How Your CHRO Can Lead Digital Employee Experience
Even with the recent rounds of layoffs in big technology firms, the employment market remains incredibly tight around the globe. The expression ‘the war for talent’ has long gone out of favor, but it remains an immediate business challenge for many.
It’s therefore no surprise that employee experience is a priority for many chief HR officers (CHRO). They are often seen as the heart of an organization, with their focus on the human needs of all employees. They are also responsible for providing some of the most commonly used corporate services, such as applying for leave or managing pay.
The digital component — the digital employee experience (DEX) — is already being shaped by the digitization of many HR activities, and driven by the rollout of tools such as Workday and ServiceNow. Beyond these operational changes, the CHRO can play a much-needed role as a DEX leader, alongside the CIO and other key members of the C-Suite.
While there are many opportunities to improve the employee experience, CHROs commonly focus on three aspects:
- Onboarding.
- The delivery of HR services.
- Improving employee engagement.
Supporting Onboarding
The first few days, weeks and even months, in an organization present a steep learning curve for new employees. Without a network of internal relationships, new starters can feel isolated and overwhelmed.
In one of its surveys, Gallup found that only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job of onboarding new employees. Furthermore, research by Brandon Hall Group (pdf) found that organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new-starter productivity by over 70%.
These are just a few of the figures from surveys and research around the globe that show how critical it is to provide a positive digital employee experience for new starters. There is a clear opportunity for the CHRO to make a measurable impact on hiring and retention rates.
Leading firms are increasingly providing new hires with access to some (or all) of the intranet before their official start date, playing into a mutual desire to be productive from day one and onwards. This can be supplemented by tailor-made content for new starters, including introductory videos, interactive training modules, and scheduled communications.
Once the new hire has started, an effective DEX would involve proactively connecting employees into appropriate collaboration spaces, giving them an interactive checklist of tasks to work through, and providing them with a clear understanding of the organizational structure and business practices.
This is much more than just a technology problem that can be solved by rolling out new tools. To get the greatest improvements, a holistic methodology for improving onboarding DEX is structured around meaningful employee research, with solution delivery by a multidisciplinary team.
Related Article: The Risk of Virtual Onboarding
Simplifying HR Interactions
Human resources is often the single largest provider of corporate services to employees, from initial induction and training, through to career development and at finally, offboarding.
In many cases, a collection of different systems deliver these HR services, each obtained at different times and working in a disjointed way with other systems (if at all). This can include standalone payroll, personnel and e-learning products. In addition, most legacy systems provide a poor experience on mobile devices.
This provides an opportunity for CHROs to take a strategic approach to not just modernize HR systems, but to spearhead the delivery of a radically better digital experience for employees.
This may involve:
- Creating a seamless experience across the intranet and HR systems.
- Streamlining the digital delivery of common HR tasks.
- Expanding the use of e-learning to encompass more of the knowledge needed by employees (particularly frontline staff).
- Simplifying access via single sign-on.
- Creating a mobile experience that delivers ‘anywhere’ access.
A word of caution: a growing number of vendors are now offering what they call "an employee experience platform," implicitly promising that their tool will cut through all of the complexity to deliver a single DEX.
These tools are modern in design and capabilities, but DEX is all about the experience of the human in the picture, not about just consolidating technology platforms. By taking a truly strategic approach CHROs can retain the focus on the human side of things, thereby navigating the roles of all the technology solutions in play.
Learning Opportunities
Related Podcast: Taking a Design Thinking Approach to Digital Employee Experience at Kraft Heinz
Fostering Greater Employee Engagement
Employee experience, in its broadest extent, encompasses digital, physical and cultural elements. CHROs are responsible for addressing cultural considerations, often focusing on employee engagement.
This isn't a 'nice to have' issue. Multiple surveys, most recently Gartner's, show both a disturbingly low level of employee engagement, and the material impact this has on the success of businesses.
CHROs can take many practical steps to use digital experiences to improve employee engagement, including:
- Using modern digital communication channels to better inform employees.
- Sharing good news stories with all employees, including through the use of video.
- Providing richer two-way engagement with senior leaders using collaboration tools.
- Celebrating employees and their successes, using tools such as the intranet to communicate these firm-wide.
- Helping leaders at all levels to work better with their teams, even when they’re geographically dispersed.
While many of these activities may already be underway in some form, they deliver greatest benefits when coordinated as part of a wider DEX strategy. This helps to shape the design of solutions, and to ensure you're addressing the true needs and motivations of employees.
Related Article: Employee Apathy at All-Time High
A Leader Among Equals
While there is clearly much that a CHRO can to do improve DEX, many other issues and needs must be addressed by other business areas.
For this reason, DEX must be driven by a guiding coalition that includes not just the key corporate services teams, but also senior representatives from the business itself.
The creation of this group may be spearheaded by the CHRO, who can then play a leadership role as the first among equals. Alternatively, DEX initiatives may be led by other senior leaders, with the CHRO representing the employee experiences that stretch from hiring to firing.
Regardless of who is the catalyst for change, DEX must be a senior leader consideration. It shouldn’t be devolved to an individual team, particularly not if these will be additional responsibilities for a team already busy with business-as-usual activities.
In my work with senior leaders across a wide range of industries, the importance and nature of DEX sits very comfortably as a top-line strategic consideration. With consensus relatively easy to obtain, a guiding coalition of leaders can quickly institute an ongoing program of work that will move the dial on DEX.
With organizations still finding their feet at the end (hopefully!) of a sustained period of disruption on many fronts, this is the time to put an emphasis on DEX — with the CHRO as a clear and urgent voice.
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About the Author
James Robertson is the originator of the global movement towards digital employee experience (DEX). Twenty years in this space, he’s one of the leading thinkers on intranets and digital workplaces. He’s the author of the books “Essential Intranets: Inspiring Sites that Deliver Business Value” and “Designing Intranets: Creating Sites that Work.”
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