Improve Employee Productivity
Employee productivity is closely tied to digital efficiency. Long onboarding sessions, constant changes in systems, and complex business processes can all hinder performance. When employees don't have the tools to complete their work smoothly and accurately, critical work is delayed, support requests increase, and employee morale declines.
WalkMe can change that. This guide covers how to use WalkMe to identify key friction points, streamline user workflows, and improve employee productivity. We'll walk through each step using our 4 Ps framework for business value alignment: Problem, Possible, Probable, and Provable.
Problem
What are the challenges and issues your employees face?
Employees often encounter unnecessary complexity in the systems they use every day. Lengthy onboarding, confusing terminology, outdated training materials, unclear workflows, and limited real-time support contribute to inefficiencies and errors. These challenges result in slower task completion, more support tickets, and decreased employee satisfaction.
When employees spend excessive time searching for answers or correcting mistakes, it's not just their time that's lost; the business suffers from reduced productivity and declining employee morale.
Possible
What should you focus on to address this problem, and how might you solve it?
To identify what's possible, focus on which tasks take too long, where employees make mistakes, and which steps cause frustration. Look for opportunities to guide users through complex processes more effectively, automate common actions, and prevent errors before they happen.
Start by answering these questions:
- Which systems or workflows are the most frustrating or time consuming for employees?
- Where do employees spend excessive time on simple or repetitive tasks?
- Are there opportunities to reduce clicks, automate steps, or guide users more efficiently?
- Which employee segments or roles would benefit most from real-time guidance or task automation?
- How do support tickets, shadow processes, or manual workarounds reflect friction in the digital experience?
Each of these opportunities becomes a candidate for WalkMe guidance: a prioritized list of high-value initiatives aligned to productivity outcomes. Continue reading for tactical guidance on how to tackle those initiatives.
Step 1: Identify Friction Points
Start by diagnosing the processes that slow employees down. Work with SMEs for each system with WalkMe installed to identify high-priority workflows- especially those tied to frequent support tickets, high error rates, or known bottlenecks. Once you've identified those workflows, find the key events in each process: the elements users should click, the pages they should visit, etc. Define those events using Tracked Events or Engaged Elements, then create a funnel in Flow Analytics that tracks the process from start to finish. As a best practice, we recommend setting up Tracked Events or Engaged Elements and collecting data for approximately 30 days to establish a baseline. Without baseline data, it becomes much more challenging to demonstrate the value and effectiveness of your content over time. As users interact with these high-priority processes, your funnel will surface where and when users struggle. Look for drop-offs: steps where users abandon a process or spend more time than expected. This data reveals not just where issues occur, but how often and how severely they impact productivity.
If you're working with a system supported by UI Intelligence, enable this feature to dig even deeper. UI Intelligence identifies high-traffic forms and highlights where users struggle, such as which fields generate the most errors, how long forms take to complete, and which fields users frequently skip. These insights help prioritize where WalkMe guidance and automation will have the biggest impact.
Step 2: Deploy WalkMe Guidance
Once you've identified where users are getting stuck, it's time to create in-app solutions that meet them at the point of need.
Support complex workflows with Smart Walk-Thrus
Use Smart Walk-Thrus to guide employees step-by-step through complex or error-prone processes. Smart Walk-Thrus highlight exactly where users need to click and what actions to take, helping reduce errors, rework, and support requests. This is especially helpful for infrequent workflows like annual benefits enrollment or performance reviews, since users have to relearn the workflow every time they use it.
Enhance your Smart Walk-Thrus with auto-steps to eliminate routine navigation steps, automatically perform element-oriented tasks on behalf of your users, or even completely automate an end-to-end repetitive process. For example, for everyday tasks like time tracking and opportunity management, the time saved by automating as much of the process as possible really adds up.
Finally, assign Goals to each Smart Walk-Thru validate the impact of your guidance.
Surface key documents just in time and on-demand
Enhance employee productivity by pairing Resources with Launchers to deliver critical content at exactly the right moment. Resources let you include key documents like policy guides, templates, or FAQs and make them instantly accessible within the workflow via a Launcher. Launchers are clickable buttons you can place wherever users are most likely to need to access additional information. For example, if employees often pause to find a benefits summary during enrollment or reference a compensation worksheet during reviews, a well-placed Launcher can surface the right file in a single click, minimizing context switching and speeding up task completion.
For on-demand support, use the WalkMe Menu as a hub for your Resources, Smart Walk-Thrus, Shuttles, and Onboarding Tasks. Employees can review key help resources as-needed, all in one place.
Take the guesswork out of form fields with SmartTips
Complement your Smart Walk-Thrus with SmartTips, tooltips that either appear as an icon next to an element or directly over the element itself. SmartTips are ideal for providing context, enforcing business rules, or validating input in real time. For example, if users frequently misformat a date field or overlook a required field, SmartTips can display the correct format or flag missing inputs before submission.
Or, if users often get stuck on a tricky field, like a dropdown for selecting a code, a SmartTip with definitions can help users confidently make the right selection.
Keep employees informed with ShoutOuts and notifications
As you roll out improvements, keeping employees informed is just as important as making the improvements themselves.
Use ShoutOuts to communicate important updates directly in-app, rather than relying on lengthy emails or repeat enablement sessions. These customizable messages can announce upcoming system changes or highlight tips for navigating recent process improvements. ShoutOuts help reduce confusion, drive awareness, and increase adoption of your employee productivity solutions.
If you're using the WalkMe Menu for desktop, consider scheduling notifications to announce product updates to your employees, even when they're not actively using the app where the change occurs.
Step 3: Unlock employee efficiency with automation and AI
Automation and AI tools eliminate time-consuming manual work, helping employees complete tasks faster and access organizational knowledge more efficiently.
Use WalkMe ActionBot to create automations that reduce errors, streamline processes, and help employees complete work faster. With its intuitive chat interface, ActionBot uses four key elements to guide employees through tasks step by step, without the need for training or complex navigation:
- Bots are the “containers” for your automations. A bot's primary goal is to comprehend user intent by analyzing the conversations it has stored.
- Conversations are a guided flow of messages, questions, and actions to complete a task.
- Launchers are the buttons that open the ActionBot chat when clicked.
- Actions are automated tasks the bot performs, from triggering WalkMe items to connecting with other systems.
Next, make use of WalkMe's generative AI capabilities to offer both proactive and on-demand support. WalkMe's Always-On AI Assistance proactively suggests guidance and help based on what the user is doing, reducing the need for help desk tickets.
Finally, WalkMe's On-Demand AI Assistance serves as a conversational interface, where employees can ask questions like “How do I update my lead in Salesforce?” and get contextual answers pulled from your organization's connected knowledge bases. This AI layer reduces time spent searching for answers and helps employees stay focused.
Probable
What are the outcomes you can expect from your solution?
Now that you know what's possible and how to achieve it, your organization can expect meaningful improvements in both employee performance and experience:
- Faster process completion, as employees move confidently through workflows
- Fewer errors and rework, due to real-time validation and clearer guidance
- Higher eNPS scores, driven by a more seamless and less frustrating digital experience
- Increased employee productivity without requiring additional headcount
Provable
How do you measure whether your solution achieved the desired outcomes?
At this stage, you'll measure the impact of your WalkMe solutions using both WalkMe data and broader business KPIs.
Here are some low-effort ways to start gauging the effectiveness of your WalkMe content:
- In Insights, review Total Interactions, Unique Users, and Goals to evaluate whether users complete key actions after interacting with your guidance.
- As you build your employee-productivity solutions, tag your content to relevant workflows, then create custom dashboards to monitor overall performance in one place.
- Use a survey at the end of a guidance flow to ask users if they found it helpful, and collect regular employee feedback with an eNPS survey.
- Use WalkMe's pre-built Engagement by Item report to download data in bulk and filter for employee-productivity solutions. Analyze this data to develop your own impact calculation.
- For example: The number of content plays for employee-productivity solutions × assumed productivity savings per process × average employee hourly wage.
- To stay conservative, assume WalkMe contributes to ~10% of the total savings and validate these assumptions with stakeholders.
Follow these steps to get deeper insights about user behavior:
- Enable DXA (Digital Experience Analytics), then generate Engaged Elements or Tracked Events to create a baseline of how users engage with relevant processes before deploying WalkMe solutions. This helps you track process adoption and completion before and after deploying WalkMe.
- Use Flow Analytics and Flow Comparison to compare drop-off rates and time saved before and after adding WalkMe guidance to see which processes are improving employee productivity.
- One calculation you can use with this data: Productivity Savings = (Time before WalkMe – Time with WalkMe) × Hourly salary
- For supported applications, leverage UI Intelligence to track improvements in form usage, such as reduced time spent and lower error rates – helping employees complete tasks faster and more accurately.
Use these best-in-class methods to truly understand the business impact of your WalkMe solution:
Connect WalkMe data with your organization's business systems through data integrations. WalkMe supports both outgoing data integrations and incoming data integrations, enabling you to analyze WalkMe's correlation with your internal business data.
If your goal is to improve employee productivity, it makes sense to connect WalkMe data with:
- HR or HCM systems to correlate WalkMe engagement with improvements in employee process completion time, HR data accuracy, and compliance training completion.
- CRM systems to measure how WalkMe guidance influences data quality, sales process adherence, and deal cycle length.
- ERP platforms to quantify efficiency gains in operational processes such as purchase orders, expense submissions, or financial approvals.
- Service management tools (e.g., ServiceNow, Zendesk, Jira Service Management) to measure reductions in internal support requests or rework related to process errors.
Even without data integrations, you can still demonstrate impact by tracking metrics such as cost avoidance from reduced process errors (e.g., purchase orders, sales opportunities, or timesheet entries) or reduction in employee-generated support tickets before and after WalkMe.
This approach helps you quantify WalkMe's impact on employee productivity, linking digital adoption directly to time saved, fewer errors, and greater process efficiency across your organization.