How to Improve Employee Experience in The Digital Workplace

Digital transformation isn’t just happening, it’s inevitable. Companies are increasingly going where the talent is distributed and hiring globally. Remote work has allowed people to work for any company without geographic limitations. More and more employees are now meeting coworkers online.

As the Great Resignation leads to more employee shuffling, it’s easy for people to join a company and not feel like they belong. Meanwhile, corporations are struggling to retain valuable staff. In a January 2022 survey of 175 CEOs, most said “talent” was the biggest challenge they currently faced as a CEO. You can’t talk about retention without talking about the employee experience—an area where 30% of CEOs feel their organization lacks shareholder trust.

The best way to feel connected to the organization is building relationships at work. That means feeling seen and heard by your peers, and being able to express who we really are. Whether you’re in charge of HR or Diversity and Inclusion, stewards of culture at every corporation need to figure out how to bond workers across the company. 

Warmly is a remote culture tool that extends a high-quality employee experience beyond your physical walls and into the digital workplace. Among companies that use our Zoom add-on, new hires ramp up 21% faster in their onboarding process. Getting to know their coworkers faster leads to increased employee satisfaction scores and higher retention.

Find out how our features tackle the three biggest roadblocks to building strong workplace relationships online.

1. Regional Sensitivity 

When everyone works in the same place, it’s easy to bond over things that are happening locally. With coworkers spread out around the globe, things that affect you might be irrelevant to someone living 1000’s of miles away—and vice versa. Regional sensitivity is being aware and respectful of what’s happening in your coworker’s environment.

With Warmly’s add-on for Zoom, users can share their city location, time zones, even the weather where they are, and to see all those things for their coworkers. This allows coworkers to be sensitive when a coworker is calling in after-hours, instead of assuming they’re in the same time zone. Warmly will soon have features that will even pull in local news, holidays and even sports scores. This also enables coworkers to be more sensitive and even provide mutual support in times of conflict or natural disaster.

2. Diversity and Inclusion

Name pronunciation is crucial not only to feeling seen and included in the workplace, but feeling confident and comfortable addressing colleagues who may not share the same cultural background. Our cofounder and CEO struggled working at Google when coworkers would pronounce his name as ‘Max’ instead of the German pronunciation, mahks.

“Our names often have ties to our culture, our families, and our origins,” says Deloitte’s Chief DEI Officer, Kavitha Prabhakar. “Kavitha/ कविता means ‘poem’ in Hindi and represents my mom’s love for the arts.”

“Our names often have ties to our culture, our families, and our origins,” says Deloitte’s Chief DEI Officer, Kavitha Prabhakar.

The Warmly add-on for Zoom allows users to share their name pronunciation in both writing as an audio recording. This way, you can easily mute the person you’re speaking to and listen to a two-second recording of how to say their name before trying to pronounce it yourself. Warmly also works in your email and calendar, so you never have to worry about 

3. Make Connecting Easier

At large companies, many employees are meeting new coworkers every week. The first five minutes of every 30-minute call is spent trying to figure out what people do, what’s a thing about them, how do you connect with them in order to make working together more fun and productive. Part of improving the employee experience is also giving people time back in their workday by skipping all the repetitive introductions and perfunctory small talk by having background information built into their Warmly Nametag. We also offer a helpful organizational chart, so users can easily look up unique and helpful information about their coworkers before and during Zoom calls. 

Humanize the Work Day

Getting to know coworkers should be effortless, not repetitive. With the Warmly add-on for Zoom, people can use personalized profiles to show their individuality at work. Users can upload their passions, hobbies, the latest things they did this weekend, other fun facts about themselves, and even include them as ice breakers to connect with other employees. Warmly also allows users to takes notes tied to the other person’s Zoom account, which is useful for remembering your coworkers’ likes, dislikes, birthdays, or even work anniversary. Employees can even post ‘Happy Birthday’ or ‘Happy Workiversary’ messages to each other—something that makes everyone involved feel good.