The work culture of a company is valuable to employees. A conducive work culture that elevates the employee experience nurtures and retains talent. Companies prioritizing employee experience can confront waves of the ‘great resignation’;

Employees decide to stay in the company based on how they feel in their current position. Considering that companies are adopting a hybrid workplace model in the wake of new changes, developing a good EX that faces the challenges posed by the transition is necessary. Primarily, organizations looking to retain talent must scale their employee experience platform to match hybrid workplace requirements.

Employee experience is a powerful tool for your company. Let’s look at five ways it proves to be one: 

Talent hub

An ideal employee experience bolsters talent acquisitions and retains talent by dropping attrition rates of a company. In a true sense, a good EX is addictive. Those who experience it are not looking to leave it and those who don’t would like to be part of it.

Companies invest a lot of money attracting, hiring, and nurturing highly skilled and abled individuals to fit into the fabric of their work culture.

 People who can be categorized as great hires are pulled toward organizations that offer challenging and rewarding roles. After hiring and nurturing the talent companies have to ensure that their employees feel engaged and affirmative in their roles. Dissatisfied employees will move to the competition. To avoid attrition and re-hiring events companies should focus on establishing a good employee experience platform.

Seamless collaboration

Employees develop a positive attitude and work as teams. Competition among employees is always healthy. They prioritize team goals above their personal growth. Best practices to handle a task are shared in the team and informal meetings. 

Effective communication 

Bureaucratic managerial practices are redundant in companies that focus on improving their EX. A fundamental lapse in organizational structure that fails is a lack of effective communication. Companies that focus on their EX establish clear channels of communication. Employees can access open-door policies and skip-level meetings to voice their opinions. 

Enhances productivity

An integrated employee experience gives importance to the needs of employees; it ensures their happiness. Happy employees challenge beyond their abilities and give their best to their company. They are more engaged, self-motivated, and problem-solvers who will strive and go the extra mile to get things done. They don’t need to be micromanaged and reciprocate the trust a company has in them with dedication. 

Satisfied customers

The rating for customer service is a direct reflection of a company’s employee experience. Dissatisfied employees lack the motivation to serve the customers and create backlogs that compound into problems of higher intensity. The opposite also holds; engaging employees can lead to better customer service. Employees with good experience platforms listen to their customers and focus on providing solutions at the earliest. 

Difference between DEX and EX

Employee experience or an EX accounts for the human emotions that employees experiences in their journey with a company. Digital employee experience (DEX) is a set of digital tools that aid an employee in completing the job. An integrated DEX enhances the employee experience and is inclusive in the platform. Old and redundant machinery is a put-off for highly skilled employees, specifically if they are trained or have worked on better digital systems. 

Importance of digital experience platform

When an organization hires talented individuals yearning for challenges, the recruits need to feel engaged. Gen-Z employees aspire to work in the best possible technological framework that helps their learning curve. They don’t like digital tools that are ineffective and don’t deliver. 

Studies show that employees feel frustrated when they lose up to one working day per week through pointless digital tools that increase their workload. They feel like leaving an organization that does not invest in an efficient mechanism. 

Considering that more companies are moving towards a hybrid workplace model, an efficient digital employee experience is critical for operational efficiency. Here are a few points that companies can consider when establishing or improving their DEX: 

1. Treat employees as internal customers

A client is engaged by a hardworking employee who performs all the functions required in the cycle. Often companies have spent a lot on innovations that deliver the best-in-class products and services to their customers. But fail in spending a proportionate amount on technology and framework that eases the process flow for the employees. 

Companies should consider improving the digital interfaces, server capacities, simple-accessible digital tools, communication bots, self-serving channels, virtual platforms, and other digital products that aid their employees in delivering better results. 

2. Safety

Employees work hard to maintain the integrity of their work. Any threat to the security of the digital framework will not just lead to data theft but also affect the morale of the employees who worked on a particular project. Even if the leadership does not hold them directly responsible, they will take it as a red flag on their resume. It leads to unpleasantness and affects the vibe of the work culture. Companies need to consider the safety of the connections in a hybrid workplace where people from multiple locations and devices log in to the network. 

3. Scalable and cost-effective

A digital experience is a capital-intensive project for any company. With the ever-changing landscape of technology, companies need to be forward-thinking and adopt a few open-source software that can be improvised with time. Even if exclusive customized solutions are used, the technology needs to be scalable and should be updated with changes. 

Conclusion

Companies investing in employee experience are more profitable than those that do not. An engaged employee serves their customers efficiently translating to growth that affects shareholders’ net worth. 

After attracting and hiring the best people, it is futile to lose them by not providing a fruitful employee experience platform that integrates work culture, digital solutions, and the location preference of the people who work for an organization. It also will go down as the incompetence of the management in thinking about a holistic development that affects the growth.

From a young age, Alexander Galitsky was interested in both the exact sciences and humanities. Later on, this helped him develop skills as a scientist and entrepreneur. What was the path that brought the famous venture capitalist and founder of Almaz Capital to success? How did he implement his unique projects?

Early years and education

The son of a teacher and chairman of a state farm, Alexander Galitsky was born in 1955 in Zarechany, a village in Zhitomir region. He inherited his enterprising mindset from his father, an energetic and initiative leader; and from his mother, who taught Russian language and literature at school, he inherited the ability to express his thoughts clearly and eloquently. Interestingly, it was journalism that Alexander initially saw as his future profession – he even published a romantic story called The Sun’s Tears in a local newspaper. However, his father persuaded him to change his career choice, as he knew that, in addition to literature, his son was also interested in the exact sciences and technology – and even launched homemade rockets and assembled radio construction kits. As a result, after graduating from school with a gold medal for academic excellence, Alexander Galitsky entered the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology located in Zelenograd.

The beginning of the career

During his internship, Alexander worked at the Microdevice Research Institute in Zelenograd. This was where he got his first job after graduation. Later on, Galitsky defended his PhD thesis on Technical Cybernetics. The Microdevice Research Institute was part of the ELAS Scientific Production Association and developed aerospace computer systems based on the latest achievements in microelectronics. In 1987, 32-year-old Alexander Galitsky was appointed chief designer of the department responsible for satellite software.

In 1991, Alexander went on a business trip to the United States and this visit turned the young scientist’s worldview upside down. Galitsky found himself in the famous Silicon Valley and what he saw seemed like a fantasy to him. The experience of meeting famous IT personalities and visiting the offices of Sony, Siemens, Nokia, Toshiba, and Philips left an indelible impression on him. Many of his new connections later developed into friendships and business relationships; for example, Geoffrey Baehr became Alexander Galitsky’s partner in his major project, Almaz Capital.

The engineer returned from his trip to America determined to promote Russian technologies in the West by attracting venture capitalists. In 1991, he created his first business project, ELVIS+. This company developed the first VPN for Windows, and a prototype of Wi-Fi. The startup received investment from the US company Sun Microsystems. Alexander Galitsky’s next international projects were TrustWorks and EzWim, which were based in the Netherlands. Both of these were IT companies as well.

Almaz Capital – a global venture capital firm

Another significant stage in the businessman’s life began when he was asked to become the president of the first European Tech Tour in Russia in 2004. This was an international event aimed at discovering promising startups in emerging markets. Four years later, together with his partners, Alexander Galitsky established the international VC firm called Almaz Capital. The goal of this organization was to invest in startups with the potential to enter the global market.

Almaz Capital brought together many people who believed in the project. Its institutional investors were the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and UFG, which contributed $20 million each to the fund. The anchor investor, with a capital of $32 million, was Cisco Systems.

Almaz Capital II, with a significantly larger investment amount of $174 million, was founded when one of the fund’s key partners, Peter Lukyanov, left the project. This time the institutional investors were Cisco, the EBRD, and the International Finance Corporation (a member of the World Bank Group). The main geographical focus of Almaz Capital shifted to Eastern and Central Europe and the CIS countries.

The LPs of the third fund, which was established in 2021, included the EBRD and the EIF. Almaz Capital III started its operation with a capital of $191 million.

Almaz Capital mostly focuses on the companies that work in the B2B space and develop software for this segment. For example, the fund supported such well-known projects as Qik (a video messaging service) and Yandex. Interestingly, Alexander Galitsky’s fund is highly selective about the companies that will get the investment. Only a few startups out of a thousand projects manage to make it. The fund works with promising teams for at least 5 years. Today, its key portfolio companies are Acronis, 3DLook, GoodData, Gridgain, Hover, DMarket, Minut, Mobalytics, Neptune, OneSoil, Parallels, Refurbed, and Virtuozzo.

Recent changes

In the past, Alexander Galitsky participated in several projects on a national scale. The entrepreneur was a Board Member at the Skolkovo Foundation and Skolkovo Ventures; he was a member of the RVC Advisory Board and Skoltech Board of Trustees; he was also the Chairman of the Venture Market Council and a member of the Supervisory Board at the MSU Business Incubator, and worked at Alfa Bank and Megafon. And although all these projects have provided him with invaluable experience, they are of no interest to him at the moment. The entrepreneur has always prioritized cross-border business activities, while the aforementioned organizations now focus their attention on the domestic market.