Editorial
Commerce has been around for centuries, and over that time, merchants have refined the shopping experience into the mature practice we know today. Employee experience and digital workplaces, by contrast, are much newer practices that could learn from retail experience design.
Think of the last time you went to a mall. It probably had a mix of boutique retail, dining, entertainment and social spaces. The variety of stores and experiences shopping malls bring together satisfy customer needs, yet collectively they deliver a consistent experience.
In contrast, the employee experience in many companies feels less like a well-designed shopping mall and more like a chaotic flea market. Employees (the customers) encounter different experiences within their workplaces when they interact with internal service providers (the experience drivers):
- Operational teams where the team leader provides operational management services.
- Project teams, where project managers provide project management services.
- Internal business services, who provide expense reimbursements, time-off, work safety, etc.
- Leadership services, provided by the entire chain of command and assisted by IC and HR.
Both malls and companies share the same objectives: create an engaging, enjoyable and memorable environment that encourages visitors (employees) to spend more time and return repeatedly.
Just as a mall works to create a few consistent experiences across multiple retail scenarios, companies should strive to do the same when it comes to delivering internal services.
Similarly, the way a mall allows shoppers to seamlessly move from store to store to buy shoes, get a haircut or enjoy an ice cream is akin to how employees need to transition smoothly between operational, project and internal business service tasks.
Table of Contents
- The 'Flea Market' Reality of Digital Workplaces
- Optimization in Isolation
- Taking Control of the Communication Noise: Push vs. Pull
- No One Cares Who the Owner Is
- How Malls Would Operate if Designed Like Digital Workplaces
- Applying Mall Principles to Employee Experience Design
- The 2-Layer Experience Model
- How Stores Operate
- A Holistic Design: Task Mechanics vs. Emotions
- Why Investment in EX Pays Off: The Shopping Mall Business Model
- Need Inspiration? Visit the Mall
The 'Flea Market' Reality of Digital Workplaces
Optimization in Isolation
Malls continuously optimize experiences for both stores and visitors. In a company, most optimization is done in isolation.
While each experience driver does their best to provide a good experience to the employees they serve, because their efforts are made in isolation, the end result is inconsistent at best. In this way it is similar to a flea market, where each seller tries to present their products as well as possible, yet the final experience is very inconsistent for the buyer.
These inconsistencies manifest in a number of different ways within the workplace.
Taking Control of the Communication Noise: Push vs. Pull
Malls have mastered noise control — and for good reason. As much as store managers would like to tell every mall visitors about their special offer, their new product line or a fancy new feature, if you’re shopping for shoes, you don’t want to see an ad for a TV.
Malls keep these push communications in check by charging for communications beyond store fronts to balance advertising revenue with customer experience. Customers pull information when they approach a store, when they want to learn about offers or discover new product lines.
Unfortunately, companies don’t adopt the same approach. Because internal comms are basically “free,” internal service providers push their messages (advertisements) to employees. This once again is the flea market effect, with sellers constantly vying to grab visitors’ attention.
The result is constant noise, which employees quickly learn to tune out.
Yet employees want to perform a task, they pay attention, because the information helps them effectively complete their task. When workplaces adopt the pull method of communications from malls, they minimize the push communications and allow the important information to come through.
No One Cares Who the Owner Is
Many stores share ownership: Inditex owns Stradivarius, Zara and Massimo Dutti in Europe, while PVH Corp owns Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and Arrow in the U.S. These stores appear as unique entities, yet share backend systems.
While customers may be aware of the store’s owner, they are more interested in buying what they want from a specific brand.
The same principle applies in companies. Employees don’t care if Travel Services are provided by HR or Admin — they just want to book a flight to a conference. They want experiences optimized for the task at hand, not ones centered around organizational structures.
No matter how complex an organization is, everything can be modeled around the relationship between internal customers and internal service providers. The company’s primary focus therefore should be connecting employees who want to perform tasks (like shoppers buying from a store) to the right internal service provider (the store).
No two shops are alike, yet customer interactions share common denominators such as:
- Attracting people into the store
- Selling the brand and its values
- Educating the customer about added value
- Informing them of new products or services
- Supporting purchasing decisions
- Performing commercial transactions and collecting feedback.
Similarly, each internal service provider needs to motivate their internal customers, inform them of the specifics of the service, including recent operational updates, educate them about better practices, provide clear support, execute the task at hand and collect feedback.
When you walk into a store, all of the products are nicely arranged to appeal to you. You wouldn't find expired products or leftover food from yesterday.
In contrast, content in intranets and knowledge bases is often missing or is obsolete. This happens because of questions around ownership to each area, and how you define ‘stores’ in your digital environment. Ownership should align naturally with existing job responsibilities and not artificially create new ones.
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The mindset of the store manager, driven in most cases by clear KPIs, is an important driver. In the corporate world, most internal service providers think in terms of ‘work’ rather than providing a service. This explains why digital resources are scattered across multiple repositories, why information is out of date, tools have confusing names and support staff are hard to identify.
How Malls Would Operate if Designed Like Digital Workplaces
If malls reflected the same patterns of most digital workplaces, the experience would look like this:
- New products would be randomly displayed throughout the store: shampoos next to bikes, clothes, shoes, electronics, lined up by the date of the product launch. This parallels the way we present operational announcements chronologically across several comm channels (email, chat, social, intranet, etc).
- Product manuals and best practices would be lumped into one spot, the equivalent of an e-learning platform.
- Payments would happen in a different dedicated area in each store, the equivalent of the app directory. The areas where payments happen will have fancy, misleading names, because apps like Success Factors, the SAP HR system, have names with no relation to the tasks they are supporting.
- If you ask for support, you will be given a phonebook with no information on who does what.
- Store employees will encourage you to leave feedback, yet there will be no place to submit the feedback within the store. Instead, you have to go to a different area within the mall, just like the specialized app that exists solely to collect employee feedback.
These are just a few of the many challenges that happen because the digital workplace is built around technical capabilities and not around the tasks/needs of the employees.
The result? Prices will be significantly higher, because poor employee experience leads to inefficiencies, which lead to higher costs. Also, the people working in stores will not be as helpful or as nice, because employee retention plummets.
In the same way, poor (digital) employee experience affects the bottom line, in terms of employee retention, employee productivity and lost efficiencies.
So what can we take from our commerce example?
Applying Mall Principles to Employee Experience Design
We should approach our digital workplace and employee experience design the same way malls approach visitors experience, to get consistency.
These experiences must be fixed first in the digital world, because this is where most of the interactions happen and where they are easiest to get right. Once you fix them in the digital workplace, propagating them to people without computer access by their coordinators will be a lot easier.
The 2-Layer Experience Model
A mall provides beautiful, spacious, shared areas and consistent access to all shops. This is the first layer.
The second layer is the individual stores. Each shop attracts you and provides good service, not just cold, impersonal, forgettable transactions. Each store preserves its individual identity while contributing to a cohesive navigational experience, particularly when you approach and enter the store.
In the EX/Digital workplace world, things should work the same way. Designers should provide consistent access to all the available services. 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).
How Stores Operate
A store’s business is to move products from a warehouse and into a customer’s shopping bags. The easiest way to accomplish this would be to allow customers to go directly to the back and pick up the package directly from a warehouse shelf.
While this isn’t bad, it comes with some trade-offs which become clear when you understand the sensory-driven retail shopper experience.
Consider a clothing store: attractive windows, well-laid out displays and front shelves filled with new products and industry trends.
Products are nicely stocked so you can quickly find items and provide inspiration for outfits. The staff is ready to provide you with support, and you might find a suggestion box too.
These all represent additional costs for the store but are viewed as investments in the customer experience — a key revenue driver.
Internal Service Parallels
Just as stores maximize for visual appeal, internal service providers can use employee experience to motivate audiences, promote changes and best practices, reduce support calls and collect meaningful feedback.
Have you ever walked into a grocery store with a specific list and left with different products because the store thoughtfully exposed them to you along your path? Have you ever made a better buying decision because information was provided to you during the shopping journey?
Within the workplace, AI chatbots operate in stark contrast, by bringing answers from a repository directly to the employee, leaving all the ‘experience factor’ aside.
While chatbots bring a lot of value, your employees need more than just answers.
Our visual cortex is extremely developed, and a great, productive experience often require more than reading straight answers.
This experience layer complements AI and is fundamental to achieving operational excellence.
What retail stores call “upselling,” corporate environments call engagement with the task at hand, such as upskilling, change adoption, workplace stress reduction, etc.
A Holistic Design: Task Mechanics vs. Emotions
Most digital workplace designers focus on task mechanics, aiming to reduce friction. Employee experience specialists focus on a few moments that matter, including the emotional aspects of these activities, yet they do not address the work itself.
The mall operators and all store managers focus on both aspects, the emotional drivers having the leading role, while also streamlining the mechanics (planograms, store inventory, payment systems, etc).
Why Investment in EX Pays Off: The Shopping Mall Business Model
Malls don’t make money directly from shoppers, they profit from renting space to the stores. Yet they realized that improving shopper experience attracts more people into their malls.
Notice the amount of effort that goes into providing a pleasant, smooth experience for all visitors across every corner of a mall, restrooms and parking spaces included.
Corporations don’t make money directly from employees, but must attract them just like the mall does. Management understands EX is important, but how important is it really?
If a mall was treated with the same amount of attention and consistency as EX, the entry way would be nice, a few stores that matter would be top notch and the rest of the company would look like a flea market, with unpaved alleys and unclear directions.
Need Inspiration? Visit the Mall
So the next time you go to a mall, please pay attention to the details of how they craft your experience, how the designers carefully balance their overall business objectives and the objectives of each store with your state of relaxation, calm and well-being. You will be able to transfer some of these experiences to your digital workplaces with great benefits for both your colleagues and your company’s bottom line.
Editor's Note: Read more thoughts on designing workplaces that work for employees below:
- Don't Let Your Company's Digital Tools Sabotage the Employee Experience — It’s time for organizations to overhaul their approach to digital employee experience.
- A Well-Designed Digital Workplace Benefits Your Employees - and Your Customers — Most cases of customer dissatisfaction can be traced back to an employee's inability to find the required information or tool they need to resolve the issue.
- How to Conduct User Research on a Shoestring Budget — There are low-cost and low-stress alternative ways to seek feedback and identify intranet needs.
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