The power of convenience in HR transformation

Why is convenience so important to employees?

Outside of work, we’ve become accustomed to literally clicking for action. Ordering food, experiences, services, whatever we desire. It’s made us impatient and unforgiving. If Pizza X can’t deliver in 10 minutes, Pizza Y can and so they win the order.

Inside of work, we’re starting to expect this same rapid response to our requests, whether to log on and be fully operational within seconds or to access learning and career opportunity portals.

The move to hybrid working has fueled this. Most in recent years have experienced changes to the way they work dues to lockdowns, and many have continued to work this way, through choice or at the behest of employers.

The psychology of convenience arises here. If we’re online at home, we expect a consumer experience. And, there is a lot that has to happen behind the scenes to create this “convenience”, but for the user comes a learning curve – and many, by default, are reluctant or perhaps even fear change.

For many, learning new systems is inconvenient because it’s not core to their job function, and so in the short-term, slows them down. This creates frustrations and a drop in engagement.

Once manual processes are now virtual. Support teams are now hidden behind ticketing systems. The perceived immediacy of the human touch is gone.

A 300+ page “help guide” on the intranet. So, employees did what was easiest: they called and emailed the Share Plans team directly because their contact details were in the company directory! This resulted in a chronic, overwhelming volume of calls, which meant the team couldn’t focus on their day jobs and had to establish a rota to deal with the influx of contacts.

To solve this problem, I had to make the solution easier than picking up the phone or firing off an email.

The answer was to make the help page into a wall of short, animated videos, showing the answers to the most asked questions. Instead of having to find the number, call the department, wait on hold in a queue and explain the problem, an employee could pick a topic and have an answer from a video in thirty seconds.

It suddenly became much easier to pick and choose an FAQ video than to even write an email. This outcome was only possible because of the statistical analysis of contacts, detailed scripting, and development of the videos, having obtained the buy-in of the right stakeholders.

No corners were cut, and I didn’t give in to any ‘convenient’ options that appeared but worked it through to make the end user’s experience easy.

The outcome? The volume of calls and emails to the team dropped over 80%. This not only meant employees were getting the answers they needed easily, but also the Share Plans team could do their regular jobs more effectively.

All this was achieved because it was made easier to do the right thing; think how this approach could affect your projects!