Unknown: employee experience has become a main
focus of human resource departments and the
driving force behind the HR strategies of many
companies. The term employee experience is also a
design principle and marketing buzzword for HR
technology vendors. given today's shifting
economic climate, plus the new reality of remote
and hybrid workforces, HR departments play a
critical role in creating and implementing a sound
employee experience strategy. Let's start with a
basic definition. employee experience refers to a
workers perceptions about their journey through
all the touch points of an organization, from
their job candidate days to their exit from the
organization and even beyond. Much of the
terminology of employee experience draws heavily
from customer experience, a concept that predates
it, the customer experience is determined by a
customer's journey through the touch points in the
buying process, such as visiting an ecommerce site
or returning a product. Likewise, it's essential
to understand the key touch points in the employee
lifecycle, so HR can build an effective employee
experience strategy. Think of employee experience
as a three legged stool. Culture, workspace and
technology are the three major components of the
employee experience, describing how employees feel
about their jobs, their co workers in their
company. culture includes the corporate culture
and how much it helps or hurts in creating a
positive employee experience. Culture also
includes specific people issues, like after work,
social activities, and how well workers get along
with their boss or feel supported in their jobs.
astrophysical workspace is everything in the work
environment that meets the needs of employees or
works against them. Those knees can range from
comfortable ergonomic desks and chairs, to safe
workplaces to healthy cafeteria foods to clean
temperature controlled air with the new reality of
hybrid and remote workforces. A workspace that
maximizes comfort and productivity is critical.
Whether it is in the office or in the home
technology is the third leg of the stool it also
plays a major role. It is a catch all category for
the software tools and technologies employees use
in the office or in remote environments. Hard to
use technology degrades the employee experience
and reduces productivity. In contrast, user
friendly up to date tools can give employees a
feeling of empowerment. While all three legs of
the stool are absolutely critical to a successful
employee experience strategy, we could add a
fourth leg employee engagement. This refers to how
employees feel about their job and their employer
and their commitment to their work into the
organization. For the most part, employee
engagement is a result of the employee experience,
not a driver of it. That's why measuring employee
engagement through surveys, data analysis, and
performance management software is the best way to
put numbers in science behind the very slippery
concept of employee experience. It helps to
determine how satisfied employees are with the
culture, the physical environment and the
technology. It's also a way to solicit ideas for
improvements and see if they are meeting employees
expectations.
Information technology including personal
computers, corporate networks, business
applications and collaboration tools plays a major
role because of the triple impact on the day to
day experiences of employees. First, technology is
usually the mechanism employees use to carry out
their own HR transactions and interact with the HR
department. Second, technology is the means by
which many employees do most of their work. And
third, it is often the primary tool that HR
department managers and executives use to analyze
and manage the employee experience itself. There
are many software applications that affect the
employee experience, and especially important one
is the human resource management system or HRMS,
which is sometimes called an HR is or a Human
Capital Management Suite. It handles most of the
HR transactions that employees need to make, like
adjusting their tax withholdings or asking for a
tuition reimbursement. Software that makes it hard
to request or execute those transactions or worse
does them incorrectly to tracks from the employee
experience. an intranet can be a more friendly
familiar entry point to employees entire roster of
applications. It can also serve as a communication
channel for sharing news and other transmitters of
corporate culture. There are many other tools and
apps that can actually improve the employee
experience service management tools such as HR
HelpDesk, health and wellness apps and websites
and HR chatbots workflows and artificial
intelligence All intended to automate employee
requests. The experiences employees have while
using their organization's IT infrastructure and
business applications are sometimes called the
Digital employee experience. It's increasingly
considered a distinct and important part of an
employee experience strategy. Ensuring positive
experiences requires putting the needs of
employees front and center when planning
technology purchases. One way to do this is for HR
and IT to work in close partnership, and not just
when it comes time to implement new HR technology.
The bottom line is that having a strategy for
planning and implementing a complete digital
workplace can go a long way to improving the
overall employee experience. HR consultants,
software vendors and system integrators tend to
recommend similar steps to address the main
components of the employee experience that we
discussed earlier. Culture, workspace and
technology along with the most important measure
of success, employee engagement, the IBM Institute
for Business Value published a paper called
Designing employee experience, how a unifying
approach can enhance engagement and productivity.
It neatly explains the five essential steps for
implementing an employee experience strategy, and
the essential tools and tactics. The five steps
are as follows. Step one, tune into the voice of
the employee. Start by asking employees about
their experience and how it could be better
consider sending out a regular employee engagement
survey that repeats some of the same questions so
you can see trends over time. A more sophisticated
tool is employee sentiment analysis. Another
approach borrowed from Customer Experience
Management. Sentiment Analysis technology allows a
much greater degree of automation and surveys. It
uses natural language processing to analyze the
employee feedback and unstructured data, such as
social media and email, then it characterizes and
quantifies how employees feel about the
organization. Sentiment Analysis and survey should
be part of a broader strategy of using people
analytics to better understand employees. Step
two, create a map of the employee journey. The
best way to document employees lifecycle to the
company is to create an employee journey map. This
means identifying personas, perhaps according to
job types, like entry level, or C suite, and the
touchpoints they typically encounter, then gather
feedback from employees about their experience at
each touchpoint and note ideas for improving
journey mapping is also an exercise in empathy
that demands frequent check ins, and a willingness
to take a holistic view of the employee, and that
includes their life goals. Step three, build a
cross functional employee experience coalition.
It's important to bring together workers from
diverse backgrounds and experience. A commonly
used method is design thinking, a group approach
to solving problems by brainstorming, prototyping,
and testing solutions, revising them based on user
feedback, then repeating the process as long as
necessary. That means inviting everyone who has an
impact on the employee experience to sit at the
table. The size HR include at the very least
representatives from facilities management, it
corporate management, and marketing. Step four,
invest in touch points with the most impact. The
journey mapping process will tell you about the
moments that matter most to employees. The
employee onboarding process is almost always a
major touch point is the most important action
after recruitment. When new employees get a better
idea of the culture, the physical workspace and
the technology of their new employer. A difficult
onboarding experience can set an employee on a bad
path that leads to an early departure and negative
recommendations to other job candidates. Career
Development is another big touch point that can
tilt the employee experience either way, assigning
employees to meaningful projects that test their
skills and creativity can help them feel engaged
and hopeful about their future. It's another
moment that matters in the employee journey. Step
five, use agile design on employee experiences.
Techniques borrowed from Agile software
development can work well in an employee
experience strategy, and align closely with design
thinking. rapid development methods can help find
solutions that can be implemented quickly and
address short and long term problems identified in
the early steps. As with most any strategy, don't
try to fix the whole problem at once. tackles
small manageable pieces, then start from the
beginning and do it all over again. Improving the
employee experience is a never ending process.
research study suggests that a good employee
experience leads to a number of positive results
such as the following greater employee
productivity. more satisfied and engaged employees
work harder and smarter produce more and waste
less, more creativity and innovation. employee
satisfaction is known to correlate with openness
to new suggestions and ideas, improved employee
retention, happier employees are less likely to
leave the company, which in turn adds to the
skills and experience of the entire organization.
lower turnover, lower employee turnover helps
avoid the cost of recruiting and training
replacement workers reduced absenteeism. This
increases productivity, boosts employee morale,
and helps stabilize the workforce, especially when
the workforce is hybrid or remote. And last but
not least, better customer facing experiences.
Happy employees tend to express more positive
impressions of their company, its products and
services that typically delivers a higher level of
customer satisfaction. As you can see, creating a
successful employee experience strategy takes a
combination of people, technologies, best
practices and continuous feedback from those most
effected the employees. The right strategy can
yield tangible and intangible results that
ultimately increase revenue, reduce costs and
hopefully result in higher profits.