The Employee Experience & HR Tech – joined at the hip

An experience is defined as “an event or occurrence which leaves an impression on someone.” In HR the competence of “employee experience” is not something that is trained, or is as prolific as customer experience in marketing and branding curricula. Yet, according to Josh Bersin’s 2020 predictions employee experience is at the top of HR leaders priority list to enhance employee productivity.

The question is; what is employee experience and how do you do it? Jeanne Meister describes it as “the application of user experience to the workplace, re-imagining the physical, digital and cultural aspects of work. This “employee as customer mindset””. User experience (UX) is “the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experience to users.”. I can tell you this is not a typical HR competency.

HR leaders are forming cross functional teams to focus on the employee experience. IBM for example have a project team that is dedicated to the strategic design, technology and UX consulting for the global HR organisation. The objective of that team is to streamline and foster human-centred offerings that are more impactful to the business. What this means is that these organisations are facilitating design thinking workshops to solve business problems and enhance the employee experience.

Let’s take a look at the ROI of great employee experience:

1. Increased Employee Retention
2. Greater Employee Productivity
3. Enhanced Customer Satisfaction
4. Greater Innovation
5. Improved Talent Attraction

I know what you are thinking. These ROIs are outcomes of effective talent management and you are correct. All except customer satisfaction are direct results of talent management practices. What then is the difference between employee experience and talent management, and where does HR Tech come into all of this?

Talent management is an organisation’s strategy to acquire, engage, develop and retain what they define as “talent” to meet business objectives. The effective implementation of talent management practices does form part of the employee experience but it does not capture the entire experience. Process and technology make up the remainder.

Re-engineering business, HR and talent processes with the objective of uplifting the employee experience is critical. What was often a manual, time-consuming process can be boosted (in many instances made automatic or digitised) by the effective building of the HR tech stack. Deloitte research has found that companies too are increasingly judged as social enterprises, suggesting that talent management could be dead and investing in experience the route to becoming an employer of choice.

A design thinking workshop (UX approach) facilitates the sketch of the employee experience from a systems perspective and identifies gaps, in terms of technology that is needed for a seamless and superior employee experience to solve business outcomes.

In conclusion, as businesses become more agile, move into new territories with new cultures and languages, and as remote working becomes more of the norm and generational socio-economic pressures shift, employee experience enabled through HR tech becomes critical. Josh Bersin describes it as “the process of continuous decluttering”  and culp agrees.