Employee Experience – more critical than ever

The number one issue on the mind of HR professionals in 2020 was employee experience. Many organisations have not even started and those that have, have not done a very good job. With COVID 19, HR needs to urgently shift from process thinking to experience design thinking with the employee at the centre. New York City-based WithPulp is a remote-only digital agency. Husam Machlovi, its CEO, says that new, big focus for employee experience managers will be to help remote employees implement their ideal working schedules. 

Employee experience is the whole experience of the employee and is broad in scope and elements – it uses human centred design, employee journeys, design thinking, empathy mapping and analytics. Susan Peters, SVP of HR at GE defines the Employee Experience simply as “seeing the world through the eyes of our employees, staying connected, and being aware of their major milestones.” Employee experience bakes employee engagement into each interaction the employee has with the organisation and the people in it. 

Creating a clearly defined and formal employee experience has become a strategic foundation for businesses wanting to flourish in today’s global marketplace.” Josh Bersin (2020) says: “EX means that "we work for the employees" and not the other way around. Sivanthu and Pillai (2018) write that: “powered by emerging technologies and new generation employees – has the potential to transform end-to-end HR processes covering all aspects of talent onboarding, talent development, and talent off-boarding”. 

Employee experience needs to therefore include the digital and remote experience. Digital employee experience (DEX) is the sum total of the digital interactions within the work environment. The power of the digital workplace as a lens is that it’s very grounded in the day-to-day reality of the digital systems and processes that staff are using. (Robertson, 2018). This means that Employee Experience managers must create a totally seamless digital employee experience that workers can access from anywhere, from onboarding to training to team management. Organisations need to have confidence that people want to do their best for their organizations and its customers, so it is important to take a people-first approach and remember that this inflection point in the world of work will be defined with the employee at the center and everyone will benefit as a result. 

Employee experience managers will need to advocate on behalf of the employee so that the employee’s work life balance is maintained, and they can focus on the results they were brought on board to achieve. He also believes that the employee experience manager’s role will evolve to have more ownership of a company’s intranet (i.e. a wiki, internal communications, employee directory, onboarding). The intranet will become a more effective way to onboard new employees as well as create communities within a large, remote workforce. (Roe, 2020)

You have to measure and continually improve the employee experience. Measuring Employee Experience is in its infancy. One way is to measure eNPS. Employee Net Promoter Score. Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is a measure of how likely your staff members are to recommend your company as a place to work. It comes from the NPS measure more typically associated with customer satisfaction surveys and it asks employees how likely they are to ‘promote’ you on a scale from 0 to 10.

Traditional employee HR information, semi-structured engagement surveys and unstructured comments from internal and external social platforms can also provide insights into potential solutions to experience challenges. Even the Internet of Things can generate useful data about working conditions and personal wellness. Analytics can help you develop insights about specific segments of the population, identify changes in physical and social environments, amplify employee voice and address issues associated with productivity and tool usage. (IBM, 2016).