Five Steps to Scale Employee Experience
Employee experience (EX) is pretty much the biggest topic in HR, and it's set to get even bigger in 2020. In a recent Digital HR Leaders podcast, Volker Jacobs joined David Green to discuss how employee experience can be scaled.
Volker Jacobs is the co-founder and CEO of TI People, and he is one of the world's leading authorities on employee experience having worked in this space for three and a half years, during which time TI People have worked with several global companies to develop, implement, and scale EX programs.
You can listen to the full podcast here.
This episode is a must listen for CHROs, employee experience and people analytics leaders, and anyone interested in how employee experience can drive value for business leaders, the workforce, and help reshape HR for the new decade.
In this extract taken from their conversation, Volker and David discuss the five-step model to scale employee experience across large organisations.
How do you scale EX in a global organisation?
Employee experience has exploded from its first appearance in 50 or so companies in 2017 to finding a place today in most global fortune 500 organisations and a significant number of smaller organisations. With that said it is little surprise that EX will be counted among 75% of CHROs ‘top three priorities’ for 2020 – or that three out of four CEOs believe EX is a company priority. Human centred design and employee experience has firmly solidified its position at the heart of significant organisational transformation around the world.
Volker Jacobs explains that EX is fast becoming ‘the’ question of 2020, and a real driving force for large organisations. In the past many organisations have focused in on one area, whether that be employee listening – where they’ve learnt to capture more feedback to be able to provide better experiences, or incorporating design thinking, journey mapping or human centred design into aspects of work, to investing into new technology that has cool apps and better user experiences. What many organisations are now beginning to find is that these three avenues alone and in isolation will not get them to the business outcomes they were hoping for.
So the focus as we continue into 2020 is very much centred around how we bring these three elements, outlined above, together and manage it at scale so it's not all about designing experiences, it's actually about delivering them in these large organisations across the world.
“That is the big question. And the answer to the question is, in one sentence, think big, start small and then iterate as you scale.”
By doing just that Volker explains that at TI People, they’ve developed a five-step model to scale employee experience across large organisations.
1. Create an Experience Baseline
Step number one is to create an experience baseline. When measuring anything whether it be performance, customer, or employee experience you need a reference point to compare progress against. So, begin by measuring the most important moments. Volker explains that measuring moments that matter do not need to be done in an overly complex way, but the focus is more around ensuring you have something that acts as a baseline to track against, which will in turn reveal potential gaps and quick wins.
“Don't do that in a super sophisticated way, but in a simplified way. Have your employee experience baseline created that will help you identify problem spaces and will at the same time identify quick wins. So, you can quickly produce, and you know what the real problem spaces are. That's a good thing. You can benchmark it. So, if it's a standardised baseline, then you can benchmark it, create urgencies and burning platforms.”
2. Create and Prioritise your Roadmap
Step number two focuses on the development of your roadmap. By completing step one you’ve now got a baseline and from this baseline you’re able to craft your roadmap. This will identify and encompass your priorities. Volker explains that:
“From that baseline, you'd create your roadmap, identify your priorities, because the most important part of that is to align it to the organisation, and ensure actually the entire company is behind it.”
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This is particularly important because of course, it's not just HR that is responsible for driving or scaling employee experience, thus your roadmap and priorities must be aligned to the organisation and its strategic goals.
Volker explains “you can almost say it's a strategic intent, plus strategic response thing.”
With regard to your strategic intent, it’s important to be very clear on the business value that you want to provide. Your roadmap should clearly outline how you do that, what your priorities are, and how these stack up against your budget for the next 18 to 36 months.
3. Conduct a Proof Project
Step number three centres around testing your project. Volker goes on to explain that step three is one of the key elements of their model and they strongly advise using the first three months of the roadmap as a ‘proof of project’. You might be wondering what he means by the term proof of project, this is essentially where you find “two, three, four, five moments that really matter and then find a part of the organisation in which you can test it and prove the concept.” Volker shares that when working with different organisations, they’ve primarily witnessed two things at this stage in the model. They actually end-up redesigning the experiences, using human centred design.
“They are involving line managers and employees and HR and other support functions and specialists to redesign the experience.
And then to measure if the improvement is actually showing, that's the re-design part of the group project.”
In parallel to the above, a second team would work on understanding how this works in their organisation if it were to be deployed at scale. They’d examine:
How do we embed employee experience redesign and delivery in the flow of work?
What is the operating model of employee experience in this very company?
How does it work?
How does it relate to other things that we're doing and who has to act when?
All of the above has to be conceptualised and takes place in this first three-month period of that roadmap.
4. Build a Platform
Once we’ve identified the baseline, crafted a roadmap and conducted a proof of concept, the fourth step in the model is to build a platform. This allows everyone to be able to see the employee experience, the platform would provide visibility to what a ‘good’ design of an experience looks like.
Volker explains that there are two main aspects of the platform one is to share and the other is to measure.
“So, you can see in dashboards how the experience in your team is doing compared to other teams in the organisation. These two things are the big enablers for employee experience at scale. There's a single point of truth and there is data and dashboards that trigger action, so we can almost reverse the direction by which we manage employee experience. It's not driven from the top into the organisation. It's a pull effect.”
Such an approach provides visibility into the organisation to be able to identify where moments that matter might be having the desired impact and the effect that this might be having on the business, in a timely fashion allowing you a business to rectify this, prior to it having a detrimental impact.
Volker outlines that the logic would be “I as a team manager somewhere in Kuala Lumpur would see that the onboarding experience of my team is not as good as the average onboarding experience. I can look into which of the four or five moments with an onboarding that matter the most is where the experience is breaking down. I’d be able to see this within my employee experience platform, what a good design of that manager interaction during onboarding should look like. So that's a little bit the way that the platform is helping, to scale it up.”
5. Combine Forces
Finally step number five is to combine forces. A standalone platform is not good enough in these large organisations to be able to truly drive employee experience, it just one element. The platform needs to be supported by an agile team, that is responsible for helping to redesign the delivery of experiences.
This agile team, for example maybe only be made up of a small number of people potentially two or three people from the central employee experience team. However, the differentiator is that it also contains experts. These experts will depend on the very question that requires redesigning. Without a cross functional, agile team to support the platform, the transformation of your employee experience will not succeed.
So, remember when you’re looking to scale your employee experience program across your organisation to ‘think big’ about designing and delivering it at scale, but ‘start small’ with a proof of concept or proof of project and then build the capabilities to ‘iterate and scale employee experience’ across the entire organisation.
In this downloadable infographic we’ve outlined the key points of EX, why it is important, and how you can visualise the complexity of EX in an Employee Experience Ecosystem.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Manpreet Randhawa is the Head of Digital Content for myHRfuture.com. In her previous role as the Change Management Lead for People Planning, Design & Analytics at Cisco Systems, she was responsible for defining and executing on the change management strategy to successfully implement and sustain the digital and cultural transformation across the enterprise. Manpreet is very passionate about change management and technology and how to use both to transform the employee experience and prepare companies for the Future of Work.