Is Digital Transformation the Key to a Happier and Healthier Workforce?
Are your employees happy?
Well, the bitter reality is that the majority of US workers dread their jobs for a variety of reasons. These include an overbearing workload, personal issues, and financial stress factors, among others.
With today’s workforce directly plagued by anxiety, depression, and mental stress, it can be tough to get the most out of your team when they’re battling just to get through the day.
In addition to suboptimal productivity, the likelihood of workplace mistakes also goes up when your employees aren’t in the best frame of mind. Vital figure mismatches can result in huge tax compliances issues, while profile misfiling can lead to an unreliable customer database.
Therefore, it is important that your business starts to do more to safeguard your most important resource i.e., human personnel by tapping into some of the health benefits of digital transformation at the workplace.
In this article, we’ll be discussing how digital transformation is the key to a happier and healthier workforce, including real-life use cases.
Let’s get started.
1. Content Intelligence to Ease Workloads
Are your employees drowning in iterative tasks?
According to a Statista survey, 39% of North American workers pinpoint enormous workloads as their biggest source of stress at work. Consequently, it’s likely the case that many of your employees believe they’re going above and beyond for the job, and are frequently stressed out because of it.
Increased workloads often stem from repetitive non-automated business processes.
If you have a rigorous customer onboarding procedure, for example, where your employees physically extract data from various document formats, it’s likely staff don’t look forward to this part of the job.
Repetitive manual data entry tasks such as these are often mundane and boring, because employees have to do the same thing over and over, which really doesn’t excite a lot of employee engagement when on the task.
To decrease workloads and the accompanying pressure, your business could channel some of today’s vital digital transformation trends and technologies to automate huge parts of your workflow.
In particular, you could turn to AI-powered document processing to ease the manual remediation burden on human staff.
Now instead of your workers having to spend hours on end hand typing information into your CRM, they can do it all a lot quicker with content intelligence platforms.
Such software solutions enable the automatic extraction and classification of various file formats through machine learning.
As an example, one bank was able to process 3.6 million legacy documents, when it was previously contemplating manual processing after a system upgrade.
A process that would have taken months of human effort, and a huge mental toll, was completed in weeks with the AI tool doing most of the work, thereby illustrating the health benefits of digital transformation at the workplace.
2. Digital On-site Clinics for Preventative Care
How many work hours do you lose to sick leaves?
According to a JOEM study, absences due to illnesses cost your business an average work time loss of 6.55% per year.
This translates to a productivity loss of over 6 hours assuming an average workweek of about 45 hours, with the numbers painting an astonishing picture as the size of your workforce goes up.
Moreover, employees who work through illness are generally unable to reach their full productivity potential, a concept which the Journal of Issues in Nursing terms as “presenteeism.” This necessitates a lot of employee monitoring work on your part as the manager.
To reduce disease-enforced absences and presenteeism, your business could incorporate a small-scale, on-demand clinic to offer preventive care.
This on-site facility should be powered by the latest digital transformation trends in healthcare, including a simple EHR system to automate data entry and collection of unstructured data related to employee’s medical histories.
Additionally, wearable medical devices at work can help individuals better track their biodata, therefore enabling your employees to take charge of their own health.
Custom Ink is a great example of why digital transformation is the key to a happier and healthier workforce. This apparel customizer assembled a digital clinic for its team, including a virtual doctor available around the clock.
The clinic offers both physiological and psychological support, among other health benefits of digital transformation at the workplace. As a result, the company has reduced absenteeism and increased productivity through preventative care.
3. E-learning to Improve Job Satisfaction
Are you certain your employees are happy in their roles?
The probability that they aren’t is quite significant, going by a Conference Board survey which states that 46% of the US workforce confesses job dissatisfaction.
When your workers feel unfulfilled in their positions, they’re less motivated to put in a good word for your company to their social circles.
Moreover, they’re likely to leave for apparently greener pastures. If you’ve been scratching your head about a huge turnover rate in a certain position, dissatisfaction may be the root of the problem.
Therefore, your business should consider today’s artificial intelligence trends, and specifically tap into e-learning solutions to improve satisfaction levels.
Intelligent learning management systems (LMS) achieves that in a number of ways. First, by offering reward programs and certificates, LMS platforms acknowledge hard-working staff and give them recognition.
Secondly, LMS systems can be used to develop employee skills further and provide opportunities for innovation, collaboration, and cross-training.
Finally, you can use various e-learning software to map out possible career progression paths to motivate staff by illustrating growth opportunities.
The role of LMS systems in job satisfaction and the health benefits of digital transformation at the workplace are further substantiated via a study by the University of Taipei.
Researchers established a link between improved satisfaction levels and e-learning systems, as long as there was a good organizational learning culture in place.
Conclusion
Unhappy employees are detrimental to your business.
They not only cultivate a hostile work environment but also impede productivity in many other ways including:
- Procrastination
- Morale degradation
- Poor quality control
- Injuries by neglect
- Tainting brand reputation
Additionally, unhealthy and unmotivated employees add to your headaches as a manager through absenteeism and presenteeism.
Therefore, you might want to embrace digitization initiatives as digital transformation is the key to a happier and healthier workforce.
Via content intelligence, e-learning systems, and digital workplace clinics, your business can unlock the many health benefits of digital transformation at the workplace.
You can reduce stress levels by automating iterative chores, and improve satisfaction with e-learning systems, and ensure workers are in prime productive shape with preventative healthcare.