Over the years, Human Resources (HR) as an industry has followed the lead of the Customer Experience (CX) field and adopted common practices. Employee engagement efforts have been influenced by customer engagement and loyalty strategies, for example, and HRM systems were developed following the rise of CRM systems.
Today, the hot trend in HR is Employee Experience (EX), which evolved, as you may have guessed, following the rise of CX. So, what exactly is EX?
According to the analytics and consulting firm Gallup: The employee experience is the journey that an employee goes through with the organization. It includes all interactions that occur throughout the employee’s life cycle, as well as the experiences involved in the role, workspace, management, and well-being of the employee. It’s easy to see how this framing echoes the world of CX, which similarly defines customer experience as the totality of all their interactions with a company.
In recent decades, many organizations, led by HR units, have invested heavily in employee engagement. The working, studied assumption has been that the more employees are connected to an organization and feel that belonging to it is central to their identity, the higher the chance is that they will serve as its ‘ambassadors.’ To contribute to an organization’s success, employees will want to stay longer and recommend it to their friends.
Yet in a world of constant transformation and disruption, investing in engagement is no longer enough to win and keep the talent. Remote work and more diverse forms of employment negatively affect the level of engagement of employees to the organization. With the fundamental shift in people’s perception of the work world, the competition around hiring and retaining employees is stronger now than ever.
Today, organizations must explore each touchpoint cross the employee’s journey (sound familiar?) –and ensure that at each one, they have a positive experience and are engaged with the organization, in accordance with its values and culture.
For example, an organization that values transparency and fairness must ensure that these qualities are reflected all along. During the recruitment and onboarding processes,new employeesmust see and experience clear stages in the screening, distinct criteria for success, detailed information on requirements and expectations, a willingness to listen to the unique needs of each candidate, etc. When it comes to evaluation and feedback, the employee should have the opportunity to express their thoughts and give feedback to management, receive some documentation of feedback, have a clear process and criteria for bonuses, etc. And these same values should apply to learning and organizational development, promotion, termination, benefits, and every other step along the line.
So, how can you manage your employee’s experience?
- Plan – Map out all touchpoints and milestones across the employee’s journey and plan relevant interaction that will provide positive, engagement-raising experiences.
- Implement – Implement processes, procedures, and routines according to the plan.
- Measure – Most importantly, measure employee experience to understand the effectiveness of actions taken.
Now, when it comes to measuring, the organizational world – my world – has relied on surveys for many years. However, in my experience, such tools mainly just provide a snapshot of specific time slots. Also, the main drawback is the time that passes between measurement and data presentation. With that in mind and given the ongoing parallels between CX and EX, it is no surprise that we chose to support managing employee experiences with a platform originally developed to support, measure, and improve customer experience – Howazit of course.
Howazit has the capabilities needed to manage interactive, automated, and personalized communication with the employee. It enables an understanding of processes, and drives employees to actions that leverage the organization, such as collection of positive feedback and improvement following negative feedback.
These capabilities provide added value currently not available in the HR tech world. And without a doubt, this is yet another example of HR following an insightful CX lead.
The blog was written by Or Shalev, co-CEO and director of surveys and evaluation processes at O.D. Organizational Development, which specializes in leading projects in the field of employee experience.
