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The average person will spend one-third of their life — approximately 90,000 hours — at work. HR’s role is to design employee experiences (EX) that make those 90,000 hours — from recruitment to offboarding — easier, better and ideally, exceptional and memorable.
But with only 32% of employees in the US, and 13% worldwide feeling ‘engaged’ at work, there's a clear gap between employee expectations and EX initiatives. Enter personalized employee experience.
Closing the Gap Between Employee Expectations and Employee Experience
Personalized EX has emerged in recent years as a way to bridge the gap between employee expectations and EX initiatives.
But personalization isn't as straightforward as giving each employee what they expect or want. Personalization of the employee experience is about creating win-win situations, said Katie Obi, chief people officer at talent lifecycle platform Beamery; initiatives that produce great results and outcomes for the organization and its customers, while also meeting the needs of each employee based on their unique skills, motivations, and the context of what is happening in their lives at that time.
HR professionals must balance personalization with some degree of standardization and mass customization. This keeps things fair and streamlined while allowing HR to focus on personalization where it matters.
On a recent webinar, ClubHealth CEO Daniel Bolus said personalization is not about treating every employee differently or completely individualizing every aspect of EX. Rather, it acknowledges and caters to their unique needs within a framework of standardized processes. This approach helps keep things aligned with company culture, values, goals and budgets, while employees can still make choices within the framework.
Tyrese Manigault, manager of employee engagement at NASCAR has a slightly different perspective. Given the diverse locations and teams at his organization, he said it's a challenge to standardize the employee experience. “No one employee and no group is the same. Trying to find that middle ground based on the culture on the ground at each location, while also making it work for a majority of our employees, has probably been one of the biggest challenges.”
Instead, he tries to identify some things HR can do at a company-wide level that speaks to everyone and supplements them with other, more group-specific initiatives. “For example,” he said, “there are some things we do to capture employee engagement, satisfaction and fulfillment at our racetrack locations that we may not do at our corporate offices, just because of how different the expectations and work cultures are.”
Related Article: Employee Experiences That Employees Actually Want
Finding Opportunities for a Balanced Personalization Approach
The wide collection of experiences that make up the employee lifecycle is one of the complicating factors. For HR to build consistent, efficient and balanced employee experiences, said Obi, one of the best strategies is to understand where the friction lies in any of the areas that impact EX most, and address them first. Onboarding, technology, the physical workspace, L&D and employee support are all areas ripe for a balanced personalization approach.
Onboarding
"At NASCAR," said Manigault, "we've leveraged regular employee and new hire feedback to find a balance between standardization and customization specifically in the onboarding process. For instance, employees that are at our racetracks may not have as much access to laptops and cell phones — they're out and about doing stuff. And the realities and culture at each racetrack site can be quite different. Our NASCAR buddy program for new hires helps them, right out of the gate, get first-hand, on-the-job experience from employees who have been here for at least a year or more."
Personalized Learning Pathways
With the emergence of learning marketplaces, personalized L&D initiatives that align with a worker's skills, interests and career goals have been among the most successful areas of personalized EX.
But it’s not only education. Unilever’s 'Flex Experiences’ program allows employees to upskill or reskill in areas of their choice via a talent marketplace. Programs such as U-Work take personalization (and hybrid work) to the next level, letting employees work on projects of their choice on a contract basis, and supporting them with mentoring, coaching and the freedom to explore cross-functional and cross-departmental opportunities.
Related Podcast: An Inside Look at How Unilever Builds Award-Winning Employee Experiences
Benefits and Rewards
Like L&D, personalization of benefits and rewards is another area for hyper-personalized EX. Employee-directed benefits (where employees can choose their specific benefits package from a pool or marketplace), Monthly Lifestyle Stipends and Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs) all offer employees more flexibility in where they can spend their allocated dollars.
When you restrict employees to a limited catalog, they feel pressured to use their allowances, even if it’s on things they don’t really need. LSAs give employees access to marketplaces with a huge variety of low-cost, high-value items, so even people with small account balances can find things that help them, said Bolus.
Employee Service and Support
HR is finally automating many previously manual, error-prone, time-consuming and generic processes. From the EX point-of-view, using automation and chatbots to answer specific employee questions can save employees the time spent scouring pages of manuals or emailing back-and-forth with an HR rep. Such automations can hyper-personalize services and provide access to customized content based on the individual’s choices, context and entitlements. Automation also helps record and track service data and patterns for continuous improvement of the EX at a macro level.
Related Article: 5 Ways Chatbots Improve Employee Experience
Manager-Delivered Experiences: An Underrated Facet of Personalized EX
Manager experience and skills are critical, yet overlooked factors in delivering positive EX. The best-designed EX programs can be derailed by managers who can’t play their part in delivery.
Managers are perhaps the single biggest EX gap and opportunity, said Obi. Unfortunately, 2.4 million "accidental managers" (those moved into managerial positions without any training and/or motivation to be a manager) cost the UK economy around £84 billion per year! And that doesn’t even cover the impact on mental health, wellness and employee experience.
Training mid-managers to motivate and engage employees, and personalize experiences without creating equity issues is time well spent, she continued.
For example, while performance appraisals typically were about the gap between business goals and employee performance, managers today must learn to include conversations about the individuals’ personal goals and whether the company can help meet them.
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Training managers on critical workplace technology is also needed. For example, when managers know what courses their team members have taken, or what benefits they have opted for, they can have very specific conversations with each individual. Similarly, feedback or survey tools and people analytics platforms can provide a wealth of data for managers to make data-based rather than assumption-based personalizations for each team member within the broader HR framework.
Related Article: Why We Need Middle Managers
EX That’s Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts
HR teams are tasked with creating a balanced employee experience for modern workplaces. This entails the right mix of standardization, mass customization and individual personalization to meet both company needs and employee expectations.
While personalization can give employees the flexibility to create their own experience path, Obi leaves us with a caution: overly-individualistic approaches to EX for the sake of personalization can be problematic. A lack of equity, fairness or transparency in how employees are treated should never be the unintended consequence of personalization.
