Elevate your organization with Oracle ME, the employee experience solution your workforce needs

Work has changed, and with it, so have employees’ expectations for how work gets done. Now, with The Great Resignation in full swing, organizations must ignite their employee experience to not just attract but retain their talent. Workers hold the reigns on the direction and speed of innovation required to support the future of employee experience. The challenge that organizations are facing is that the future of employee experience is now.

While the past couple of years has been hard for most people, our individual experiences have been unique. We have different family situations, work needs, and personal challenges. For me, I’ve felt disconnected from my team working from home, and have struggled with my work-life balance. I’ve spent time evaluating what is important to me, and I’ve looked to my organization for guidance on how I can be most effective in my job. Whether your experience mirrors mine or not, each of us is more productive and satisfied in our jobs when our unique experiences are recognized and respected.  

I can summarize what we’ve learned the last few years into three key lessons.

• Every employee is unique with their own needs, goals, and ways of getting things done.
• Personal priorities are driving decisions about when, how, and why people work.
• Organizations—and specifically HR—need to deliver a more personalized employee experience if they want to drive productivity and satisfaction.

What employees want, and how you can give it to them

In the not-too-distant past, a forward-looking employee experience meant ping pong tables and unlimited snacks in the breakroom. Expectations are different today. Workers are not looking for free pizza at lunch or the ability to drop off dry cleaning at work. Instead, they seek flexibility and guidance to succeed and grow. 88% of employees have re-defined what’s important to them, with work-life balance, mental health, growth, and flexibility as top priorities.

Employees are telling us how we can support them in meaningful ways, including:

• “Make my experience more about me” -- Use everything you know about my circumstances, needs, and aspirations to personalize my tasks and interactions.
• “Show me the way” -- Guide me through complicated processes based on what is relevant to me. Think ahead about what information I’ll need along the way to support my success.
• “Keep me connected” -- Help me build better relationships with my leadership and network with my peers.

Reimagining the employee experience to meet the needs of today’s workforce is no longer optional but necessary to retain your talent. Workers with a positive experience have 16 times the engagement level of employees with a negative experience, and they are eight times more likely to want to stay at a company.

Many technology vendors are offering organizations a quick fix to improve their employee experience through independent, top-layer platforms that don’t natively connect to their HCM solution. HR can deliver deeply personalized experiences only through an employee experience solution that operates as a unified solution with the organization’s core HCM—because it is supported by the complete knowledge of the employee’s history, location, role, skills, performance, relationships, and more. Additionally, a unified solution owned by HR offers data integrity, security, and agility that cannot be matched by independent, top-layer platforms, but are required to manage in the new work environment.

An employee experience built for me

Oracle ME is a complete employee experience platform that allows organizations to deliver tailored experiences that help employees be more productive and successful. As part of Oracle Cloud HCM, Oracle ME delivers personalized employee experiences with targeted communication, recommends relevant tasks with step-by-step contextual guidance, enables stronger connections with managers and peers, and provides personal service in the ways employees prefer.

Oracle ME is different from stand-alone productivity and workflow tools because it’s natively built in Oracle’s end-to-end HCM solution. It uses knowledge from comprehensive workforce data to deliver the right guidance based on an understanding of every individual from their personal details, role, location, goals, activities, interests, and other attributes.

Oracle ME extends across Oracle applications, connects to third-party systems, and functions in the flow of work via email, SMS, browser, and collaboration tools, allowing employees to manage their experience wherever they work.

HR teams can configure Oracle ME without IT support, making it easier to manage changes to employee experiences and reflect their company’s unique needs and culture.

Let’s take a closer look at what you can do with Oracle ME

1. Make it easy for employees to find and complete the most important actions for their career, work, and life with personalized, contextual, step-by-step guidance. 

Oracle Journeys provides step-by-step workflow guidance to help workers complete professional and personal activities such as onboarding, exploring career opportunities, transferring to a new role, getting married, having a baby, or other tasks, all in one experience.

Recent investments help workers make informed decisions by surfacing personally relevant instructions, training, and analytics along their guided journey.

For example, a manager completing a promotion journey for an employee in a different country may be guided to review a policy document to ensure the promotion is compliant with local regulations. With contextual analytics, the manager can determine an appropriate pay increase based on similar roles in that region. 

2. Extend a better employee experience to every interaction across the enterprise

Oracle Journeys is open and extensible, delivering experiences beyond HR across all Oracle Cloud applications and third-party solutions. Oracle Process Automation provides low code configuration options to support the automation of workflow to third-party solutions to ensure one single experience for your workers.

3. Foster continuous engagement between employees and managers by giving every worker a voice and every manager the tools to act

People want their leaders to listen to them and take action that improves their well-being.

Oracle Touchpoints helps managers continuously survey and track employee sentiment and take suggested actions, including scheduling check-ins, adding discussion topics to upcoming one-on-ones, providing feedback, or celebrating an employee’s work success or milestones. Notifications can link directly to the recommended task to save managers time and encourage immediate action. 

Besides giving feedback, employees can also take an active role in the employee engagement center, which gives them one place to define and organize topics for upcoming one-on-ones, review meeting history and pulse survey trends, and act on suggestions from their manager or HR. 

4. Design communications to keep your workforce informed, support change, and reinforce organizational culture. 

To communicate with workers today, most HR teams rely on corporate communications teams or use third-party tools that don’t connect to their workforce data—both of which add complexity and time. 

Oracle HCM Communicate is the first and only solution purpose-built for HR to create, send, and track personalized employee communications. It is connected to your workforce data so you can easily create and send personalized communications directed to the individuals and groups they are most relevant to, based on simple to complex combinations of workforce data with follow-up action.

For example, you could target those working in a specific city who are within their first two years of employment and have not enrolled in a specific learning course. Specific targeting cuts down on noise and makes communications more relevant, effective, and actionable.

You can also measure engagement and easily retarget or set up ongoing communications to drive more action. 

5. Nurture connections among employees for greater workplace belonging and development. 

Great relationships at work encourage people to stay. However, with remote and hybrid work arrangements, people struggle to stay engaged with their co-workers and create the type of connections that help them feel like they belong, leading to new opportunities for personal or professional growth.   

Oracle Connections is an interactive workforce directory and organization chart that fosters deeper connections among colleagues by making it easier to find and connect with people. This solution helps individuals quickly find colleagues with specific skills, interests, or experiences to easily build their network and relationships.

6. Support your workforce with consistent, intelligent service, accessible wherever they are.  

Employees expect immediate access to information and responsive operational support. However, it’s hard to keep up with service requests, especially with ongoing changes in safety protocols, organizational structures, and remote or hybrid working models.

Oracle HR Help Desk is a service request management solution that makes it easy for all workers to get the answers they need and for HR and service centers to easily track cases to closure, without the exposure risk to sensitive data.

Beyond service inquiries, Oracle Digital Assistant provides a conversational interface for workers to get immediate answers to questions, and easily complete transactions directly through their voice or text.

The future of employee experience is “me”

Enhancing employee experience will be a priority for 92% of organizations over the next 3 years, compared to just 52% saying it was a priority before the pandemic. This is great news since employees aren’t willing to wait long for change.

Workers expect a modern experience at work like they’re used to in their personal lives—one that is intuitive, contextual, and personalized. An experience like this is powerful, because when employees feel seen, heard, supported, and connected, they are engaged, satisfied, creative and productive.

See Oracle ME in action at Oracle Live.

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