Moving Towards Excellence in EX Management
The pursuit of an outstanding employee experience (EX) has become more than a mere buzzword; it's an organisational imperative echoing through the corridors of businesses worldwide. While the dialogue surrounding ‘better EX’ is omnipresent, suggesting a universal stride towards enriching workplace dynamics, there's a need to pause and reflect: Are these discussions translating into disciplined action and tangible improvements?
Jonathan Ferrar and I explored what ‘Excellence in People Analytics’ looks like in our recent book, which leads me to want to shine the spotlight onto the discipline of employee experience management. What benchmarks define excellence in this field? Are organisations genuinely advancing in their ways of working to to create environments where employees don't just survive, but thrive?
To answer theses questions, I invited Stephanie Denino & Timo Tischer, both Managing Directors at TI People, to join me in this expert interview.
In our conversation we uncover what excellence in EX management entails and speak about the biggest hurdles to reaching excellence, based on findings for this year’s State of EX 2023-2024.
Stephanie and Timo provide expert advice on managing EX deliberately, offering a deep dive into the multifaceted approach required for enhancing the fabric of the modern workplace. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did.
Could you start by defining 'Employee Experience Management' and explain what constitutes 'excellence' within this framework?
Successfully managing Employee Experience means that an organisation has built the necessary organisational muscle (i.e. has adopted a set of practices) to systemically improve employee experiences.
Systemically improving experiences suggests that an organization is improving the moments of people’s experiences at work on a broad scale and in an ongoing way.
When it reaches excellence in EX management, an organisation can:
Improve all required moments of people’s experience (coverage), well beyond the experiences shaped by HR and into the day-to-day of work
For all key talent segments (reach)
With proven impact (effectiveness)
Repeatedly (regularity)
Of course, that doesn’t mean an organisation needs to improve all experiences for all key talent segments at the same time. It focuses on improving those experiences where it can have highest impact and expands its scope over time.
Based on the ‘State of EX research 2023-2024’, what key insights can you share about how effectively organisations are managing their employees’ experiences?
From what we see, organisations still very much struggle to effectively manage employees’ experiences.
In the research on the State of EX 2023-2024, we describe four main aspects that are barriers to higher impact through EX management:
Agility,
Humancentricity,
Measurement,
Dispersal.
Across each aspect, organisations can score a maximum of 4 and a minimum of 1. It is telling that the average score across all dimensions is 1.6, which is less than half of the possible maximum score.
The highest-rated dimension is agility with 2.4 out of 4. It reveals that organizations are pretty good at scoping down projects, iterating on them, and prioritising impact over scale, but many are slow—or at least, slower than they want to be when it comes to activating changes that will improve people’s experiences.
Humancentricity, the second highest-scoring dimension, shows quite a drop with a rating of 1.6/4. Indicating that organisations do not sufficiently include employees in prioritising and designing experience improvements.
The third dimension is measurement with a score of 1.5/4. Organisations are often constrained by legacy listening – mostly engagement surveys – and are lacking detailed enough data to effectively understand where and how to improve experiences.
The final dimension, dispersal, scores 1.1/4 because experience improvements are still mostly HR-driven and HR-focused. In a nutshell, organisations struggle to expand action and ownership for EX beyond HR.
So, as you can see, there’s still much room for improvement.
Looking forward to the rest of 2024, what are the primary aspects organisations are emphasising to enhance Employee Experience Management, and would you say these are the right areas of focus?
The good news is that the number one priority for 2024 is to “redesign experiences”. This is important, because that’s what EX work should be about: improving experiences, with positive impact on people and the business. In the past, priorities have centred around building EX teams and infrastructure. While that’s understandable for organisations making first steps into the discipline EX management, it doesn’t create value for the organisation. So, it’s good to see the focus is changing.
The second priority “get broader buy-in for EX work across the organisation” and the fourth priority “get more/better data” are in fact enablers of redesigning experiences. EX work cannot be done by HR alone, it requires ownership by many people within other support functions like IT or facilities as well as the business. And data will help prioritise those improvements of experiences that have the biggest impact on employees and prove the value of improvements for people and the business.
Of the top four priorities, only the third priority “build an EX roadmap for the organisation” is an activity which is not directly related to improving experiences. But it is understandable that organisations will want to offer clarity on the direction of EX efforts to rally the right players, making this activity still highly relevant.
So, yes, these priorities are headed in the right direction.
Your research is intriguingly titled ‘So Many Stakeholders, So Little Time'. Could you elaborate on the reasoning behind this choice, perhaps discussing the agility-related challenges and the need for swift action to meet employee expectations?
The theme “So many stakeholders, so little time” is reflective of the willingness and need to involve more people across organisations to drive change on EX and of the associated struggle to put in place improvements at speed, as more stakeholders are involved.
Indeed, while focused on the number one priority of “redesigning experiences”, another top challenge faced by respondents is “coordinating everyone involved in EX work across the organisation”, closely tied to the overall challenge of “taking as much action to improve experiences as employees expect” and the first and second agility related challenge of “moving from discussion to action” and “meeting business partner demands for speed.”
In summary: we want to involve more people to improve more experiences, but that often slows us down. The best organisations have therefore figured out how to clarify and divide up responsibility for experience improvement, allowing ongoing and modular improvements to involve the right group of people in solving.
For example, if you learn, thanks to moment-centric data that illuminates high and low performing touchpoints, that what’s breaking down for employees when trying to pursue a new role internally is the career portal given challenges with the application page, it becomes easier for a responsible moment owner to take this up with the HR IT team (while also involving your people), instead of involving the full ecosystem of players who may have a hand and interest in improving internal mobility.
What are the major challenges organisations face in proactively enhancing employee experiences, specifically regarding measurement and human-centric approaches?
Regarding measurement, only 35% of organisations report that their current EX data is adequate for their needs. So, two thirds of organisations are dealing with inadequate data. We believe that too many organisations are still constrained by legacy listening, still mainly relying on large-scale engagement surveys.
The data from these is often too high-level and not specific enough to take precise action to improve specific moments people experience and the human / physical / digital touch-points they interact with. This is backed up by more data: only 32% of responding organisations tailor their questions to employee segments.
The other key challenge regarding measurement is the challenge of measuring an EX improvement’s business and financial impact. There are a number of reasons this is a challenge for organisations, including it not being prioritised, not having access to data about the people impact let alone business and financial impact, and not having the required know-how to perform the right kinds of linkage analyses. Readers can find more on the importance of striking up a partnership with finance to overcome this challenge.
As for humancentricity, the data unfortunately shows that these aspired new ways of working are not yet the reality today. Although 76% of respondents to the State of EX survey said it’s more important that experience improvements satisfy employees than senior leaders, it’s not reflected in the way employees are involved in prioritisation and design of improvements. Indeed, 61% of organisations say that when prioritising EX improvement projects, it matters more whether senior leaders care about it than whether employees want it, and only 31% say that experience redesigns are co-created with employees.
The question then is: why? This may be due to a lack of knowledge or capabilities in human-centred design beyond those on a central EX team, a reluctancy of the business to free up employees for participation or a resistance from experts to involve employees because they feel they know best. We’ve learned that it’s important to understand the specific reasons to define appropriate counter-measures.
The issue of 'dispersal’ challenges is a fascinating one. Can you explain what this entails and suggest strategies that organisations can leverage to address it?
As already shared, with a score of 1.1/4, dispersal is the most challenging dimension for organisations to mature on EX management. In our context, ‘dispersal’ means to spread ownership for and focus on EX across the organization, which allows for an increased impact of EX improvement work not only for people, but for the business.
We see in the data that the business is starting to be more committed to EX: 63% of respondents say their senior leaders view EX as equal or higher importance compared to other corporate priorities. Despite this alleged importance, EX improvements are still mostly initiated by HR (84%), and EX projects also mostly improve experiences in HR (73%). That’s why we say that business stakeholders are informally committed but formally unaccountable.
That’s an issue, because HR can’t do it alone. Employees expect good work experiences, and HR has neither the ownership for most of them nor the resources to cover all required improvements. The topic is mostly driven by HR, but the second biggest challenge is to coordinate everyone involved in EX work across the organisation. Changing this isn’t easy.
What works best from our perspective is to start with identifying a business problem – like high attrition at a critical workforce segment, stagnating productivity, or quality concerns – and applying a proven EX improvement methodology focused on reducing work friction to attack the problem.
To give you one example: one of our clients that adopted this methodology was able to reduce early attrition in a specific role by 12%, and they calculated a resulting cost reduction of US$13.4M per year. That’s a strong argument to use EX as a tool to solve business problems, and when showcased, increases the demand for this work. As this greater dispersal is achieved, the coverage and reach of EX work expand.
Finally, what advice would you give to organisations that aim to more deliberately manage EX?
For us, it starts with acknowledging that EX can in fact be managed. To some, this statement is preposterous. They do not believe something so complex and convoluted could be rigorously and systemically progressed upon. So, it requires that organisations be willing to accept that there is a science to improving EX in an ongoing way.
Once this is appreciated, organisations can begin performing the critical activities to manage EX, such as:
Identifying the moments that make up a person’s experience at the company
Measuring and listening continuously to people’s experiences across these moments
Clarifying responsibilities (who “owns” which journeys, moments and/or touch-points) to ensure accountability, and improving high importance / low satisfaction moments
And many more.
To learn about the activities driving the practice of EX (summarised by the APEX model), we invite you to read our research report by the same name.
Lastly, we want to share an observation that can serve as parting advice: organisations that have made the biggest waves toward managing EX more systemically have learned to go where there is traction. For example, if managing EX across HR-driven moments was met with resistance, they have known how to take this tool into the business to improve role-specific work moments to drive business impact.
In sum, EX leaders in these leading organisations are masters at finding a business problem to solve, showing impact using EX as a tool, and in so doing, creating ever increasing demand for this approach – while sometimes never even needing to use the words “employee experience”.
THANK YOU
Thanks to Stephanie and Timo for sharing insight into their research on the State of EX and their views on how organisations can more systemically improves people’s experiences of work. If you want to find out more about Stephanie & Timo and the work they do through TI People, connect with them on LinkedIn.
To read and hear more about their perspectives, please see a list of recent pieces they have contributed to:
Research reports
State of EX 2023-2024 full report
Introducing the model APEX: how organizations can systemically improve employee experiences
Articles
Article: “Prioritizing employee experience initiatives that are mission critical in a downturn”
Article: “Getting the data you need to improve employee’s experiences”
Article: "Why EX leaders and CFOs need to build stronger partnership"
Article: “Are we doing it right? The quest to progress on employee experience”
Article: “Digital HR Services Experience – The Big Lip-Service”
Podcasts
Podcast: "Building an EX muscle", on The Experience Designers podcast
Podcast: "On moving EX from the boardroom to the office floor", on the Extra! Extra! podcast
Podcast: “How HR, IT, CX and business leadership shape EX”, on the Atomic Work Podcast
Podcast: “Part 1: Variability in EX roles” and “Part 2: The tension between EX and HR”, on The exprience lounge podcast
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephanie Denino
Stephanie Denino is Managing Director at TI People – an employee experience consultancy (EX).
Stephanie works with leaders who are eager to shape and apply the practices that will allow them to systemically improve experiences for and with their people. Through her work, she helps organizations chart their path toward excellence on EX, improve critical work experiences and build capabilities needed to improve experiences, at scale.
Before joining TI People, she spent 6 years building up the Global Employee Experience team at Accenture – this practitioner lens is one she carries with her as she now serves a broad range of organisations in this space.
Timo Tischer
Timo is Managing Director at TI People and holds a PhD from the University of St. Gallen. He has focused on the field of EX since 2016 as an advisor, writer, and speaker. In his work with senior leaders of global organizations, Timo can also draw on his yearslong consulting experience at CEB and The Boston Consulting Group.
