HR and IT…Allies for Great Employee Experience

IT must take more of an active role in partnering with HR to develop policies that align workplace tech and user/roles and responsibilities. Whether it's creating policies for remote workers or it's job descriptions incorporating user accountability, HR and IT must partner for these to be in sync and help the business get the ROI that they make in people and the workplace technology.

For example, remote working is something that most major corporations are integrating with their worker policies. So how do we allow workers to stay connected and productive? First, we need to understand that there are typically different templates of a remote worker. There might be workers that are designated to be in roles that work from home full-time, there are workers that work from home with a pre-arranged cadence such as days they don't have childcare, and of course, there are those workers that are given the flexibility to work remotely at their discretion. 

Depending on their role in each one of these templates, they'll have different tech needs and require different sets of business-provided services such as a home computer and sufficient internet access. Creating expectations for these differences is important.  Doing so will enable both IT and HR to provide for a great worker experience in each case, as well as service and maintain each configuration accordingly.

I also believe that with the proliferation of technology in our workplace, the time has come for workers to have skin in the game. What does that mean? Quite simply, that all job descriptions that workers accept should include responsibilities around learning and using the technology tools that are being rolled out. The investment in these tools is definitely intended to make users more productive, make it easier to store and safeguard mindshare and to impact the bottom line. But it's also creating benefits for workers to be more creative, be a part of a better culture and leverage digital tools to be more flexible and thus create a better work-life balance. 

So if everyone can benefit, let's give everyone accountability. It's a two-way street.