Working in the United States for 12 months was an eye opener as there is virtually no protection for employees. With the most complex labour and tax laws, and benefits systems and processes I have worked with, the Employee Experience (EX) is a way for HR departments to design customer centric processes.
What is Employee Experience?
Employee Experience is essentially what individual employees encounter, good or bad, through their work journey. It’s everything from being a candidate, to On-boarding, the interaction with colleagues and managers, to the systems and processes they use. It is an holistic and inclusive view of the employee journey that organisations should embed into their everyday business and management of employees. Using the concepts of design thinking, you can use this to build a digitally enabled experience for your employees.
Out of necessity, the Employee Experience, based on the Customer Experience, has been evolving as a point of difference for HR to improve the lives of their employees. Done well, a thoughtful, custom-designed and realistic Employee Experience can most definitely help to increase engagement, reduce turnover and generally make everyone’s work lives more enjoyable.
The US is typically 5 to 7 years ahead of Australia when it comes to trends and practices in technology and sometimes the edgier side of Human Resources. Designing your Employee Experience is one of the trends we need to get behind in Australia.
Before you launch headlong into it, here are some questions to get you thinking:
Bespoke or Cookie Cutter?
Design the Employee Experience to suit your organisation. You will hear about wonderful, amazing and innovative Experiences in On-boarding, for example. These companies may have spent lots of time and money on implementation. But, this may not be the case for you; your high value Experience focus may be ‘seamlessly recording CPD points for accountants’. So, design what works for you. It might mean that you start with one experience – the one that you know can do better – CPD points. Once you have this under your belt, you have the confidence to tackle a more complex Experience, such as On-boarding.
How many employees do I need to have?
There are no minimum numbers. Of course, the more scale you have, the bigger the return on investment. But think about this, if you are a company of 100 people, and you have 5 people in your critical areas leave each year because their Experience at your company doesn’t meet their expectations, wouldn’t it make sense to redesign processes so employees want to stay? Even for an SME this is a lot of money and time saved.
I’ll be posting some more information on this in the coming weeks, but would love to chat in the meantime if you need some help or guidance.
Photo credit: Kevin Laminto at Unsplash