Superior customer experience is insufficient for businesses to maintain their positioning in the market because, in the employee experience economy, effectively managing your workforce is more critical to success than ever, multinational human resources, payroll and workforce management software company UKG Europe, Middle East and Africa VP Russell Howe said during a recent visit to South Africa. 

Speaking at a series of workshops hosted by UKG’s local partner Altron Digital Business, Howe said “Happy employees mean happy customers, which leads to growth.”

He said companies that invest in their employees are four times more profitable than those that do not.

“Because employees are customers of other brands, they’re familiar with the customer experience, and increasingly they expect that from the companies where they work.”

In January, UKG published a report that identified three megatrends shaping the future of work. These are an escalating global labour deficit; the amplified employee experience imperative; and the human-AI advantage.

By 2030, UKG forecasts that 85.2-million jobs will be unfilled, largely because of the misalignment of job and skills requirements. Only 5% of executives surveyed agreed that they were helping employees to learn new skills, while simultaneously employees accustomed to the experiences offered by customer-obsessed brands, now want the same from their employers. The report showed that customer-obsessed brands are leading, but employee obsessed brands are defining markets. 

A key topic raised at the UKG roadshow was the impact of AI.

“There’s so much noise about what AI is and that’s the part we need to start to unlock. The real winners of AI are the companies that focus on data,” Howe said.

To illustrate the scale and amount of the data UKG is producing, Howe compared a megabyte to a grain of rice.

“With 5.9-million Google searches per minute, 347-billion emails and 328-trillion megabytes of data created every day, we could fill the Pacific Ocean with rice every three days. It’s overwhelming,” he said.

Howe said intelligently applied AI tools could improve productivity in employees and managers, reduce cognitive overload and foster innovation. While much hype around AI has focused on it as a job displacer, Howe argued that it was actually a powerful enabler. 

UKG leverages Google’s AI capabilities, then builds on that foundation with in-house industry-specific data and expertise. Then, UKG incorporates each customer’s unique data with solutions tailored to their specific needs. This layered strategy improves the accuracy, relevance, and impact of AI tools.

“Human-AI interaction is a balance we’re all trying to find. The real bit that’s overlooked is data, especially unstructured data,” Howe explained.

According to market research firm Forrester, only 27% of data is structured, while the other 73% lies below the surface, largely inaccessible to analysis.

Howe said that, as AI becomes more capable of understanding the drivers of business performance and the nuances of employee behaviour, the data it learns from influences other aspects of the business.

“That data asset also starts to influence your customer relations, enterprise resource planning, and supply chain that need to come together to give you that technological advantage,” he said.

“When you manage the entire employee experience, from access control and time capture to payroll - you unlock a goldmine of workforce and operational data,” Altron workforce management lead Martin Blignaut added.

With AI natively integrated into these systems, he explained, businesses can “sift through the rock to find the gold” through real-time reporting and AI-powered insights that drive cost control and strategic planning.  

“[UKG] offers companies an external benchmark in the form of 22-million-user survey data that allows us to understand what culture looks like, 40 years’ worth of workforce management experience and integrated client ecosystem data to inform a company’s use of UKG technology,” Howe explained. 

He added that, ultimately, employees, like customers, wanted to feel valued, supported, empowered, fulfilled in the work that they did and that they could trust their employers.

He explained that, in practical terms, this meant being paid on time and correctly, being able to easily swap shifts if there was a personal emergency and having opportunities for career growth. These would be critical for employee engagement that drove business growth over the next decade of the workforce experience, Howe said. 

He explained that AI’s role in the employee experience economy would not only be to automate repetitive tasks. It would also provide users with more insights and guidance based on learning people’s work preferences, patterns and intents, while generating new insights, delegating tasks and personalising experiences.  

“AI is a force multiplier. The reality is the human AI imperative we’re in right now,” Howe said.