In its pursuit of a first-class fan experience, the rights holder owes as much to the employee experience (EX) as it does to the customer-facing, digital touchpoints that drive engagement. This extends to the staff member’s ability for personalizing the fan experience using customer data.
Given that sport’s digital transformation lives and breathes on the digital literacy of its workforce – although change management maturity remains “very low” in sports business – data governance is vital for driving audience growth and retention, meaning that sports properties should strive to understand how technology can serve their workforce, in order to serve the fan.
“By implementing the right combination of technological solutions, sports properties are able to enhance the EX, too,” explains Motasem El Bawab, N3XT Sports’ Chief Information Officer (CIO). “This, in turn, caters for a higher digital maturity among their workforce, strips out unnecessary workflows or bottlenecks, while allowing the organization to continue to optimize its business processes and explore new digital revenue streams.”
This approach – outlined in our 2023 Digital Trends in the Sports Industry report – can be achieved in several different ways. Among them, the centralization of employee resources is shaping the sports executive’s toolkit. While several best-in-class sports entities are consolidating their fan experiences into a fully integrated direct-to-consumer (D2C) platform – designed to give users access to their entire digital portfolio – some properties are also providing a similar experience for their employees.
In order to digitalize organizational workflows, the sports organization traditionally sees its departments adopt different software solutions and technologies selected to perform various roles within their respective fields. However, while this puts organizations at risk of disrupting productivity, by mixing non-compatible software solutions, this has led sports properties to re-think their digital framework and how the technologies they choose help to optimize their employee output without creating data silos.
According to António Gonçalves, Junior Consultant at N3XT Sports, our team “prioritizes the needs of employees when implementing a digital transformation within a sports organization”, adding: “We don’t just focus on how it benefits the customer-facing product. To achieve this, one approach is to create an employee portal that serves as a centralized platform for all the tools and resources required by employees in the organization. This process starts with addressing each employee’s professional needs.”
CASE STUDY | STEPS TO BUILDING THE PFA’S OWN DEDICATED EMPLOYEE PORTAL
Unlike customer portals, which allow an organization’s client base and stakeholders to proactively manage and customize their own data by centralizing their respective workflows, in contrast, employee portals work to consolidate an organization’s existing resources into one interface – acting as a universal hub for the entire workforce.
“By consolidating all of the new tools that the workforce uses in one place, it not only works to make the EX more friendly, but also to assist in the evolution of the business,” Gonçalves says. “By giving its people the best tools to support their unique ways of working – based on the individual elements of their business – it allows the employee to re-define how the wider organization operates as a complex, multi-functional entity.”
By way of example, the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) rolled out its own employee portal with the support of N3XT Sports last summer. The platform consolidates multiple employee applications, including the union’s players’ directory and subscriptions, communications and marketing assets, a shared employee calendar, as well as tools for member development, including apps dedicated specifically to the PFA Business School, Education, Youth Advisory, and unique Membership Offers.
Patrick Coyle, the PFA’s Chief Operating Officer (COO), says that the rollout of the union’s first-ever employee portal has helped transform the way in which its employees communicate having become 100 percent paperless, as well as their ability to assess their membership base in more granular detail, including how their interactions with the members inform the PFA’s ongoing client initiatives.
“The employee portal has not only enhanced the way that the PFA operates internally, but also provides our staff with direct access to the PFA’s first-ever fully integrated members portal, which acts as a direct line of communication between the union and our members,” Coyle explains. “By gaining a unique understanding of the PFA’s 5,000 members who play for professional clubs in England and Wales, as well as about 50,000 former professional players, our team is better equipped than ever to meet their needs and enhance the members’ experience on and off the football pitch.”
Updated members’ data is made available to every PFA staff member via dashboards integrated within the employee portal. While giving everyone inside the organization invaluable insights into the PFA’s customer base, user trends, and demographics, N3XT Sports and the PFA first drew upon the EX before deciding how to best integrate its member and employee functionalities.
“Where a sports organization has multiple employee tools, but no portal to access them, that’s where the operational process becomes disjointed and unorganized,” Gonçalves continues. “Therefore, involving the employees – and bringing them along the digital transformation journey – is fundamental to optimizing the operational process and to gain their buy-in into the solution.
“For example, since adopting an employee portal last year, the PFA’s Education Department is processing its members’ applications at least 50 percent faster than it used to, while client feedback points to an improved EX – supported by a more efficient platform that is easier for users to understand. In return, it has given the union’s key decision makers greater visibility of the organization’s ongoing productivity and employee activity.”
WHAT’S N3XT?
Given the challenges that digital transformation presents to rights holders whose employees struggle to retire old methods, technology integration can often present barriers for meaningful change rather than invite new, more efficient ways of working. Therefore, easing the pressures of change management inside an organization can be difficult, while adopting new technologies can prove more disruptive than helpful without the proper guidance.
In response, working alongside its clients, N3XT Sports services face-to-face interviews and workshops with each department, its personnel, and stakeholders – to better understand the challenges that they face in their daily work patterns and to educate employees on how technologies can be implemented in ways that truly support them. Employee portals by their very nature grant organizations the flexibility to combine and adjust their user applications to meet new objectives and align with their employees’ needs.
“Technology is an enabler – it’s here to facilitate people’s processes, not to dictate them,” Gonçalves explains. “In order to discover the best technologies to serve an organization, we must first understand how its people currently operate, what are the business objectives they want to achieve, and to identify the pain points that need to be addressed by engaging them during the initial discovery process.
“We can learn a lot more from taking this approach. While organizations have traditionally sought out software solutions and technologies to fix a problem, to meet a goal, or instruct their workforce on how they ‘should’ be working, employee portals are designed to give back control to the workforce and implemented in a way that allows for moderations to the organization’s digital infrastructure based on employee feedback and how they can do their job more effectively.”
Our team at N3XT Sports works tirelessly to develop and implement data and digital transformation strategies across a multitude of sports properties at federation level, competition level, and club level. To learn more about how to implement an employee portal into your organization, fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch. Our goal is to drive the digitalization of the sports industry and our clients.