Her work with our team launched our organization's first intentional efforts to raise the bar on Psychological Safety at the Royal.
The success to date of our program, and this article confirm for us that we're on the right track.
How
Can You Build a Better Employee Experience?
“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.”
– Oracle
Employee experience is
not just another buzzword created to jargonize the discipline of employee
engagement. It is, in fact, the foundation for achieving differentiated and
sustainable business results. This is hardly surprising when you consider its
impact. When the employee experience is good, employees are happy, engaged, and
able to get their work done efficiently. That delivers better bottom line
results.
But what is employee experience? Is it the perks and
benefits that you offer to your employees – the cherry on the top of the
ice-cream sundae? Or is it something more? An important point to consider here
is if the ice-cream sundae is appalling, the cherry will not make up for it.
Your employee experience is like the sundae, it runs so much deeper than perks
and casual Fridays!
When we talk about
employee experience, we are also referring to the days where there are
difficult performance reviews, or how well the manager supported an employee
the day she learned her son had cancer? Or consider whether the organization
acted upon the key areas of opportunities identified in the last engagement
survey.
Designing the right employee experience
Employee experience is
principally concerned with one of the essential questions in business: How do I
create the right Employee experience (that is, the right employee operating
environment) so I can help my people deliver great results? Once you accept
this notion – that it’s all about your people – then you really begin to see
how the right employee experience can be transformative. Hence, your most vital
contribution as a leader is to design, build, and sustain the right employee
experience so that the sum of your employees’ perceptions, whether across your
organization, division
or team, is such that it encourages and produces the
very best in your people.
Here are our
recommendations that can act as a roadmap to your organization’s employee
experience strategy –
Tune into the voice of your employees using analytics
The subject of employee
experience may suggest the softer disciplines of employee culture and
perception, but enhancement efforts should start with analytics. Your
organization can apply similar techniques to gauging employee experience as
those you use to measure and evaluate customer experience. Traditional employee
HR information, semi-structured engagement surveys and unstructured comments
from internal and external social platforms can 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.
Invest in key touchpoints where employee experience has the
greatest impact
Making changes to
employee experience often requires investment. It forces you to think about the
points in the employee lifecycle that truly make a difference —for employees
and the organization as a whole. For some companies, particularly those in
traditionally labor-intensive industries, recruiting and onboarding processes
have a significant impact on attracting and retaining top talent. These
organizations depend on recruiting experiences that reflect the employer brand
and are able to rapidly absorb employees into the working environment.
For other companies,
experiences related to project assignments and career development will more
notably impact retention and productivity. Understanding the relevance of
different employee experiences, and taking into consideration your
organizational strategy and culture, will help you target investment in those
areas that are most impactful.
Build an employee experience coalition that crosses traditional
silos
Designing integrated
experiences around the physical, social and task spheres requires a
multi-functional perspective. In addition to tool design and development, IT needs
to provide the hardware and help desk support that makes it easier for
employees to perform their jobs. Facilities and real estate services are vital
to delivering workspaces that enable individual productivity and collective
innovations. Marketing must help amplify and communicate the connection between
employee and corporate branding. And perhaps most importantly, leadership at
the line-of-business level must oversee day-to-day employee activities and the
overall work environment.
Employee experience
cannot be delegated to a specific supporting organization; rather, it needs to
be woven into the very fabric of your business. In the future, responsibility
for the employee experience may fall under the umbrella of a Chief Digital
Officer. While many of these digital leadership roles currently cover external
customer experiences, it is not too far-flung to imagine them expanding to
encompass employee experience issues, as well.
Design employee experiences using rapid, iterative design
principles
Lessons from the world
of customer experience point to the value of applying agile design principles
to enhancing employee experiences. First, develop a deep understanding of your
user population based on quantitative as well as observational data. Second,
document the stages of the employee journey, highlighting the physical, social
and task-related interactions that occur at each stage, as well as approaches
for addressing limitations or bottlenecks. Third, rapidly develop solutions
that solve parts of the puzzle over short time periods rather than creating one
larger solution that may take months or years to execute. Finally, capture
feedback and refine the original solution on an ongoing basis. Applying these
principles to the design of employee experience can generate quick successes
and prevent larger, more costly challenges in the future.
Conclusion:
If your aim is to create
a thriving workforce, successful business, and happy customers, the obvious
route is via your employees. How you treat them will have a knock-on effect
that ripples throughout your company. It’s time to examine your employee
experience and, where necessary, get started on making positive changes. Today.
References:
- Christine M. “We all need friends at work.”
Harvard Business Review.
- Chiaburu, Dan S. and
David A. Harrison. “Do peers make the place? Conceptual synthesis and
meta-analysis of coworker effects on perceptions, attitudes, OCBs, and
performance.”
- IBM Institute for
Business Value analysis based on client interviews and secondary research.
- “Think Better: Neuroscience is the Next
Competitive Advantage.” Steelcase. 2015.
- Hedge, A. “Linking environmental conditions
to productivity.” Eastern Ergonomics Conference and Exposition. June
2004.
- King, Rachel. “IBM
researchers try to measure employee well-being using technology.” Wall
Street Journal. July 2015.
- Luis Garza, Innovation Manager, CEMEX
Research Group.
- Pink, Daniel.
Drive. Riverhead Books. 2009.
- Accessibility Action Plan, 2015-2016.
National Australia Bank.
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