recommended tools

• Hubstaff: An employee experience solution for managing burnout, rewarding peak performance, identifying productive apps, and balancing meeting and focus time.
• Officevibe: Employee survey platform with performance reviews, feedback and recognition features, and engagement metrics.

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Knowledge management tools

Whether you manage an in-office or remote team, there will be times when employee engagement simply isn’t possible. People will always have questions, but what isn’t guaranteed is that someone will always be around to answer them.

Having a knowledge management tool addresses this problem. Keep important process documentation and frequently asked questions in one accessible location so team members can quickly refer to them anytime they have questions. This will make work so much easier for everyone.

Recommended tools

• Notion: Knowledge management platform with documentation, basic task management, and wiki features.
• Evernote: Powerful note-taking app with templates, documentation tools, and a web clipper that lets you quickly save articles and web pages to your account.

Communication tools

Whether you’re remote, hybrid, or in-office, no business can function without strong communication. A good communication platform will allow employees to effortlessly talk to teammates, learn about one another, and share memes (because that’s also part of the employee experience).

Video meetings, which should be kept to a minimum, should also be straightforward. If your team has to figure out how or where to join a call before it’s even started, you’ve already wasted a lot of time. Do your team a huge favor by including a reliable video conferencing tool in your tech stack.

Recommended tools

• Slack: Instant messaging platform with file sharing, voice and video calling, and multiple integrations.
• Zoom: Video conferencing tool that supports team meetings, webinars, messaging, and voice calls through the phone.

Workforce management tools

Remote companies rely on employee monitoring software to compensate for the physical absence of employees.

This also means that responsibilities like tracking hours and preparing timesheets are often placed on employees’ shoulders. Managers will have to allot time for budgeting and paying employees, too.

No one wants to spend energy on these tasks when they could be doing more meaningful work, though. Thankfully, there are workforce management tools that can automate them.

Recommended tools

• Hubstaff: Workforce management solution that automates admin processes with time tracking, productivity, timesheet management, invoicing, payroll, and reporting tools.
• Toggl Track: Time tracking tool with basic reporting, project budgeting, and billing rates.

What employee experience technology do you use?

In 2023, there’s no reason for companies to provide suboptimal employee experience. While internal processes and employee guidelines will cover a large part of it, having good employee experience technology makes everything drastically easier.

Your employee experience tech stack doesn’t have to be permanent. If it works well now, that’s good. But you may find that as your team evolves, your needs will change too. Adding or removing tools from your stack is okay as you’re working with your team to figure things out.

With all of that said, it’ll take some time before you figure out what your employees need (and want) to work at their best. You’ll know you’re successful when every team member is happy and getting things done with minimal roadblocks.