Feature
Cristi Salanti brought us to the mall, took us down into a subway station and showed us his favorite cafe this year. But he wasn't writing a travelogue. He was asking digital workplace leaders to take inspiration from unusual places.
As a digital employee experience architect at Zenify.net, Cristi has worked with and developed intranets for over two decades. And all of that experience made him realize that digital employee experiences don't fail just because something goes wrong in a moment that matters. They fail because of the daily friction employees experience trying to accomplish certain tasks: asking for time off; submitting an IT support ticket; finding knowledge in their database.
Here are three of the biggest takeaways from Cristi's articles this year:
1. Employee Experience = the Everyday Experience of Work
Improving employee experience means improving how work flows, not just how an employee feels during a specific moment. The argument moves EX from what is often perceived of as a "soft" concept into something that is operational, designable and measurable. Cristi drove this point home in his article, "A Comprehensive, Actionable Model for Employee Experience."
The article introduced Cristi's underlying argument for the mindset digital workplace leaders should adopt to improve the digital employee experience: organizations should be designed like service environments.
Digital EX is the backbone of EX. A digital workplace that consistently delivers all four categories of services, that properly connects the employee with all stakeholders responsible for their well-being, becomes a natural foundation on which great EX can be built. Unless you fix the digital part, it is very unlikely you will achieve great EX — at least not in the long run, and not with minimal costs.
2. Digital Workplace Leaders' Focus? Removing Friction
Good digital employee experience should be like air — ideally, employees shouldn't be aware it's there because it just works. Employee actions in their digital environment should be reliable, predictable and demand low cognitive effort. Unfortunately, too many of our experiences are the opposite. Friction in digital handoffs, disconnected intranet experiences, bumpy transitions from one task to another — our daily work is filled with these moments.
To overcome this friction, Cristi invites us to view our digital workplaces through the lens of a shopping mall in, "Want to Design a Better Digital Workplace? Go to the Mall."
Just as shoppers move easily from store to store, employees should be able to quickly move from task to task, while having a consistent experience across each type of task (operational, project or internal business service task).
3. Timing and Platform Means as Much as the Message for Internal Comms Success
Internal communications professionals devote hours to getting the tone of their messages just so, only to push their message out and ... crickets.
Attention is scarce in our workplaces (and in our daily lives, but that's a topic for another day). When your messaging competes with the rest of the digital noise, all of your hard work will be wasted. Cristi suggests comms professionals spend a little less time on perfecting their messaging and a little more time thinking about timing and platform in: "What Internal Comms Can Learn From Joshua Bell's Subway Experiment."
At work noise can be anything that comes at the wrong time: countless email, notifications, phone calls, interruptions from peers or all of the articles in the intranet newsfeed .... This continuous noise numbs employees at all levels of the organization, hinders information flow, and has a direct effect on how the organization performs and how it adapts to internal and external changes.
