YSoft Labs Drives Innovation for Higher Employee Engagement in the Future Enterprise

By 2025, more than 70% of the enterprise workforce will be Millennials—and many current workplace tools and practices will be obsolete. The business print systems at the heart of enterprise communications today will be used less and less as ones and zeroes replace paper and ink. Analysts predict the gig economy will supplant the full-time, life-long employee. Who knows what will become of pensions and 401Ks?  Anticipating these changes and inventing smart new solutions is an assignment YSoft Labs takes to heart.
 

A new enterprise needs new technologies to achieve higher employee engagement

 
In the bad old days, onboarding new employees kept the copiers humming, generating files full of signed papers that never went away. The cost of hiring kept rising—in 2016, the average cost to find and sign an average employee reached $4,425, with executives coming in at nearly $15,000 a head. That was the average spend before the first day of work. Those same studies show that depending on the business and the nature of the job, it takes a new hire from three to six months to get totally up to speed. Especially in a gig economy, time to productivity has become a metric that matters to business success.
 

Time to productivity has become a metric that matters to business success

 
YSoft Labs was chartered to imagine and create new products to serve the enterprise of the future. Our latest project is all about what happens after an employee accepts a company’s job offer. We’re working to achieve higher employee engagement by digitizing pre-boarding and on-boarding and to create new user interactions so that employees are effective from the first day on the job. The smart phone in everybody’s pocket makes the perfect way for getting what used to be the paperwork done.
 
But signing the tax forms and figuring out where the bathroom is don’t deliver Return on Investment. There’s a facilities map to master, an org chart to memorize, a work group to meet and greet, a business culture to internalize. There’s a schedule, a hierarchy of colleagues, bosses and bosses’ bosses, dependencies and areas of responsibility. And then, there’s the job one is hired to do. What is it, how’s it done and what does competence look like? All of this takes time to master.


 

The tantalizing white space between candidate selection and the new hire experience

 
As the YSoft Labs’ Managing Partner for Human Resource Management, I am able to bring my experience building teams in large global businesses as an important insight. While a great deal of energy was being spent on new hire acquisition, no one was focused on the journey of the new person after they got hired. We realized we’d hit upon a unique product concept, where enormous value can be delivered in a short space of time.
 
The key idea here is, if you start well it pays off in a big way, in higher employee engagement and much lower attrition.
 
Once the big idea was in place, the team got to work developing a product for pre-boarding and on-boarding new employees. Research and experimentation show that it’s more effective to push information at new hires than to expect them to pull it out themselves. At the same time, YSoft Labs is developing ways to assure the information getting pushed is specifically targeted to the needs of the individual on the receiving end—and where he or she sits in the organization.
 
At the end of the day, the development team concluded that how that information is delivered—User Experience--is hugely important. Once the training mechanisms and principles are established, they form the foundation of ongoing, individualized learning that lasts for the whole term of employment. If equipment, tools or processes change, training happens through a known, trusted channel. If employees change teams or get promoted, the same channel will bring them up to speed on their new jobs. When they retire, too.
 

“Above all, we need to make it interesting for employees to take the journey.”