New Technology Tools Can Help Retain Top Talent

In today’s tight talent market, retaining your best employees can be just as important as recruiting promising new ones. A significant amount of staff turnover, or losing a smaller number of valued employees, can keep an organization from achieving its business goals.

Employers may find that investing in employee training and upskilling can be a significant value driver, helping them diversify their capabilities, engage their workforce and boost retention. In addition to traditional methods, such as job shadowing and mentoring, new technologies are providing additional ways to manage and retain employees.

Microlearning

Microlearning provides a quick activity or lesson to train a user on a single item or issue. Typically delivered in short digital video modules and/or games, these activities may be delivered as a series or included as part of training for a specific task or outcome. Microlearning easily fits within an employee’s schedule, because it is easy to use, can be completed in a relatively short amount of time, and offers immediate and practical outcomes.

Learning Experience Platforms

The learning experience platform (LXP) builds on the static resources of the traditional learning management system (LMS) to create a more dynamic and useful user experience. It enables users to add content — corporate learning modules and documents as well as resources from social media and the internet — and make them accessible to other users, who can comment and share. Because the users primarily create and share the content, the format encourages employees to return more often than they do to mandated corporate training modules.

Employee Assistants

Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots can serve as employee assistants, helping workers handle tasks such as finding people, locating resources, navigating administrative processes and other common workplace issues. These tools are especially useful in “enhancing and automating the experience of repeatable tasks,” as Jeff Mike, vice president and head of research ideation for Bersin by Deloitte, said in a SHRM article.

Employee assistants can quickly solve issues that previously consumed large amounts of time and productivity. The assistant can understand requests and questions, and it can often respond with nearly immediate results for simple tasks. For employees who can now waste less time and increase productivity, this technology can lead to higher job satisfaction — a crucial benefit in this job market.

Employee Engagement Platforms

Higher job satisfaction is also the goal behind engagement platforms, which are a forum for regular feedback and coaching, encouragement, learning, competition, participation in team or social activities, personalization, and social recognition.

Engagement platforms offer a number of benefits. By aligning employees with business goals, today’s technology enables recognition by leaders, managers or peers. Unlike traditional manager-driven, top-down gratitude, these forums enable a more extensive social system where employees directly recognize each other. Finally, they provide analytics and reporting that traditional programs cannot deliver.

Flight-risk Analytics

By capitalizing on the vast volume of data generated by an employee’s activity, employee retention technologies can apply analytics to track engagement levels and predict when an employee is considering leaving the organization. Using the data, the employer can intervene early to pinpoint gaps in employee engagement, address issues and help influence employees to stay.

Intelligence provided by data and other AI capabilities can inform retention strategies by predicting flight risks, identifying top performers and determining where the organization can improve engagement for all employees.

Use Technology as a Tool, Not a Crutch

There are concerns that technology will make the employee experience commoditized and depersonalized. It’s important for employers to balance the drive for digitization with the need to ensure that workers are still at the core of talent management.

The key for employers is to adopt technologies aimed at empowering and engaging employees. Leveraging these tools can help everyone make the most of his or her time on the job and can lead to high productivity and satisfaction as well.

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