Is Your Experience Management Strategy Facing Forward or Backward?

Employee experience management is about understanding and influencing employee beliefs and attitudes that support a company’s mission, vision and goals. Innovations in experience management technology are making a major impact by enabling companies to better link HR practices to business outcomes. But to fully realize the power of experience management, companies must do more than use it to improve past practices. They must use it to drive future business results. 

How Experience Management Works

The image above illustrates how experience management works.  Employee experience mediates the link between HR practices and business results. Workforce management methods do not directly impact business outcomes. What they do is change employee beliefs and attitudes. Changes in beliefs and attitudes then translate into changes in employee behavior, which in turn impact business results.  

For example, imagine a company implements a new pay for performance process. The first thing this affects is employees’ experience in terms of beliefs and expectations about how much money they are likely to receive in the future. This then changes how they act in their jobs. Depending on how they feel about the pay plan, they might work more, work less or even quit.  This change in behavior will then drive business outcomes such as sales, productivity or customer service.

Related Article: 5 Ways to Measure the Value of Your Employee Experience Function

Forwards or Backwards?

Because employee experience is a “middle link in a chain,” experience management strategies can be either backward or forward looking. Backward-looking strategies focus on how employees feel about past practices and events. This includes asking employees if it is easy to complete training courses or if they are happy with the benefits a company offers. The primary focus of backward-facing strategies is HR process improvement and employee satisfaction, efficiency and retention. This is a valuable goal, as  poorly designed HR processes waste people’s time, create significant stress and can cause employees to quit.

On the other hand, forward-looking strategies focus on employee attitudes and beliefs that drive behaviors that are critical to company success. For example: Do employees feel supported in sharing ideas and challenging the status quo? Do they feel rewarded for putting the needs of the customer first? Do they believe everyone in the company has equal access to career opportunities regardless of ethnicity, age or gender? 

Forward-looking experience management is tied to a concept in psychology called “organizational climate.”  An organizational climate reflects beliefs, attitudes and behavioral norms shared across people in a group. This has been shown to significantly influence a score of things, such as sales revenue, customer satisfaction scores, manufacturing productivity, product quality, patient care, safety incidents, security breaches, employee wellbeing, equity and inclusiveness and other metrics that directly impact company profit and growth.  

Backward-looking experience management strategies tend to be easier to implement than forward looking strategies. This is because they ask people to evaluate satisfaction with past events to improve specific HR processes. In contrast, forward-looking strategies require companies to develop models defining links between current employee beliefs and future employee actions. Forward-looking experience management is about changing cultural norms that determine “how things are done around here.”  

The factors that impact forward-looking strategies are less about process improvement and more about manager behavior, leadership decision making and employee ability and motivation.  For example, it is easier to address employee concerns about a company’s child care policies (a backward-facing topic) than to determine if employees feel empowered and supported by their leaders to do what is required to improve customer service (a forward-facing topic).  

Backward-facing experience management is about making work simpler and more enjoyable. Forward-facing experience management is about creating organizational climates that support the company’s mission and strategy. Companies often put more focus on backward experience management because it is easier to implement. Business leaders appreciate backward-facing experience management strategies because they make work more enjoyable for employees. Business leaders value forward-looking experience management strategies because they increase business performance. An ideal experience management strategy will include both backward and forward-facing components to improve past actions and drive future results.

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