When employees value their work, you’ll see real business value

SAP Concur Team |

Exploring the business impact of the employee experience.  

Think about your very first job. Were you happy? Did you love it? Did you want to do it for the rest of your life? Well, if you’re not still babysitting or asking if someone “wants fries with that,” we can assume you weren’t entirely fulfilled.  

The same is true today for your employees. To be sure: They’ve chosen your organisation for their actual career, but if they’re not happy in their work — say, because they spend too much time on menial, mundane tasks and don’t get to the valuable work they signed up to do — they’re not able to give you their best.  

If, however, employee satisfaction is high, it directly impacts the bottom line. A recent Gallup Study bears this out, showing 17% higher productivity, 21% higher profitability, and 24% lower turnover when your people are happy.  

Read the eBook The employee experience at its impact on business

Even better news? You’re already improving the work experience — using SAP Concur to automate the expense processes that bog employees down. But can you do more?  

Expanding your SAP Concur solution just might make everyone happier 

Pushing your SAP Concur solution beyond the automation you have in place takes even more tedious tasks off employees’ desks — leading to improved productivity, engagement, and savings beyond what you’re currently seeing.  

Getting the C-suite out of their silos helps, too. Recent Forrester research states that “In order to deliver better employee experiences and drive positive business outcomes, firms need both automated, scalable T&E and invoice management solutions, and to have finance, IT, and HR partner in the service of employee experience transformation.”  

So it isn’t just about capturing receipts and managing reimbursement, it’s about aligning processes between finance, IT and HR. It’s about working together.  

Making it happen.  

To sum up Forrester’s recommendations, there are three things you need to do as an organisation:   

  1. Reframe expense management as an investment in the employee experience. 
  2. Look beyond finance in calculating the benefits of T&E. 
  3. Use T&E as a way to align HR, IT, and finance.  

Again, you’ve already got a good start: You’ve automated expense management. What more can you do to get the most out of your SAP Concur investment? 

  • Evaluate other AP or travel processes that impact employees and redesign them for employees — things like mileage reimbursement, invoice management, and your expense report audit function.  
  • Give employees apps they want to use — like Concur ExpenseIt that eliminates paper receipts, and Concur Drive that gets rid of tedious tasks like mileage tracking — and they’ll reward you with productivity, policy compliance, and better visibility into spend.  
  • Tap into services that make it easier to manage the process, and you’ll free up finance and IT to focus on higher-value work.  

Where does going beyond automation get you? 

You can read all about it in the recent SAP Concur eBook, The employee experience at its impact on business, but it all comes down to this:  

  • Fewer manual processes mean employees get more done  
  • Better tools give you visibility into booking, itinerary, and spend data  
  • Integrated travel, expense, and invoice data helps you manage all your spend one place  
  • Simpler systems mean fewer IT inquiries 

Employees getting their work done. Finance getting control of spending. IT getting to focus. It sounds like somewhere you’d be happy to spend your career.  

Read on:  

Download the Forrester Research

Read the SAP Concur eBook