REBA Inside Track: Now is not the time to lose innovation momentum
There’s no two ways about it, innovation in the world of work owes a lot of its current headway to the pandemic. The crisis forced organisations to rapidly change and adopt new ways of working that all centred around the dreaded ‘T’ word; technology.
The urgency to transform and evolve has somewhat passed, but now is not the time to lose momentum and stagnate. As REBA’s recent article on the future of work uncovered, technology is going to play a key role in the coming years, and if firms want to outlast the skills crisis, the war for talent or simply improve recruitment and retention amid the cost of living crisis, they will need to step up to the digital plate.
An element that will be most impacted by technology is the employee experience, which is undergoing a digital transformation as a direct result of the pandemic. With the rise of hybrid working and the emerging trend of borderless offices with remote employees across the UK, or even the globe, it’s fair to say technology is the glue holding it all together. But if this was implemented in a hurry back in 2020, it’s worth revisiting, as a cumbersome solution may be a hindrance to the experience.
And there are other benefits to updating any bodge job tech solutions, such as improved data collection. Connected tools and products can make farming data an easy task, providing insights that can influence multiple aspects of the workplace, including identifying gaps in your reward and benefits strategy. Indeed, a robust reward and benefits package could be the difference between retaining, attracting and losing key skills in the future.
An offshoot from this is total reward statements and their relationship with data. Total rewards are a powerful tool in recruitment and retention, especially during the current cost of living crisis, as they create greater awareness of the employer’s investment. But one of the only ways to create such a statement is through high quality data, sourced from either a benefit provider’s platform or a third-party file such as payroll, which will give employees a way to understand what they are really getting.
Indeed, reward and benefits are increasingly reliant on technology to provide data insights, and direction as to what is missing, what works well and what needs to be changed. With technology and data influencing so many aspects of the employee experience, reward and benefits professionals need to maintain the momentum from the pandemic and get ahead of the game when it comes to technology adoption.
