Editorial
Employee experience (EX) has been around for a while now. People agree it's important, managers have spent time and money on it. And yet things haven’t really improved.
On the contrary, while EX’s objectives are understandable and commendable, translating them into reality proves challenging — and for good reason.
You Have to Improve More Than the 'Moments That Matter'
The traditional approach to EX aims to improve some of the relevant “moments that matter” in the employee lifecycle. The challenge is that these moments represent less than 10% of the time an employee spends at work in a year. And, these ‘important’ touch points might not be the same for people from Finance, Operations or Sales.
The other 90% of the time employees spend at work is somehow forgotten. This “experience of work” takes up most of our day to days, for example, handling a customer complaint, requesting maintenance for equipment, submitting business expenses for reimbursement, getting detailed product information, submitting feedback on a newly introduced system, etc. I have never seen an employee leave a job because the job board had poor filters, yet I have seen a lot of people frustrated over poor internal operational communications, overly complex tools, cumbersome procedures or avoidable errors.
Most of this experience of work takes place digitally, therefore I would argue that a good EX strategy should have a strong digital backbone. Still, for most EX specialists, digital is more like an afterthought.
Adding to the challenges, the ROI of traditional EX is hard to quantify. Decision makers have a lot of competing business requirements on their plate, and the ones with a clear and competitive ROI will always be preferred. As a result, EX is often left aside.
A Better Way to Look at EX
I’d like to propose an alternate approach to EX. My approach starts with the observation that every task or aspect of work an employee must accomplish has an equivalent owner of the task or specific topic. I call that person the internal service provider.
To improve the experience of the employee in relation to the task/topic, you have to make it easier for the provider to deliver their services to their internal customers.
The services delivered to employees can be broken down across four categories:
- Team management services: When an employee performs regular tasks with their team under the supervision of the direct manager.
- Project management services: When an employee works on a project under the supervision of a project manager.
- Internal business services: Examples of internal business services include requesting leave, having travel expenses reimbursed, paying supplier bills or submitting a near-miss safety report.
- Leadership services: People need motivation, to feel they are a part of something bigger where they can make a difference and that they can develop to their highest potential within the organization. These services are delivered by the management team, at times with internal comms and HR involvement.
Employee experience is the total experience of all four types of internal services provided to the employee.
Let’s look at each of these services in detail to see how we can improve each. Digital workplace design, centered on these four types of services, is that needed backbone of great EX.
Employee Experience Within Operational Teams
While this is the simplest and most common scenario, it has a twist.
Traditional team management sees the team members offering services to the team leader. When you look through the lens of employee experience, you see that the manager provides the services to each member of the team.
The easiest way to improve the employee experience here is to help the manager improve their managerial abilities. A number of resources are available on how to do this, so I will leave it at that.
How Digital Tools Help: Line of business apps supported by suites like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace help a team work better together, especially in hybrid scenarios. Employees also need consolidated lists with all of their tasks, including those coming from operational systems (like “list of invoices to be processed” plus “list of support tickets assigned to me”) and ad-hoc tasks like “build a report for the CFO by Friday”.
Employee Experience When Part of A Project
Project managers own a project and employees perform the tasks. So, the project manager is providing project management services to every employee on a project.
Based on my experience running several large projects and obtaining a PMP certification, I would say that a good project management framework is quintessential for a good employee experience. This is especially true because some best practices in PM tend to be counterintuitive, especially for people whose main experience is in operational activities.
As an example, people tend to delay activities or enlarge the scope of work without a clear understanding of the dependencies these changes have on the overall project. Understanding their opinions, educating them and managing their expectations have a big impact on how they experience work on the project.
Project communication. Changes in operational activities are rare,so people only want to be notified when something out of the ordinary happens. Communication plays a much bigger role in a project, as the number of changes in a short period of time can overwhelm team members. Miscommunication here can quickly lead to increased FOMO, frustration, rework and delays.
Reaching project goals is important, but not at the cost of the experience of the people involved. Because if you reach project objectives, yet the project team is frustrated and overworked, they might quickly look for another job.
How Digital Tools Help: You need up to date collaboration and communication tools to make sure everyone is working on the latest version of a document. The team needs a shared agreement on how they will work and communicate — in other words, no emailed attachments or long email strings. A clear task list is also fundamental for project success. In cases when an employee is involved in more than one project, try to create some consistency between how the projects are run.
Employee Experience While Consuming Internal Business Services
When an employee requests proof of employment, registers a customer complaint, reads a product brochure or a work instruction or reports a security breach, all of these are examples of internal business services. Every one of these tasks has an internal service owner.
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Employee experience takes the biggest hit here — for a few good, simple reasons:
- While you know most of your managers, you’ll rarely know all of the internal service providers, since they’re often in different parts of the organization, different floors, buildings, cities and even countries.
- Most companies don’t think in terms of services provided to the employees — and most internal service owners only think about it as “work.”
- These interactions happen at a very low level within the organization: most internal service providers are regular employees or team managers at the most, while most of their internal customers are regular employees.
- Executives don’t see the problems here, so they are accepted as normal. Any attempt to address these problems are therefore often cosmetic or limited in scope.
- Each internal service provider looks for local optimizations, which lead to inconsistent experience across internal services.
- Managers tend to assume that because they have top of the line business apps such as SAP, Salesforce, Oracle Apps, ServiceNow, it means their internal services work very well. Tools alone aren’t enough. Employees also need to understand the Why, the How and the What of that task (business apps being part of the What), which can be challenging in a complex, dynamic environment.
How Digital Tools Help: The digital component here is fundamental. Sadly, most digital workplaces fail to efficiently and consistently connect the internal business service providers with their internal customers. Instead they provide neatly organized collections of digital resources (a list with all the existing apps, a list with all the employees, libraries with all documents, all sorts of news, etc). The approach manages to transform some essential connections into an information salad, and fails to properly connect internal business service owners with their customers. It’s fair to say that the connection between internal business service providers and their internal customers is broken by design in today’s (digital) workplaces.
Don’t get me wrong, these services work. But they work slower, at higher cost, with more problems and stress, involving an excessive amount of low value-added human interactions. Also, when changes are made, it is a slow and painful experience.
Employee Experience While Consuming Leadership Services
Employees need to feel like they are part of a bigger team. They want to feel aligned with the company values and engaged with the strategic priorities of the organization. Direct, middle and top managers come into play here, by delivering what I call “leadership services” to the employees, with some professional help from IC and HR.
Professional literature is full of ways you can achieve this, so I will not spend any more time on this topic.
How Digital Tools Help: Most digital tools provide at least decent support for connecting employees to the middle and top management. Features such as a CEO blog, virtual town hall meetings, webinars, are all popular approaches in this segment.
Status of Employee Experience
Consistency across these services makes it possible for employees to jump from one task to another with ease.
I believe EX should be like the experience of going to a shopping mall. A mall includes several types of experiences: department stores, food court, entertainment area. Whether you shop for shoes, clothes, hairdressing, sports equipment or food, your experience as a customer is pretty consistent.
The same should be true for employee experiences in a company.
And just as retail outlets are designed to attract, sell and upsell, EX needs to be able to inform and engage employees, to upskill them, and better connect them with the relevant internal partners for all the relevant tasks within the company.
But EX in practice is less like a mall and more like a flea market, wheresellers display their wares wherever they see fit and they shout and grab passersby to catch their attention. It’s unpleasant for the buyer and it’s unpleasant and unproductive for a busy worker.
EX should not have a “one size fits all” approach. It must accommodate different employee needs from different parts of the organization. Somebody from Finance will have different needs from somebody from Productions, Operations or Sales. Because these employees in different departments use different mixes of services, improving the delivery of each of these services allows for improved experiences across the board.
When we consider the digital environment for EX, it’s even worse, because most digital workplaces are more like a collection of digital resources designed around their owners, and not around their consumers.
The Fix
In spite of all of this, improving EX is not as complicated as it sounds! 😊
Great EX starts by changing the mindset of the four types of internal service providers. This might sound tricky, but all internal service providers have substantial short- and long-term gains from this approach. Organizations that focus on their customers tend to perform better. The same can happen when employees are treated as internal customers.
The second step is to streamline the digital delivery of all these services to the employees in an employee-centric manner. This is also a quick win, because internal service providers will be able to do more with less and their internal customers will receive better service.
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.
Sustainability
Sustainability is a key criterion for any internal initiative. What will happen to the organization after an EX-initiative has been implemented? Will it generate natural support in the organization, or do we have to keep pushing at it? Do we need to hire more people, do some people need to work harder to make the rest of the employees happier?
All I can say is that an internal service-driven EX approach lowers the effort required by the internal service providers and the employees to do their work.
Employee engagement improves, service providers can better understand and communicate about their role, and internal customers receive better service and understand the Why, the How and the What of the service they are provided.
The Result: Outstanding Employee Experiences
I believe this is the simplest, most efficient, effective, comprehensive and actionable approach to creating outstanding employee experiences.
Improved internal services delivery also comes with some nice to have side effects such as improved task execution across the board, lower support costs, easier integration for new employees and faster propagation of any organizational change. These benefits can be rather easily quantified and put in a clear ROI calculation, which, in my experience, is measured in months and not years.
And chief officers love these side effects when it comes to approving EX initiatives.
Editor's Note: Read more thoughts on improving the digital employee experience:
- Creating Exceptional Employee Experiences: Where HR, Comms and Technology Unite — Employee experiences cross departmental boundaries. So to create exceptional EX, multiple departments must work together – with internal comms in the lead.
- Where AI Can Improve Employee Experience: A Digital Workplace Perspective — AI can help build digital workplaces where employees thrive. Success lies in balancing tech innovation with an understanding of employee needs and aspirations.
- Can Human Resources and Employee Experience Coexist? — Employee-centric programs often conflict with the tactical structure of HR organizations. Here's what it takes to reach alignment.
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