Invest in Employee Experience to Grow Your Bottom Line
Employee experience is a hot topic today – and for good reason. It encompasses all employer-employee touch points, from recruitment to retirement, as well as all the places, processes, and tools that allow employees to do their best work, whether they are in the office, on the road, or working from home. When these touch points align well, employees are free to do meaningful work. Research has shown this creates a sense of wellbeing, engagement, and meaning. In other words, it increases employee satisfaction and morale so they can get more done, stay longer, and serve customers with high levels of engagement and care.
The business impact of this can be significant. On the contrary, a poor employee experience is bad for business and can escalate all the way to the bottom line: Unmotivated employees bogged down by dull tasks and frustrating processes when performing everyday tasks are less engaged in their work, which in turn reduces productivity. This can lead to higher employee turnover, which then impacts the customer experience – which ultimately hurts the bottom line.
So, it's no surprise that according to a recent study conducted by AMI-Partners, small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) are focused on strengthening their workforce and providing better experiences for their employees. SMBs are under constant threat of losing their customers and their top talent to larger businesses because they can’t offer the higher salaries, better benefits, and more sophisticated IT solutions that skilled employees – especially tech-native Millennials and Gen Z workers – consider essential.
Financial decision-makers to the rescue
Financial decision-makers are in a unique position to quickly and radically improve the employee experience, as they own core processes that nearly all employees engage in regularly: travel, expense, and invoice management. According to AMI-Partners, many of the overarching challenges related to employee experience can be tied back to the use of manual and frustrating processes. These includes:
- Having less time for strategic work: 60% of SMB decision-makers agree that time taken away from strategic work was a top challenge prior to automating. Many employees want work that is challenging and has an impact on the overall company, but they remain occupied with everyday tasks such as manually entering expense and invoice data into the system.
- Reliance on cumbersome processes: 57% of SMBs indicated that a top challenge of manual travel and expense (T&E) and invoice management was how cumbersome it was. Part of what makes manual processes cumbersome is that they are prone to errors. When employees book travel without tools and process for support, it can result in booking mistakes, wasted time, and higher costs for the business. Guided experiences help ensure things get done right.
- Delayed approval cycles: 59% of SMBs cited protracted approval cycles as a challenge when manually processing T&E records. A typical manual reimbursement process goes through multiple approvals stages resulting in delays that can be frustrating for employees.
The good news is, it’s easy to address these challenges by deploying intelligent cloud solutions that automate travel, expense, and invoice management. These technologies can enhance the employee experience and increase bottom lines by:
- Simplifying the expense submission process – Intuitive user interfaces and processes create workflows that reduce frustration
- Facilitating mobile – Mobile apps enable employees to easily submit expenses and continue to work from any place and any device
- Enabling faster reimbursements – Employees are satisfied when they get reimbursed sooner, which facilities compliance
- Saving time for accounts payable teams – Employees can avoid day-to-day tasks and spend more time on strategic and meaningful work
- Improving compliance and visibility – Satisfied employees are less likely to submit inaccurate expenses (intentional or not), helping to boost visibility into company spend data
To quantify the benefits further, AMI-Partners surveyed SMBs after automating their expense process. SMBs, on average, reported saving 530 hours annually per finance employee.
Want to learn more? Download the full AMI-Partners report now: “Enhance the Employee Experience and Boost Bottom Lines with Travel and Expense (T&E) and Invoice Management Automation.”