Delight Your Employees with Outstanding Digital Tools

When organizations consider updating or introducing new software or systems, the primary focus is often on achieving greater efficiency, improving automation, and increasing productivity. These business priorities are, of course, crucial. However, I believe the focus should be broader.

Implementing new software or systems isn’t just about crunching numbers. It’s essential to look beyond the business aspects and prioritize the employees. That’s why the headline is: Delight Your Employees with Outstanding Digital Tools.

This blog post focuses on the employee aspects of a software/system implementation. For a moment, traditional business goals are set aside.

Why Employee Experience Matters

It’s indisputable that employees are organizations’ most important resource. Recognizing this means that organizations must provide their employees with the best possible working conditions.

The Employee Experience (EX) movement has gained traction in recent years. This is evident in the emergence of roles like CEEO/CEXO/CXO (Chief Employee Experience Officer) in a growing number of companies in Denmark and globally.

So, what exactly is employee experience? Essentially, it encompasses the entire journey an employee takes within an organization.

How do you perceive your workplace? The answer is likely the sum of all your interactions and experiences with your employer. Everything from company culture, workload, relationships, and physical workspace to the technology and software at hand.

This is relevant for organizations because the sum of these interactions directly impacts employee engagement, retention, development, and performance.

I am not an expert in “Employee Experience.” I won’t delve deeply into organizational touchpoints but will instead focus on some of the benefits that well-implemented systems can bring to employees — and the consequences of relying on manual processes.

Employees Have High Expectations for Technology

The digital tools you provide your employees are a significant part of their overall experience. Ask yourself: Is the technology in your organization user-friendly or cumbersome? Do your employees have all the tools and software they need to perform their jobs optimally? Do the tools support your digitalization strategy?

It’s clear that employees who work with cumbersome, unresponsive, slow, and outdated applications are dissatisfied with the organization’s system landscape. If they still work manually or partially manually, the experience is even worse.

Today, employees expect the digital systems at their workplace to be of the same high quality as those they use daily on their smartphones. Organizations must ensure that their systems have user-friendly interfaces and, naturally, support requirements for automation, efficiency, digitalization, and potentially the use of AI.

What About the Employee Experience within Our Domain?

The number of e-invoicing solutions have grown significantly over the past several years. Fortunately. Invoice processing is a subprocess within a finance function, and therefore doesn’t affect all employees in the company. However, it’s still crucial for those who are impacted.

Does it enhance job satisfaction if your employees are stuck in tedious and manual invoice processes?

We can probably agree that it doesn’t, which can become a challenge. As an employer, it’s about making everyday life as simple as possible for your employees. They need the best conditions to succeed. And they certainly don’t have those if they have to manage invoices manually.

Examples of Manual Tasks Associated with Invoice Processing

Why should employees in the finance department spend their valuable time on:

• Wasting time and resources internally chasing missing invoice references and approvers
• Communicating with suppliers if there is a missing reference or other necessary data
• Manually moving data around to fit your workflow requirements
• Checking if the VAT basis is correct
• Ensuring that payment terms are accurate
• Validating references and payment accounts
• Checking for fraudulent invoices
• Ensuring that the agreed-upon terms and prices are met
• And much more

All of this, and much more, can be automated. Automation that will save employees many hours of control and detective work. Employees can spend their hours on more valuable tasks – more enjoyable and exciting ones. This helps improve parts of the employee experience and brings joy to their daily work, supporting the blog post’s point.

How Do You Want to Be Perceived?

Who doesn’t want to be seen as a modern and digital organization that provides digital tools to its employees, making their daily work easier?

You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that every company wants this. When you invest in outstanding digital tools, you not only improve productivity; you also enhance job satisfaction and the employee experience.

At efacto, our passion is to free employees in the finance function from time-consuming and manual invoice handling. We do this with intelligent e-invoice solutions. Solutions that digitalize and automate cumbersome and time-consuming invoice processes (like the list above) for the employee, all within a user-friendly interface.

Fortunately, there are solutions that make everyday life easier for employees in various roles. You undoubtedly benefit from them already. These solutions are not limited to invoicing. The market is packed with fantastic solutions and systems that benefit employees in HR, marketing, production, sales, development, IT, and more.

Remember, such solutions are also an attraction for future hires. If I may take one last example from our own invoicing world: Newly graduated employees in the finance function want automated processes and challenging tasks. They don’t want to spend time on tedious and manual processes and on correcting supplier invoices excessively.

Anders Olsen,
CSO

Author

Anders, our Sales Director, has his finger on the pulse of all the challenges organizations face related to invoice processing.