Many businesses are now focusing on their customer’s experience, but often people diminished the importance of designing for their employees. Making it easier for your people to do their job directly impacts the quality of your customer’s experience, your business’ income and even the talent attraction and retention.
According to MIT, employee experience is defined by work complexity (how hard is it to get work done in your organisation?) and behavioural norms around collaboration, creativity and empowerment.
Furthermore, the research shows that having a great employee experience will have a positive impact on the following results in your organisation. On average, it will:
- Double your customer satisfaction
- Increase your organisation’s innovation: companies with scores in the top quartile of employee experience were twice as innovative as those in the bottom quartile
- Improve your company’s income: with a 25% increase in profitability
There’s no doubt a great EX will almost always equal a great CX, but the reverse doesn’t quite ring true.
The world of work is continuously being reimagined and the implementation of digital technology, for the most part, is enhancing the customer experience. But what is it doing for the employee experience when the technology itself is driving the change in your organisation, as opposed to the other way around?
How do you design a better employee experience?
At Three6 we have a framework for a great employee experience, so we’ll take you through our three-step journey to get there:
PREPARE
1. Understand the needs of your employees
What do they need to be able to do their work in an easier, more efficient way? What processes can be changed to deliver greater value? Are the spaces set up in a way that enable your people to do their job in the best way possible?
2. Define your EX strategy
Where do you want to take your company? Why is EX important for the organisation and the leadership team? You need to demonstrate to your people that the EX is important to the company, and show them it’s not just another engagement campaign.
3. Know your culture
Understanding your company culture and how it impacts your employee experience and more specifically, how they deliver your product or service. What is that culture and will it be able to deliver your company goals and objectives? Or is there a need to step back and change the culture?
4. Set up the basis for a great experience
There are 3 key behavioural elements to make this happen:
- Collaboration
What kind of collaboration do your people need? What can you do to enable collaboration? You can, for example, create cross-functional teams to deliver different parts of your strategy. - Creativity
By enabling and encouraging creativity in the workplace you are inviting people to bring their ideas to the table, increasing their engagement and interaction between different areas. Creativity will make your employees want to learn more, propose more and try more solutions. You can try by having brainstorming sessions, creative workshops or even an open continuous improvement forum. - Empowerment
Teams that are trusted to make decisions are more likely to propose new ideas and even give feedback to their managers. People need to feel empowered and trusted to be able to collaborate and be creative. To learn more check out: ‘Empowering People with Purpose’.
PLANT
1. Communicate your strategy
Communicate the value of your employee experience strategy.
2. Co-design solutions to your problems
What’s working and what’s not? Your employees will help you co-design solutions for how things can be done better but include them in the wider spectrum of information available so that they feel they’re apart of the decision-making process. Don’t simply bring new software expecting it to solve your behaviour or culture problems. Also, keep in mind that while co-designing is very important that you give your employees structure and direction. Creativity can be overwhelming and create uncertainty if while navigating change there are too many questions that can’t be answered. A client of ours in the education sector had told us that they decided to co-design an entirely new org structure. But their people quickly became disengaged as the weight of uncertainty was bigger than the chance of being part of the change. Co-design is very powerful to help people feel apart of something and to take ownership and accountability of the change, but if done in the wrong conditions you can rapidly drive disengagement and stress.
3. Reduce the gap between technology implementation and business value using value chains
You can start by prototyping and testing the co-designed solutions – you don’t need to launch a completely new digital transformation to see if the ideas work. Instead, think about how you can build something that can help you test if they work so that you can learn from those tests and iterate prior to investing a lot of money.
4. Enable Feedback channels
GROW
1. Keep optimising your employee experience
Think of your employee experience as if it was your customer experience, you never stop working on your CX, so the same applies to your EX, it is a gradual process. Measuring the employee experience and engaging with your internal customers will help you define what your next steps are.
2. Quality enhancements to the products and processes
When first changing your processes or implementing products to make it easier for your employees to do their work, things won’t be perfect (and that’s fine!) keep working hand in hand with them to enhance what you’ve already developed together.
3. Grow collaboration, creativity and empowerment
Embedding the importance of these three behaviours is something that you need to keep working on. Not only allowing people to propose ideas but actually implementing and developing them.
Remember, employee experience is all about enabling your employees to do their work in a more meaningful way.
If you are curious about this, feel free to say hello@three6.com.au