Talent isn’t just hard to find: it’s also hard to keep. Scarcity of talent is certainly a recruitment challenge, but the real challenge is in creating a fulfilling employee experience that makes people want to stay. As such, employee experience is now high on the agenda for many organisations.
Business leaders know that the organisation’s talent is the critical lever for success. They research, design, create, deliver, sell and support whatever product or service is being offered. Improving the employee experience – and all that it impacts – improves business performance.
Designing a strong employee experience is about understanding what makes people tick, how they do their best work, and then taking action to meet their needs. And yet, many companies simply don’t know where to start. They might have some insight from their annual engagement surveys, but employee experience is far more than employee engagement.
Engagement has received plenty of focus in recent years: now often featuring in a company’s annual report and tracked over time.
However, for us, engagement is only one of many possible outcomes of a great employee experience.
When your people have a great employee experience, then productivity, performance, development, engagement and wellbeing all follow on. Get employee experience right, and the rest can fall into place.
To manage employee experience, you need to understand it. We realised early on that despite the importance of this concept there is no shared definition. We’ve hosted dozens of workshops with clients across many countries and each time a new set of different ideas and priorities rise up.
We see employee experience as the result of the dynamic interaction between people – and the characteristics and mindset they have – and their environment. Our model and framework are built on this complex and dynamic interaction which sits at the heart of employee experience.
A healthy and meaningful employee experience has many meanings among individuals. Personalisation is key. HR knows this, but struggles to reach good levels of personalisation in a scalable way.
Using surveys and questionnaires to gather data to understand the complex interaction between employees and their environment is almost impossible. In most cases they only help understand the context factors in an organisation, and typically by the time the engagement survey is closed, the snapshot taken is already one of the past.
To understand employees’ current perception and experience of work and the workplace, HR leaders need to make better use of the data they already have
AI is needed to understand the relationship between people and their environment via vast quantities of data, and to then personalise relevant recommendations for employees and people managers to impact future outcomes. Without the use of behavioural science and AI, it would be too time consuming to collect and interpret the data or to come up with actional recommendations that can improve people and business outcomes.
While organisations still offer traditional engagement surveys, it is not always clear what the results of such measures offer. What do the engagement scores mean for an individual? How can people managers improve engagement, and how this might fit within the bigger picture of achieving business success?
Even when managers get survey data, analysis and insight for their own teams, what do they do with this information – and, importantly, how limited is the view? How well do managers understand the drivers of employee experience, the impact on flight risk or absenteeism in their teams, and what they can do to improve future people and business outcomes in their unique context?
To understand employees’ current perception and experience of work and the workplace, HR leaders need to make better use of the data they already have. This passive data might reside within the company’s HR tech, elsewhere within the organisation, or outside of the company. AI can now offer a clear view on how the perception of a company’s employee experience compares to industry peers, and the actions required to leverage strengths or close gaps, without reliance on surveys.
AI has a key role to play in making sense of this.
Current approaches to measurement of the employee experience simply cannot give organisations a full picture. Internal, external and forward-looking lenses offer a clearer picture of what’s needed to drive positive outcomes in the future.
A strong employee experience boosts productivity and performance, strengthens belonging, reinforces purpose, and bolsters retention.
Engagement survey results tell us little. As an example, people might rate the development opportunities offered by the company on a scale of 1 to 5. But what does a score of 4 mean? Should the organisation invest more in development in the organisation – or not? What else is at play here? Perhaps it is a lack of confidence or network to seek out development, or a limited understanding of what is available? The L&D leader could schedule more training courses, put in place a more thorough comms plan or encourage networking across the company.
Without a broader understanding of people’s perception of their needs at that time, the L&D or HR leaders are making decisions in a vacuum. There is always a combination of several factors – and a dynamic taking place between them – and without getting underneath and unpacking what is truly going on, HR lacks insight.
Another example is workload: a topic often talked about but difficult to “fix”. It means different things to different people and its roots might lie in different places. How can workload of stretched employees be reduced? We need to look around – and beyond – the word “workload”.
Workload increase might be temporary and objective. Perhaps in a team of five, four are on holiday or off sick. One person remains, covering all five jobs. That's an objective workload issue. But it could be that the technology used is outdated and hasn’t kept pace with what is needed – or that the people in the team are struggling to prioritise, focus or know who to ask for help.
There are both contextual and personal characteristics variables that impact the experience of work. Each requires a different “fix”: temporary support, investment in new tools, skills learning to manage work tasks or network or confidence building.
A strong employee experience boosts productivity and performance, strengthens belonging, reinforces purpose and bolsters retention. It impacts the forward-looking HR metrics and wider business metrics. We don’t have to ask whether someone will leave a company in six months. If we know people don’t experience purpose, they lack focus or have a people manager who blocks their experience. We know from the behavioural science that these are leading indicators of flight risk.
Understanding the data and the impact of action of these metrics allows organisations to make choices for relevant action.
An external perspective helps HR leaders to understand the focus and the priorities. It helps them to understand who they need to be listening to and allows for comparison with competitors. It enables a benchmark to be made between the “articulated” and the “lived experience” of an organisation’s Employee Value Proposition (EVP).
Consider the time invested in defining and showcasing the firm’s EVP. Is this an authentic representation of working within the company? Employees and former employees might be sharing their experiences outside of the organisation! Tapping into this external data allows for a benchmark: any gaps can be highlighted, and action plans formed.
External data gives this extra perspective and, when used in planned and focused way, leads to faster action taking.
Moving beyond the comfort of the annual engagement survey and opening your eyes to the possibilities of external perspectives and additional already-available data, requires planning, preferably with the help of a trusted advisor.
Here are the lessons we have learned from working with clients:
Start small – and make the case for change
Understand where you want to make an immediate impact and focus on a single group, subgroup or division. Use this as a learning sandpit, and to build a business case. Few organisations have the capacity or desire to overhaul HR processes and technology at one time. A business case shows the impact of the information gained from applying the different lenses on employee experience, be they external, internal or forward looking.
Use behavioural science: understand – and define – what needs to be measured
Without a model on which to hang thoughts and ideas, insights are unstructured and chaotic. Use a model that has been validated and shown to have strong coverage of the aspects of employee experience.
Offer personalised insights to increase autonomy and ownership
We overestimate people’s self-awareness. Behavioural science can be used to personalise recommendations and insights for employees and people managers to help them understand how to change their own – or their team’s – functioning with relevant learning resources and tools often already available in an organisation.
Look outside the organisation for data points to supplement your internal perspective
This external perspective is often a missing piece of the puzzle. It gives you an entirely different lens to look through to understand your company. And you can start to understand your employee experience, while comparing it with other companies or other industry peers.
Embrace passive data
The external lens is where passive, or already-available, data resides, and it is an untapped pool of information. The wealth of online data that already exists about your organisation, its culture and employee experience add a new dimension to your understanding. Remember the passive data that sits within your company too – even if not within the HR function.
Never lose sight of the goal
Data is everywhere. It is easy to become overwhelmed by the quantity of data, or to opt to use only the easily available. The key is to remain connected to your goal, remember what you want to achieve and not be sidetracked.
Work with a partner with the experience and the know-how
This is your project and your employee group. However, you will benefit from working with a partner who has already developed a scientifically validated model, the technical know-how, the measurement expertise and the AI capability to help you make decisions and move forward. Seek them out; challenge them and make sure they can explain exactly what needs to be done, and how the technology works. Educate yourself about what is possible and learn from them to develop your own knowledge.
AI opens many new doors. It can support HR leaders in refocusing their time, and in doing what they do best: enabling people to thrive by improving the strategic impact of a stronger employee experience.
And yet, AI cannot (right now) replicate those core human qualities such as creativity and empathy. We still very much need human resource specialists and experts to understand and critique AI-driven recommendations.
There may be a tension between exploring the exciting opportunities of AI, and being wary of the unknown.
While it is too early to develop a definitive guide to using AI effectively and ethically, this should not deter us from exploring its potential.
Businesses should embrace the new possibilities that AI offers, without replacing the critical decision making of seasoned professionals. AI can augment their knowledge with additional data, helping them to see previously unseen connections. It offers an unheard-of level of support to your HR team and, as such, to all the individual employees in your organisation. As HR gains deeper insights into personal workplace needs, employees will thrive.