Employee experience has become a key metric to determine the sustainability and growth of an organization in the modern business world. In this article, we explore seven ways in which business process management (BPM) helps you enhance your employee experience.
Business process management helps business leaders transform their business processes and operations. It streamlines the process workflows and business functions to the core, improving overall operational efficiency and productivity.
Along with these tangible transformations, it also helps stimulate an intangible business element that is critical to the success of any organization - employee experience.
Employee experience is defined as the journey an employee takes with your organization that includes cultural, physical, and technological environments. Building a positive employee experience induces a culture of happiness and high performance within your workforce.
'The way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers' - Richard Branson
While there are a lot of reasons why you should consider improving the employee experience in your organization, here are a few that will have you startled:
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Disengaged employees cost the country between $450 billion to $550 billion per year
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Productivity shoots up by 20% when your employees are happy
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Companies with better employee experience outperform the S&P 500 by up to 122% points
Your employees are an important part of your business processes. Their daily activities highly depend on the established processes of your business. Hence, managing and improving these processes will ultimately affect the performance and attitude of your workforce.
Here are seven ways in which business process management can help you enhance your employee experience:
BPM Boosts Transparency
Business processes are complex structures and workflows that contain more than one of these elements - teams, functions, tasks, activities, procedures, systems, etc. At an organizational level, these things are bound to entangle.
Many things can go wrong, such as inaccurate documentation, improper mapping of process workflows, and lack of transparency due to the latter issues.
Business process management ensures your processes are accurately discovered, mapped, documented, and analyzed. Every nook and corner of your processes are screened and analyzed to ensure it is properly documented. This naturally results in radical transparency of your business processes. When your processes are transparent, your workforce flourishes due to proper accountability and responsibility assigned to every employee.
BPM Enables Accountability Within Your Employees
Accountability is a direct result of transparency in your business processes led by business process management. But how does this concern your employees?
Imagine a situation when an employee drops the ball - say she does not process an invoice on time. In this case, the employee might choose not to report this error, which may cause mayhem in your accounts system. With proper process mapping and analysis, you can get to the core of the error without having to rely on your employees' reporting.
BPM ensures there is transparency within your systems so that no one can hide anything. There cannot be blame games and finger-pointing. This sense of accountability in your employees makes them feel responsible for their duties, resulting in better performance and efficiency.
BPM Helps Eliminate Redundancies with Automation
Business process management as a practice also includes process automation - using technology to automate complex, redundant, and clerical processes. There are processes in every business structure that can function without minimal to no human interference. For example, customer ticket allocation, resume processing, data extraction, and data backups.
While human brains cannot be replaced, technology has allowed us the luxury of automating some of the tasks that do not need the human touch. Besides, these redundant tasks and clerical activities are more harmful to your employee experience as they tend to promote lethargy and underperformance. You can use the same amount of time and intelligence of your employees spent on these repetitive tasks for much better and productive activities.
When you automate such processes, your employees can focus their energy and talent on more critical and challenging tasks. According to a 2018 survey, 1 in 3 professionals cites boredom as their main reason to leave their jobs. Hence, to ensure you create a positive employee experience, you must challenge your employees with creative and stimulating roles. Automation can help you retain the productivity of your processes, as well as that of your employees.
It Fosters Creativity
Business process management enables automation to free up the time of your employees for more challenging tasks. BPM also ensures there are transparency and accountability in the system, leading to fewer conflicts and errors.
With a lot less to worry about, your employees can now focus on more high-priority and creative activities. When challenged appropriately, they can put there energy and mind in building more innovative, effective, and efficient ways to execute your process activities. These challenges ensure that your employees are engaged and happy.
It Boosts Productivity
One of the key motivators for businesses to practice business process management is to increase overall productivity. BPM is a facilitator of discovering, measuring, optimizing, and automating business processes.
When your processes are efficient and automated, your employees can focus their time and energy on other priorities. This automatically leads to reduced waste of time and effort, as well as increased productivity. Seeing the productive outcomes of their work makes them happy - it is a cycle of productivity.
Increases Data Accessibility
Data accessibility across the organization is a common challenge in modern businesses. Data is everywhere, and data is the new oil. It is of primary importance to a business, but handling it is a task. Business process management ensures your data systems are streamlined and accessible across the business.
But how does this impact your employee experience? Data accessibility helps with transparency, accountability, and productivity. These are directly proportional to your employee experience score. Hence, data accessibility is necessary for your business to perform better.
It Enhances Work-Life Balance
This is one of the most critical ways in which BPM enhances your employee experience. Your employees are humans - they crave social connection, personal boundaries, and of course- some time off to lay low.
When your processes are mismanaged and out of control, they directly affect the performance of your business. This takes a toll on your employees, making them work late, work on the weekends, cancel their pre-planned vacations, and not get quality time with friends and family. These repercussions are bound to affect their performance at work.
Instead of paying this heavy price, it is better to manage your business operations with BPM techniques to ensure everything works smoothly. Business process management streamlines your operational workflows and enhances the work-life balance of your employees so that they live balanced, active, and healthy lives - and help flourish your business too!
Conclusion
Employees are the first customers of your business. Hence, you must provide the most satisfying experience possible for these customers. Business process management is a small but impactful catalyst in the long and continuous journey of improving your employee experience - so use it wisely!
Explore the opportunity of improving your employee experience by managing your business processes with this simple yet effective program - connect with us today.
