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Organizations understand the importance of investing in tools that support remote working and collaboration, according to Reworked’s 2023 State of the Digital Workplace.
They’re also striving to make those tools accessible through a cohesive, integrated environment with the needs of the employee at the center, all with the goal of creating a strong employee experience (EX).
Enter: the employee experience platform, a digital tool meant to create a seamless and engaging workplace environment by uniting elements like HR systems, communication tools, recognition platforms, learning management systems and more.
As the digital landscape continues to evolve, so too does the realm of EX platforms. The ever-changing needs of the modern workforce and advances in technology are driving trends that will shape the market for years to come.
Biggest Trends & Issues Impacting the EX Platform Market
What transformative trends are currently steering the course of the employee experience platform market?
Remote and Hybrid Work
The number one issue shaping the EX platform market right now is at home and hybrid work, according to Josh Bersin, global industry analyst and founder and CEO of the Josh Bersin Company. “So people want tools that help improve productivity from any location.”
In response, said Bersin, platforms have developed a myriad of features, including:
- Location services.
- Remote video/meeting tools.
- Easy-to-use remote scheduling tools.
- Information chatbots.
He also pointed to various forms of low-code development tools, “so managers and remote HR people can build onboarding and easy to use employee support applications.”
Productivity and Burnout
“The second big issue,” said Bersin, “is productivity and burnout — companies are desperately working to simplify work, reduce the [number] of systems, consolidate all the EX apps.”
And pandemic-era work culture seemed to underscore this delicate balance between employee well-being and output. Remote work, while offering flexibility, blurred the lines between professional and personal life, leading to the “always-on” work mentality.
Employee experience platforms are strategically positioned to address these concerns by consolidating applications and streamlining workflows, providing some much-needed respite from the dreaded app fatigue. And ultimately, Bersin believes artificial intelligence (AI) will be part of solving this issue.
Related Article: Too Many Tools Are Stifling Productivity
Data-Driven Insights
Despite other big trends impacting the EX platform market, data-driven insights and analytics also deserve our attention, said Chantel Wilson Chase, director of quality analytics and reporting at Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
“As a data scientist, there are oftentimes we just look at the data very superficially without diving in,” she explained. “For example, companies are now filled with countless dashboards filled with metrics and KPIs. We flood our companies with this information. We give leaders numbers when what they really want is insight.”
Chase said when she started her career, she had to gather new data to have data. Today, it’s the opposite. “I now have to decipher what the critical data is and throw out the garbage data. We are inundated with information — and this necessitates a different form of data analysis.”
We (collectively) have not adjusted to the data overload, she added — a conundrum leaving us looking in multiple directions rather than keeping our eye on the prize. “The prize being happy, content employees,” she said.
Artificial Intelligence
The big emerging trend to keep an eye on, said Bersin, is artificial intelligence — “information bots, recommendation engines and easy-to-understand communication tools for broadcast and two-way employee feedback.”
EX platforms have become a large independent product segment now, he added, and the big platforms are all becoming integrated platforms for employee communications, networking, time scheduling and training.
“What AI is starting to do is power the back end so they can produce Q&A type responses to many of the ongoing employee questions and issues that used to be on portals,” he said. “It’s going to massively disrupt the market and make it less and less necessary to ‘find the app’ or ‘find the answer to a question.’”
Chase also sees promise in AI for solving the issue of countless dashboards filled with metrics. “AI-powered data visualization techniques could transform complex data into intuitive representations. Clustering, trend analysis, and anomaly detection are ways to make it easier to digest data at a glance," she said.
Related Article: What HR Professionals Need to Know Before Investing in AI
Real-Time Sentiment Analysis
Machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) are both subsets of AI that could shape the future of EX platforms, especially when it comes to real-time employee sentiment analysis and predictive analytics.
“EX platforms could integrate sentiment analysis capabilities more seamlessly to gather real-time feedback and measure employee sentiment,” Chase explained. “Leveraging natural language processing and machine learning lifts potential issues to the forefront more quickly. If we leverage these capabilities effectively. These processes are very fluid and are always evolving.”
The goal of employee experience platforms, she added, should be to help supply information in such as way that it becomes easier for the company to retain its employees.
“And this second part is very important — retain employees not because they HAVE to stay but because they WANT to stay, they want to contribute, they want to grow, and that staying at Company X positively impacts their lives. If the platform can do that, I’m on board.”
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However, she was quick to add, it’s never been a specific platform that achieves that. “It has always been the people who engage in the data enough to understand and translate it to stakeholders — specifically to stakeholders who want to make it better.”
What Will the EX Platform Market Look Like in 5 Years?
The future of the employee experience platform market appears positive.
“I see the EX market as a huge growth area,” said Bersin. Typical back-end vendors are not competing well, he added, predicting fast growth for certain companies, including ServiceNow, Firstup, Microsoft Viva and tools like Zoom (with Workvivo).
Ultimately, however, Chase said we need to be more in touch with the needs of our colleagues.
“Creating an environment that stimulates thinking, gives a sense of value and worth, and generally makes people feel like they didn't waste their day is really timeless — and yet the market always misses that very basic need,” she said.
