How to Create a Better Employee Experience with Calendar Integration
The faster a company grows, the more difficult it can be to keep employees engaged.A positive company culture is important for companies of all sizes because it builds a sense of belonging and reduces staff turnover. It helps motivate employees and motivated employees can achieve more both for the business and for their personal development.
How to Create a Better Employee Experience with Calendar Integration
Jeremy Bourhis
The faster a company grows, the more difficult it can be to keep employees engaged.
A positive company culture is important for companies of all sizes because it builds a sense of belonging and reduces staff turnover. It helps motivate employees and motivated employees can achieve more both for the business and for their personal development. Employee engagement rests on every member of the team feeling valued and on giving them all the tools they need to do their work efficiently.
In a small company, it’s easy to build a positive company culture and for management to interact with their teams regularly. However, as a company grows and new employees join the team, it becomes increasingly difficult to preserve this culture.
In recent years, new communication and information technologies have revolutionized HR. They’re now critical in building a strong relationship between employers and their staff. These technological advances have helped to make employees’ jobs more straightforward, giving them more control over their work, and providing them with learning tools to develop their skills.
HR departments commonly use video conferencing services, applicant tracking systems (ATS), absence management software, online learning platforms, and interview scheduling software.
Calendar sync helps distributed teams
More and more employees are working from home. Studies have proven that this is great for productivity and employee morale, but it can make communicating with colleagues complicated.
Connecting your HR software to your users’ calendars allows for automatic, real-time updates when changes are made on the software or directly on the calendars. This means that no matter when or where changes are made, everyone’s calendars update simultaneously. This is especially useful to share absences in real-time or when booking meetings.
If an office-based employee needs to book a meeting for a colleague in the field, synced calendars mean that there’s no need for a phone call to find out when they’re free – the person booking the meeting can see their availability straight from the software. This means that even if the other employee is in another time zone, meetings on their behalf can be booked without worrying about disturbing them. Handy if you have telemarketers booking appointments on behalf of your sales team.
Having everyone’s calendars update in real time means that there’s less of a risk of double-booking and everyone is always kept informed about events. It doesn’t matter if your team works in the same office or hundreds of miles apart – when they’re calendar connected, everyone’s schedules are kept in sync.
Streamlining staff training
Onboarding new employees is one of the most effective ways for a company to share and build its company culture. Training helps employees buy into what the company is doing, and developing their skills will provide them with new career opportunities. However, the bigger a an organization, the harder it becomes to a find time and a place that works for trainees and trainers.
Most companies pick a day and a time that works for the trainer, and ask employees to attend. But prior commitments can get in the way.
When employees are calendar connected, the training manager can see everyone’s schedules and pick a time when everyone is available. This means that employees don’t have to rejig their schedule to fit it around training – the training schedule fits around them.
Managing absences made easy
Submitting and managing absences requests can be a real hassle. Most absence management systems will require team members to log onto a separate application in order to enter their absences. Once the absence is accepted they would need to create calendar events to notify their colleagues. This type of process interrupts workflows and simply gets in the way.
Smart HR software allow managers and employees to manage their absences directly from their calendars through calendar sync. Calendar notifications keep the managers updated and employees don’t need to duplicate the event on their work calendars.
Improving teamwork
Giving employees greater control over what they do is one of the best ways to encourage loyalty, happiness, and productivity. When an employee’s calendar is connected to HR software, everything they do can be managed from their calendar instead of a dozen different programs. This is the kind of gain that can change the entire employee experience.
For a large company, getting everyone calendar connected can be a real challenge, though. There will always be someone who misses the invitation email or accidentally denies the authorization.
With Cronofy’s Enterprise Connect, everyone and everything on an organization’s calendar domain can benefit from calendar sync in an instant. There’s no need for invitational emails or waiting for someone to get setup.
Engaged employees are happy employees
The easier software is to use, the more likely employees are to embrace it and benefit from it. When software is complicated or offer a poor user experience, it puts them off and that leads to dissatisfaction. This then means that instead of saving time and money and increasing employee retention, a company could actually end up losing staff and damaging its culture. This makes it worth investing in a more user-friendly software.
A good employee experience is the key to a low staff turnover, increased employee satisfaction, and a faster-growing company.
Find out how calendar integration can improve your employee experience – book your demo today!
