It’s HR’s role to make company culture happen. We take pride in creating big, ambitious plans to improve the employee experience, from team trips to new benefits to leadership training.
But the truth is small moments define how employees experience HR — much more than these big ideas. Whether employees need to track down the latest travel policy, enroll in healthcare benefits, or simply look up a colleague’s phone number, small moments cause immense frustration when they disrupt the workday.
At Moveworks, our HR team has a strong perspective about what it takes to create a world-class culture. Ultimately, though, I believe we were named the number one Best Place to Work in the Bay Area because we’re dedicated to eliminating the minor inconveniences that make or break the HR experience. Taking the friction out of the workday involves a company-wide commitment with buy-in across every team. And today, I’ll explain three actionable steps you can take to make your workplace the best workplace:
- Shift focus from one-on-one help to self-service resources
- Invest in automation for HR service delivery
- Prevent small issues from becoming big ones with actionable employee comms
Create easy-to-consume resources
One-on-one conversations to fix common issues are well-intentioned. But the best way to make things easier is to help employees help themselves.
By shifting your attention away from individual support and focusing instead on building simple, self-service resources, you’ll have more time to scale those impactful “big idea” initiatives. I speak from experience — going from 70 to 400 employees in less than two years has taught me that HR needs a way to address thousands of questions at once.
Figure 1: When resources are easily understood, employees help themselves.
The thing is, an employee can better understand a clear paragraph that covers a single topic than a hundred-page employee handbook. By organizing resources into an easy-to-consume format and investing in the right tools, employees will be able to pinpoint a specifically relevant snippet of information within a trove of massive documents, all on their own. This way, when an employee asks HR about their paid time-off, paternity leave, or clarifications on the expense policy, there’s a resource that allows them to answer their own question.
Automate routine support issues
HR teams have been tasked with ensuring employees are safe in the face of a fast-moving and seemingly never-ending pandemic. With policies constantly changing, just keeping up is enough of a challenge for a team that’s already spread thin. The idea of building resources to respond to endless questions and requests sounds like an impossibility until you realize that those resources hold the keys to automation.
Figure 2: Answer common questions in seconds with AI.
For years, the sheer complexity of HR service delivery prevented companies from even trying to automate it. That said, the good news is that automated support platforms have become much smarter of late. AI-powered platforms are increasingly able to understand the language employees use to ask for help, including the unique terms and systems found within your particular company. It’s even possible for a bot to pull a personalized solution from resources scattered across dozens of knowledge bases, handbooks, and other documentation.
Now more than ever, it’s crucial to get people the support they need immediately. With automation, you can help set up vaccine bookings, explain return-to-office policies, and answer a multitude of FAQs related to the pandemic in seconds. Not to mention that automation can also help with more conventional duties, like onboarding new employees and setting up a new 401K plan. Being a health services expert wasn’t in our charter, but with AI, we’ve been able to keep up during a time of intense and rapid change.
Communicate proactively
At this point, you’ve made the small moments a lot less frustrating by improving resources and automating support. With this foundation, you can stop issues before they happen by sending actionable employee communications.
The root of many support requests is change. Launching a new 401(k) program is great, for instance, but only if employees know how to enroll. Every time you launch a new system or update a policy, employees will flood your team with questions that could have been prevented.
Figure 3: Send actionable messages to prevent issues before they happen.
To stop the deluge, first, you need a way to give every employee actionable next steps. When my team sends a comm, we give employees the resources they need to complete the task — whether it’s filling out a form, linking to a portal, or reading the latest travel policy — directly in the message.
Second, know that even when employees do read your messages, they’ll inevitably have questions. Here’s where your painstakingly created resources and automation tools step in. An AI-powered chatbot can engage with each employee individually and handle all the follow-ups and back-and-forth on your behalf, surfacing answers, so you don’t have to.
Small moments matter
HR’s role in company culture is to spend thousands of hours onboarding new hires, providing top-notch benefits, and fostering a company culture that empowers everyone. The problem? Employees don’t feel connected to their company. And with the rise of remote and hybrid work — they are literally disconnected from the people, systems, and resources they rely on for support.
That’s why it’s a big deal when minor things take a huge amount of time and effort. The best HR teams will make the pivotal shift to improving the small, but impactful, moments of everyday work. If done well, this means both employees and support teams will spend less time solving support issues and more time on meaningful projects. With the right strategies, you can create a culture where no one sweats the small stuff.
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