Robots have an increasingly important place
20 years ago, they were just speculative concepts or imaginary beings in science fiction movies, both admired and feared for their endless possibilities. Today, they are at the heart of the supply chain industry.
Robots allow the automation of a multitude of tasks, they limit the drudgery of monotonous work, and they increase the productivity of businesses. This has allowed businesses to better serve their customer needs by maximising the efficiency at every stage of the supply chain.
However, whilst robots may greatly improve the processes within a supply chain and take an industry to the next level, they are actually here to facilitate the employee’s job rather than erase it. The importance of having a human contact within the supply chain shouldn’t be taken into question.
In fact, if managers are not careful, their employees may feel less and less important when working with robots. In a study conducted by Cornell University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, they found that when humans and robots work side-by-side at the same task, human productivity and self-esteem takes a hit.
That’s why employee experience has never been more important than in the age of the human-robot collaboration.
Asking employees of a complex supply chain for feedback is complicated
The introduction of robots to supply chains, while beneficial for productivity as it saves a lot of time, can nevertheless become an experience problem for employees.
Robots that replace many tedious and laborious tasks also replace the work of some skilled people with years of experience who used to perform these tasks manually. It is therefore crucial for these employees to adapt to this technological evolution by following training courses.
Training courses can be difficult to track however, without having an integrated platform to link up your course data with your employee feedback, it can often be forgotten and employee feedback may get lost in a feedback form in a folder in HR.
It is therefore important to measure the experience of these employees in order to understand their opinions and their feedback in real-time and by using a platform that can hold this data together.
Supply chains of this size are often complex and have many silos in the form of warehouses, departments and ground staff working together. This makes the global view of the experience very difficult to analyze.
Moreover, asking employees for feedback is not an easy task since they usually don’t spend their working day in front of a computer, which limits the possibility of finding moments when they could answer a survey.
As for the teams responsible for the employee/customer experience, they are the only ones who have access to this data and rarely share it with the managers of each department, which does not allow them to distribute potential improvement points within teams, leaving a gap between the actual experience and the theoretical feedback.
Having a single analyst is no longer enough to study the feedback data received, it is important to empower your teams to get their own KPIs and to be able to analyze their own feedback so that they can see the points of improvement and act quickly.
Empower the right person at different stages of the supply chain
Creating different team dashboards and assigning feedback to the right person in real-time becomes a breeze on Feedier. Importantly, it remains accessible to every team in your company so they can be part of your success.
Most managers rely on one-off surveys to gather feedback from their employees, giving them a representation of their experience at a certain moment of time. Feedback is flowing on a daily basis and managers need to capture these streams. You need to listen, analyse and act at the right moments of your employees journey.
Your employees are busy and don’t have time to answer long and boring surveys. That’s why you need to make sure to send them interactive and short feedback forms. Feedier comes with 15 different question types and attractive designs for your forms that you can personalize and add your branding to.
The goal is of course to have as high a response rate as possible without compromising on the quality and wasting the employees time.
By having all this feedback data and especially assigning it to the right people, the employee experience can be significantly improved as the analytics show where the problems are and help you overcome them by simply listening directly to those workers who are in the best position to talk.
Originally published at https://feedier.com on April 29, 2021.
