It is all about the employee experience

“Employee experience is the sum of all experiences an employee has with an employer, over the duration of their relationship with that employer.” (ORACLE)

Talent is the key to keeping an organisation relevant, but with a global marketplace commoditising the best jobs and people, it takes much more than offering a role and salary to reap returns. (KPMG)

The experiences employees have at work matter. An employee centric approach to HR shifts the dial completely for the human experience. Kevin Finke writes: “The phrases “employee experience” and “employer brand” have become popular among human resources professionals as they aim to bolster their organization’s ability to attract top talent. Creating a clearly defined and formal employee experience has become a strategic foundation for businesses wanting to flourish in today’s global marketplace.”

Just as Marketing has become customer centric and manage the whole customer journey, Human Resources have been urged, in a competitive talent environment, to take an employee journey approach and use design thinking and co-creation to design moments that matter to groups/personas of employees. In order to that, HR has to understand what is working and not working for employees, what they want and how these experiences can be designed. The driving force in employee experience transformation is the idea of the consumer-worker. As employees experience ease of digital communication, simple online administration, pre- emptive personalised service and fast resolution of issues from other companies, they are demanding this from their place of work.

And this has huge impact. As stated in an Oracle article:” As employees, we’re all on a journey with our employer. Our experiences on this journey will strongly influence our attitudes; our attitudes in turn form our behaviours which ultimately drive outcomes. A poor Employee Experience (EX) naturally results in a poor outcome. Attitudes are formed by the Employee Experience, so if we can change the experience we can reshape the attitudes, resulting in different behaviours and different outcomes.”

Many HR teams have started on this approach, but have made the mistake by simply throwing systems and apps at the problem. The whole experience has to change using employee experience journey mapping. It has to be employee and talent centric (using tools like empathy maps), it has to be collaborative (using design thinking), it has to be insightful (powered by best practice and analytics) and it has to be engaging (a great and easy user experience).

The idea is to move from a process-driven mindset to a mindset that always begins with the experience for the HR customer— who could be a candidate, employee, contingent worker, or even alumni. So, for example, instead of thinking in process terms, “What do we need new-hires to do on their first day?” HR thinks in experience terms: “What do we want a new employee’s first day to be like?”

“Follow their progression within the organisation, the learning of new skills, their development and
the timeframes for that,” he says. “Understand their priorities, what’s important to them, and how you’re able to create an experience which aligns with some of those expectations.” (Martin Blake, KPMG)

Questions like the following are especially effective:

• Describe your typical day at work?
• What excites you about your job?
• What are the things that distract you and are pet peeves for you at work?
• When is a time you felt most empowered to do your job?

Modern HR needs to support new ways of working and an increasingly digital workplace.  They also need to make sure engagement is baked into every part of the experience and measure and adjust the employee experience. Usually new designs are tested in experiments and only after showing real impact, it is scaled. HR needs to deeply understand which drivers have the biggest impact on the employee experience and prioritize employee initiatives that will make a quantifiable difference to the enterprise.

Sources:

Oracle: An Employee Centric Approach to HR
Deloitte: Reimagine and craft the employee experience
Finke, K. (2017). The Experience Engine: How firms are creating employee experiences to attract top talent.
Foresee: Measuring employee experience to drive positive employee engagement
KPMG: The new world HR: the employee as ‘customer’, connection and reward.