Editorial
If done right, establishing employee experience as an organizational capability, not just a series of “nice-to-have” activities, can help your company stand out to talent in a highly competitive marketplace.
In a previous article, I described the stages required to move EX from an activity to a fully-fledged strategic capability. In part 2, we deep-dive into the expertise that underpins a robust EX capability and highlight different strategies to gain access to these skills.
Identifying the Expertise You Require Within Your EX Function
When considering the EX capabilities, we can divide them into seven domains of expertise, each representing a cluster of skills. They are in no particular order, and viewing them holistically is essential as they each contribute different values to the function.
The first cluster is human-centric design expertise. This domain contributes knowledge and understanding of human behavior, which is essential to understanding EX's cognitive and emotive sides. This domain will be responsible for consumer research, ensuring human-centered design principles and building personas. Skills related to design thinking and behavioral or ethnographic research are good examples of this domain, and you should seek individuals with a social and behavioral sciences background.
The next domain relates to workspace design expertise, such as ergonomics, facilities management and digital workspace design. This area should contribute to how physical and digital workspaces as well as services can be designed and executed. For this domain, you should consider sourcing individuals with user design experience as well as those who understand the dynamics of work environments and physical space.
Process design expertise is incorporated into the next domain. This area contributes to collecting, translating and designing user and business needs into scalable processes. Business analysis and process engineering are good examples of skills within this domain, and having individuals who also understand technology and systems is a value-add.
Technology is vital in most EX initiatives, specifically digital platforms, user experience design, and coding skills. Realistically, you will have to be insource and borrow some of these skills. Yet, it is vital that a significant understanding exists of the EX technology architecture and how data is collected and analyzed.
In addition, insights and analytics expertise, specifically skills in data analysis and quantitative and qualitative methods, contribute significant value during EX's design and listening components. Within this area, there is a need to balance individuals who understand the toolsets, such as people analytics skills, with those who utilize the data to build new insights and solutions.
Employee marketing contributes expertise such as communication or reputation management and is key in managing the employer brand narrative. Reputation management is usually seen as an unusual skill for an EX capability, but a significant component of EX is managing the internal perceptions employees have of their employer, as well as managing the external perceptions of potential candidates and past employees.
HR subject matter experts will also be required to provide insight into specific people-related processes. Usually, these individuals will rotate in and out of the function depending on the areas of the experience in focus. Usually, organizational design, talent, EVP and reward are actively involved with the EX team, yet this does not always constitute a full-time allocation.
Lastly, you require a leadership team passionate about EX and willing to infuse EX into the DNA of organizational culture and values. EX is a promise to your organization's people, and you need an advocate at a senior level to champion the cause.
Related Article: What Is Employee Experience? And Why It Matters
Gaining Access to These Skills
When establishing an EX capability, all these skills and expertise do not have to be owned permanently, and it is more advisable to follow an "access-based" strategy. An access-based strategy refers to gaining access to these skills as and when required, aligned to the EX mandate and focus — whether the skills exist internally to the organization or in the external market.
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Various talent strategies can be applied to access these skills, and it is best practice to use a combination of approaches:
- Build and bridge the skills you want within your team by developing current members or moving internal talent that already has these skills to your team—for example, developing the talent consultant or organizational design practitioner into an EX designer.
- Bind skills together to establish a new capability. Binding skills together refers to combining related skills together into one role. For example, asking an employee who has already mastered design skills to also learn process engineering.
- Buy skills by sourcing them for your organization. For example, you could recruit process engineers or UX/UI designers if this skill is not readily available in the organization.
- Borrow skills you do not require permanently — for example, using contract workers, consultants, gig workers or drawing from other parts of the organization aligned to specific EX focus areas. This strategy works well with skills you require for particular initiatives but do not warrant a full-time resource.
- Finally, a bot strategy can be followed for activities that can and should be automated instead of having a person allocated to this role. For example, by investing in a project to automate EX reporting and data maintenance, resources could be assigned to other activities.
Related Article: Contingent Employees Are a Missed Opportunity for Many Employers
Wrapping Up
Building the right skills at the right time is a key contributor toward shifting your EX capabilities along the continuum positioned in the first article. The seven areas mentioned in this article act as a starting point to design EX teams that can deliver on the organization's strategic intention.
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