How Utilities and Energy Companies Can Improve the Employee Experience

Having qualified and experienced employees has always been important to utilities and energy companies, but in today’s world, it’s crucial. Not only is it harder than ever for organizations to retain their employees—and expensive to replace them—but experienced employees are increasingly hard to find and hire.

Why Does Employee Experience Matter?

• Gartner expects employee turnover to be 50% to 75% higher than companies have previously experienced.¹
• Gallup shows it costs up to two times an employee’s annual salary to replace them.²
• 78% of employees strongly believe their employer is responsible for helping them increase their job satisfaction and well-being.³  
• 34% of employees expect a seamless technology experience in their workplace but feel they don’t have one.⁴

To show your employees you value their daily contributions and reduce employee turnover, your organization must make every moment of the employee experience count. To start, we recommend using a tool like Concur Experience Optimizer to capture your employees’ sentiment, that way you can truly understand the context and build a solution that works for everyone.

Why Employee Experience Matters

Read more in our whitepaper.

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Three ways to improve the employee experience

While there are many ways to improve the employee experience, a few easy places to start are by:

1. Improving employee satisfaction with enterprise applications. Because many employees can get frustrated using enterprise software if it’s not easy to use, a provide employees with state-of-the-art systems like Concur Travel and Concur Expense. Adopting proven processes for managing travel booking, expense reimbursement, purchasing card reconciliation, and invoice payment with Concur Invoice will streamline the process of navigating and complying with your organization’s spend policies and procedures for your employees.
2. Automating the expense reporting and approval process. Capturing and reporting expenses can be difficult and time-consuming for your employees. By using technology like Concur Expense to automate the process of creating and submitting expense reports, ExpenseIt to capture receipts, and approving reimbursements, your organization can significantly reduce the amount of time your employees spend manually filling out expense reports and approving them. You can even automate the flow of charges on corporate credit cards using Company Bill Statements to directly integrate your organization’s expense reporting tools. Plus, an automated online solution is more accessible and easier to use for employees who work remotely.
3. Automating mileage capture. If your utility or energy company is like most, you have employees who often use a company vehicle to drive back and forth to job sites. This likely requires your employees to manually track, document, and self-report the amount of mileage they use, which can lead to errors or unnecessary costs. By automating mileage capture with Drive, you can greatly reduce the amount of time your employees spend preparing and submitting mileage reports for reimbursement. An automated process can also improve mileage reimbursement accuracy and provide your organization with more control over mileage expenses to save both time and money.

Automating routine, time-consuming tasks can also improve your back-office productivity in areas including human resources, auditing, program administration, purchasing, IT, and risk management. Plus, your accounting and finance teams won’t have to wrestle with paper or chase down overdue receipts or misplaced invoices. The result? Your employees will spend less time on manual tasks, leaving them able to focus on their core responsibilities.

Deliver a Positive Spend Management Experience with SAP Concur solutions

Want to learn more about how to improve the employee experience for Utilities and Energy organizations? Download our tip sheet to learn how SAP Concur solutions can help you deliver a positive employee experience when it comes to travel, expense, and invoice management.

Sources

¹ “It’s time to reimagine employee retention,” Gartner, 2022. https://hbr.org/2022/07/its-time-to-reimagine-employee-retention

² “The fixable problem costs U.S. businesses $1 trillion,” Gallup, 2019. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/247391/fixable-problem-costs-businesses-trillion.aspx

³ “Care to do better,” Accenture, 2020. https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/Thought-Leadership-Assets/PDF-3/Accenture-Care-To-Do-Better-Report.pdf 

⁴ “Empowering your people: How executives can jump-start the flexible workplace,” Oxford Economics, 2022. https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/empowering-your-people-how-executives-can-jump-start-the-flexible-workplace/