How to enhance the employee experience?
How to define the concept of employee experience? It’s the sum of all the interactions between the company and the employee, from the recruitment phase to the eventual departure.
Offering an enhanced experience means equipping ourselves with effective, agile resources to ensure that each experience contributes to the commitment and involvement of our employees in our company’s mission. The objective: to improve corporate performance.
Employee experience, customer experience, same battle!
For a long time, companies focused primarily on the customer experience, to the detriment of the employee experience, believing the latter to be secondary. The COVID period reshuffled the deck, highlighting the need for “symmetry of attention” to optimize the relationship between the company and its employees, as well as between the brand and its customers.
Driven by the employer branding, the concept of employee experience is developing alongside that of customer experience. Customer experience aims to create a unique, personalized relationship between a customer and a brand throughout the customer’s experience, including after the act of purchase.
The employee experience follows the same logic, providing a similar experience to employees at every stage of their career. Offering a positive employee experience means working to improve each and every employee experience, at every stage of their relationship with the company. It’s a question of taking into account their expectations and trying to satisfy them as best we can.
When it comes to employee engagement, every moment can make a difference
In the employee journey, every moment, whether important or trivial, can have an impact on employee commitment. Employees who evolve in an appropriate and satisfying working environment are more inclined to develop and maintain positive and effective relationships with their various contacts, whether internal or external.
Improving the employee experience increases employee involvement by developing a strong sense of belonging and a high level of commitment, which in turn leads to increased productivity.
Employee experience needs the HR community
Supporting employees at every stage of their career is a role that falls within the remit of local Human Resources partners. While it’s clear that everyone feels invested with this responsibility in their own area, involvement at the level of global strategy is not taken for granted. Common sense dictates that what works well here should probably work elsewhere, but you have to be able to know it and make it known.
The question of identifying and involving HR stakeholders within a global, structured and active community is therefore a prerequisite for any initiative to improve the employee experience.
This involves:
- Onboard all stakeholders involved within a collaborative community structure.
- Enable this community to share its best practices, while at the same time gaining visibility of external perspectives and uses.
- Share, co-construct and deploy best practices that have proven their worth.
- Identify and promote the most committed contributors to make them recognized influencers within this community.
And all this while observing the principles essential to success by being:
- Disruptive and innovative to stand out and create top-notch experiences for employees. This is not just a posture. It’s a participatory approach that draws on the collective intelligence of the wider community.
- Agile and flexible to respond quickly to the accelerating pace of internal and external change linked to the ever-evolving world of work, and to offer all stakeholders ever more adapted and relevant experiences.
- Authentic, to give a voice to those who design and those who live the experiences.
- Pragmatic and concrete to be able to provide ready-to-use solutions, tested and validated in the field, which have already proved their worth. For every need encountered by an employee at every stage of the employee journey, a reflex to systematically look for an existing solution must be triggered within the community to capitalize on the power of the collective.
- People Driven, to draw on collective intelligence, because the intelligence of a dynamic community will always be greater and more effective than the sum of the intelligence of each individual member of the community.
Build on knowledge and know-how to avoid reinventing the wheel
Designing an augmented employee experience means being able to question every moment in the employee’s journey to potentially improve it. This continuous improvement approach is similar to the operational excellence approaches widely used in the fields of quality, safety and operations.
Relying on collective intelligence to improve the employee experience is a virtuous approach for both employees and the company. The key to success lies in the organization’s ability to implement the right collaborative and community tools for such an approach, and to engage the relevant stakeholders to achieve concrete results.
CTO de Yumana
