It’s a question so familiar to anyone’s been in an interview.

Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?

Only this time, it was asked of the employee experience.

In Gallagher’s latest webinar, in collaboration with LumApps, the session delved into this idea, led by Marc Wright, founder of Simply, and Elise Rostaing, VP EMEA Marketing of LumApps.

Four major trends 

With AI transforming the hiring process, working-from-home becoming a non-negotiable, and pushes to move towards skills-based systems, the employee experience is set to look entirely alien to us by the time 2030 rolls around. In LumApp’s analysis, Elise had found four major trends already emerging:

• Cohesion of employee environment and employees
• AI, specifically the move away from generative AI
• The need to upskill employees
• Fostering community and cohesion

Cohesive employee environments

In the past, HR oversaw monitoring the employee experience, but as that has grown and developed, there needs to be an interdepartmental understanding to cut through to colleagues. Employees no longer have a single-entry point into new comms’ systems, meaning their onboarding is often chaotic and messy.

This wasn’t just Elise’s opinion either, as it was backed by McKinsey’s findings that employees spend 2 hours daily searching for information they need. On top of that, a separate Gartner report found that 70% of employees rate their intranet user experience as difficult.

What is the objective of your platforms?

For Elise, it all came down to the amount of time tasks took and the consistency of user patterns. For example, tracking one user’s data from a knowledge article to a training course to submitting paid time off would show a clear workflow. But if users are going back and forth between the same online spaces, it shows they don’t have a clear understanding of new situations.

Tech needs to give people the tools they need to be as productive as possible.

Trend 1: The need for an Employee Experience Designer

This is where the Employee Experience Designer comes in as an evolution of the internal comms role. This takes us from working with interfaces, apps, and features, and instead mapping out the employee journey incrementally, from the first thing they do in a working day to the moment they clock out.

From that map, you can understand friction points that occur through any typical day and how to smooth them over.

A typical day one

Elise then took us through an example of what this mapping would look like, following a new starter, named Jane.

1. Once Jane gets in, she needs to have a lunch at the company restaurant, but she doesn’t know where it is as she hasn’t completed her onboarding. Because nothing is integrated, this takes around seven clicks to find out where the cafeteria is.
2. When she gets there, she needs to pay with her company card, but it hasn’t been topped up, meaning she has to ask for an advance from the server.
3. After that, when she gets time, she wants to book in a ski holiday but needs to find an HR tool to request that time off. This means navigating through emails from everybody to find the right place.
4. After that, because she manages a team, she then has to validate holiday times separately.
5. Then, she also wants to recognise employees so adds birthdays to the calendar.
6. And after that she has a headache and needs to locate the organisation’s infirmary.

In just a single day, there’s a cavalcade of technical needs that are not readily available in a single space. An employee hub, with a personalised dashboard that enables her to access all the apps is what she needs to complete these tasks more effectively.

In mapping this out, you can work on personas in advance and thereby prioritise what experience is suited for each typology. In Elise’s experience, this included innovation tools that allowed colleagues to use project community groups for consistent communication, instead of the likes of Microsoft Teams, as per their preference.

Trend 2: Rise of agentic AI

The next trend looked at moving away from generative AI and into implementing agentic AI. This is about minimising human intervention on low value tasks; again, the issue of wasting time searching for information. People want the same simplicity at work as they get in their downtime.

Content gardening

A key pain point in communications is content gardening. As communicators know, there’s a massive amount of content that exists, and certainly won’t decrease with the advent of AI. Maintenance and curation is the new key tool.

Often, teams can struggle with contradictory information within the intranet, but with AI tools, you can scan and flag older content and duplicates, as well as suggesting new ideas and activities to replace them.

After some querying in the chat, Elise also explained how you can both take suggestions from the AI software or actively categorise and remove content through one process, whichever best suits your needs.

Sentient analysis

Sentient analysis with AI helps to measure and improve comms by:

• Tracking employee needs
• Evaluating feedback
• Analysing the tone of messages
• Monitoring sentiment trends
• Comparing functionality to market standards

In this way, it creates a more proactive and responsive comms system.

Employees already share so much of how they feel in various online spaces (intranets, chats, etc.), which offers an employee data layer that mixes sentiment, employee journey, and how tools are used to understand all kinds of needs.

Trend 3: Continuous learning

The third trend Elise wanted to discuss was around the time it takes new starters to ramp up to full productivity. Elise believed this highlighted the urgency for continuous learning to reduce the time it takes to be fully operational, and particularly important for deskless workers.

To facilitate this, LumApps had delivered personalised training that was integrated into workflows in short accessible formats, directly available through intranets. The fundamentals of new IT tools or marketing strategies were still communicated but in a gamified system that was much more easily absorbed.

When used in conjunction with the existing employee data layer the microlearnings can be tailored into employees’ existing career aspirations. They can see where they’re at, coordinate with managers to enable them to take new training courses in bite sized chunks already built into their working life.

Trend 4: Search for authenticity and the collective experience

Elise concluded the session by addressing the trend she felt most strongly about; the search for true and trusted social media platforms in the modern age. With so many user-generated content hubs overrun with bots and AI generated content, it’s near impossible to trust those you follow.

Colleagues can find a safer, more authentic space within communities on their intranet and, as she demonstrated in her own work, they often had.

Topics not directly related to work were incredibly popular and bred a more genuine connection with other departments, such as sports and pets’ focussed pages. Returning to the traditional ideas of what social media platforms are for minimises the distance between communicators and teams.

Conclusion

As much as the future of communications can be daunting, there is an incredible opportunity for so many to leverage the latest technological advancements to meet employee needs like never before.

Harnessing nuanced data and tailoring your rollout to working habits is the core to understanding colleagues’ needs better than they do, all while boosting productivity in the process.