How Improved Technology Helps You Retain Your Employees
By: Holly Luttenegger
Striving to provide the highest possible quality education is a challenging and multifaceted issue, but there are a few constants that ring true for colleges and universities of all sizes. For instance, you need to retain your top-performing staff members to get the best results.
Retention of staff is a persistent problem in higher education. In fact, the most recent National Association of College and University Business Officers survey named "supporting and maintaining the workforce" as the No. 1 business issue facing schools.
So, what does it take to counteract high turnover rates and lock in a solid, reliable workforce for months and years to come? The answer may revolve around the technology staff members have available to them.
How Do Turnover and Attrition Harm Higher Ed Workplaces?
The effects of constant employee turnover are easy enough to see anecdotally. When workers are constantly coming and going, a higher ed office will struggle to create a sense of camaraderie and identity, and will miss out on the effectiveness that comes from long-tenured employees' knowledge.
The impact is also quantifiable, with peer-reviewed research on the subject, including a European Journal of Business Management research paper highlighting some specific weaknesses in organizations that struggle with high turnover.
These problems include:
High costs: Hiring and training a constant stream of replacement employees is costly, and the lost productivity of the departing employees also eats into the bottom line.
Skill loss: Replacing a long-tenured employee with a new hire means there may be a deficit in skill and expertise during the ramp-up and training processes.
Lowered output: An institution that frequently loses employees may struggle to perform effective work in their absence.
Damaged morale: It's difficult to keep morale strong and maintain productive in-office relationships during periods of elevated turnover.
Financial and emotional strain: In simple terms, keeping a college or university office on a strong financial or cultural footing is hard when there isn't a solid, settled team.
To avoid subjecting your institution to the stress and limitations that come with frequent turnover, it's important to identify the most likely countermeasures. This often means renewing your focus on the employee experience and engagement, as turnover can be seen as a consequence of a weak connection between employer and employee.
How Can Technology Help With Employee Satisfaction and Retention?
A number of factors influence your work experience, but technology is increasingly the defining issue. This is because tech isn't just a set of tools, it's the interface through which employees perform their daily tasks, collaborate across teams and, in hybrid environments, communicate with even their closest coworkers.
Qualtrics' Brad Anderson and Microsoft's Seth Patton commented on this fact for the Harvard Business Review, citing their respective companies' research on the contemporary workplace experience. For instance, the Qualtrics survey revealed that when employees feel they are supported by their employers' technology choices, they're 230% more engaged and 85% more likely to stay in the role for over three years.
The need for new and collaborative workplace experiences has become clear in the years following the upheaval of the Great Resignation. Employees today are defined by a few factors, such as the fact that they interact in digital spaces, and they focus on seeking out workplaces that will provide suitable experiences and support.
When the technology platforms employees use every day are tuned to save them time and effort, making them more effective without demanding extra effort, your organization is on the right track. The key to these positive tech experiences is often data. Platforms that turn data into useful fuel for insights, with minimal manual work, are powerful difference-makers.
Planning software platforms, Anaplan prominently among them, fit into this category of technology tools that can harness data to improve the quality of life for employees.
What's the Impact of Anaplan's Connected Planning?
As a planning software platform, Anaplan can connect previously siloed systems that would otherwise have trouble communicating. When your higher ed organization uses Anaplan, you're well on your way to achieving that widely held goal — creating a single source of data truth for your organization to draw on.
Functions that thrive when run through Anaplan include:
Budgeting: Setting departmental and institutional budgets for the quarter or year is easier when you have contextual information from throughout the organization, as well as an effective set of automated tools to reduce manual toil.
Forecasting: The forecasting features within Anaplan allow you to craft complex models based on the latest inputs and A/B test them to prepare for likely future scenarios.
Workforce planning: Human resources analysis carried out in Anaplan can use a wide variety of data points and key performance indicators to help you set ideal staffing levels.
Enrollment: Beyond running the business side of your institution, you can also focus on overseeing the student body with powerful automated analysis.
The employee experience can improve many times over with those functions managed through Anaplan. Without a planning solution in place, employees may experience:
Frustration over siloed and unavailable information.
Wasted time manually updating spreadsheets every period.
An inability to pull relevant reports quickly.
Emotional exhaustion due to too many inefficient processes.
In addition to those issues, offices without efficient planning platforms can suffer from a wave of "shadow IT" as employees try out their own unapproved tech solutions, further fragmenting the work experience.
Anaplan wipes away those challenges by providing automation and standardization, as well as acting as a single source of data truth. Employees will know where to find what they're looking for and have a set of quick, consistent and highly automated actions available to them. This is the kind of environment modern IT can deliver.
Ready to Start Your Tech Evolution With Anaplan?
To get started on creating a work environment that will keep employees happy and engaged, it pays to tailor your implication to your exact needs. Out of the box, Anaplan may fail to meet your higher ed employees' specific preferences. This is where a custom implementation comes in.
The experts at Allitix have in-depth experience integrating Anaplan into higher ed tech stacks, creating smooth workflows that can boost morale, leading to retention and consistency. By working closely with your team, we ensure the solution is just right for your everyday requirements.
Ready to get started? Contact us.