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6 Core Pillars of an Elite Employee Experience Platform

The fundamental underlying benefit of a truly amazing employee experience platform is that it needs to be easy to implement, easy to operate, and easy to manage. We talk to organizations on a daily basis that deployed a solution they thought would be transformational, but were disappointed to find that it wasn’t easy to implement or operate, and no one can manage it. Based on these conversations, we developed these six core pillars that sit under the umbrella of a powerful employee experience platform.

Pillar 1: Modern Intranet

The modern intranet is the most visible component of the employee experience platform. The key difference between the modern intranet and the traditional intranets we've come to grudgingly accept is their innate potential.

While a traditional intranet is a content graveyard - one size fits all, static,
not targeted or personalized in any way - a modern intranet is everything but.

It's dynamic because it's so easy to update, it's robust because it's integrated with every system you use, and it's built specifically for each of its thousands of users. Two employees rarely see the same content when they log in, because two employees are rarely the same.

The modern intranet is built to deliver to each individual user, while focusing on the business. It delivers the right content, the right news, and the right information into the hands of each employee. As a result, every person in the organization receives a targeted productivity window that enables them to do their job better, to produce more product, to service more customers, to take part in more meetings.

Pillar 2: Communications Platform

Communications, a communications platform, and a communication strategy is not simply about the business communicating with the employees. It needs to give a voice to every single employee; it has to be operationalized in real time; it has to be multilingual; and it has to be relevant.

The most critical element of a communications platform is multidirectionality. Truly progressive workplace communication enables two-way conversations between the business and the employee, as well as the employee and their peers. It's no longer about pushing information to an audience. It's about generating discussion, enabling commenting and reactions, sharing knowledge. A true communications platform is a productivity and culture driver that should be built into the employee experience platform.

Pillar 3: Collaboration Engine

There are two types of collaboration that employees engage in on an ongoing basis: team-based collaboration and entity-based collaboration.

Team-based collaboration is an ever-present and ongoing persistent collaboration that, in many cases, outlasts the team members themselves. Teams probably rely on a tool like Microsoft Teams, Yammer, or Slack for their team-based collaboration.

In entity-based collaboration, the real focus is on day-to-day teamwork and the applications that employees use to do their jobs. It's about driving a better experience around getting work done, being a pro at process, and bringing together components like milestones or timelines or documents or tasks into a single pane of glass at global scale.

A powerful collaboration enables employees on an employee experience platform to easily do both.

Pillar 4: Content Management System

Content management is typically the first major consideration for organizations when creating a public facing website or extranet.

From our perspective, content reuse is key, and the ability to create content once and distribute to several places using an app-driven interface is incredibly important. The goal is to enable you to create sustainable and reusable content as easily as you could post to Facebook or Twitter from your mobile device, and to do it in any language. In essence, to deliver the right targeted content-based experiences to any employee at any time.

Pillar 5: Enterprise Native Mobility

More and more, we’re working with distributed organizations who have no mechanism to give a voice to or actually interact with their remote or deskless teams.

But those remote and deskless employees represent an important employee population with unique insight into the customer experience. They can not and should not be left out.

A true enterprise native mobile app works across both the iOS and Android platforms, it’s branded and cultivated for your enterprise, and it leverages existing technology in each mobile device including push notifications, GPS, and camera and biometric authentication. The more distributed a user base, the more important native mobility is to centralized content management, regardless of the device it’s consumed on.

Pillar 6: Integration Layer

Your tech stack doesn't include just Office 365 products (which is what most vendors supply integrations for). You need to be able to deliver content and data from all of your systems (Salesforce.com, ServiceNow, Workday, and more).

From our point of view, the integration layer is the tunnel that leads to the single pane of glass experience that we want. It allows us to focus on driving a more robust and more reactive experience for every employee that’s built for them, not necessarily just built for the business.

Well, there you have it. The 6 pillars of an elite employee experience platform. Akumina has all the expertise needed to build one for your organization, and we are here when you want to learn more.

For more information on Employee Experience Platforms check out our guide.