This week we are going to be looking at another topic that is a key discussion point amongst HR professionals – personalised employee experience.
We will look at how EX has grown over the last few years, why it is important to ensure that experience is tailored to an individual and how people in HR and internal communications are best placed to enable it.
What is personalised EX?
In our recent blog ‘Employee experience matters – but why?’, we looked at employee experience and the shift that we have seen from engagement towards experience.
According to CIPD, EX is “about creating a great work environment for people and helping them to be their best”, plus the role a line manager and trust play in the employee and employer relationship. It also encompasses other factors such as wellbeing, employer brand and the way communication channels are used.
The employee experience is one that is lived throughout the employee lifecycle. From the moment an individual signs their employment contract to the moment they leave the organisation. Every moment that they interact with the organisation matters and to make that experience a great one, we need to understand what their experience is – not making assumptions, we need to measure the gap between expectation and reality (we need to understand – warts and all), in order to continually evolve to create more good days at work for all.
Traditionally EX is measured conducting a survey and creating an action plan to improve. This transactional approach is fine in the beginning, but overtime will need to shift towards a more transformational one.
The employee experience gap
In a recent white paper, Tivian share their latest research into the employee experience gap:
In their annual research conducted with HR teams and employees, what comes out loud and clear is that the new ways of working post COVID (we will explore the impact that COVID 19 has had on engagement in a future blog), is transforming the ways in which people are working, from where they work, when and how. Turnover is at an all-time high and HR teams are under pressure to deliver.
One of the gaps highlighted in the Tivian research is that there is a problem with listening and responding to employee feedback in a personalised way – the personalised EX.
The white paper shows that whilst 85% of HR staff surveyed think that they are doing a good job of turning feedback into action; people disagree, with only 14% agreeing that they think feedback is useful.
Why is personalised employee experience important?
What this is showing is that there is a breakdown; organisations are not listening to their people at the right times and are not communicating in a personalised way. Insight that is gathered is being wasted as people do not feel they are being listened to.
If this continues, we are likely to see a further drop in engagement (especially around pride and advocacy) with less people recommending their organisation as a great place to work and attrition rates continue to increase.
What can we do as HR and Internal Communications professionals?
Tivian set out from their research what the three stand out areas are that we can start to fix:
- Collecting feedback seems to be a tick box exercise
- Organisations are not using the right tools or automation to help close the feedback loop and communicate with people as individuals
- There is not enough focus on employee experience and collecting feedback at the right points in the employee journey.
Collecting feedback
Conducting a survey or conducting a focus group or interview, are a great way to amplify employee voice. But the Tivian research shows us that currently people do not feel they have an influence within their organisation.
We know from our extensive research at People Lab (and the Tivian report agrees), that people are able to perform at their best when they have a sense of control or autonomy over their working conditions and how they do their work.
People want to be able to see the value that they add to customers experience (impact) and feel valued in return (appreciation).
The universal themes of experience set out in our MAGIC-CA model show this:
- Meaning
- Appreciation
- Growth
- Impact
- Connection
- Challenge
- Autonomy
The Tivian research shows that 70% of those surveyed have little or no influence over how things are done with 38% of people saying that their organisation is rarely open to ideas.
The research further points out that 97% of people surveyed want to work for a transparent organisation, but only 55% say their organisation is. Again 97% want strong two-way communication yet just over 51% say they actually get this.
To fix this gap we need to listen to employees more closely to better understand their needs without making assumptions about what we think they need. We need to communicate transparently; and this must be a two-way communication and not just messages pushed from the top of the organisation down. By building a culture of feedback you will ensure that people feel they truly have an influence on crafting their experience.
Using feedback effectively
Overtime, the way feedback has been collected has improved. The Tivian research shows that HR now drives extensive, regular survey and listening programmes. Eighty percent of those organisations’ surveys collect feedback on a regular basis (ranging from daily to quarterly). The annual survey is on the decline with only 16% relying solely on this form of feedback, which shows that more people are getting to share their views more than once a year, which is great news.
A lot of people that we speak to at People Lab, talk about survey fatigue – but what is interesting is that actually people prefer to give feedback on a regular basis. Results tend to be shared faster (in some cases with the right platform this can be in real-time).
But whilst feedback is being collected, still only 14% of the people surveyed in the Tivian research feel that their organisation is effective at making changes due to the feedback received. This has an impact on retention – over two-thirds (67%) of people surveyed said that if organisations made changes based on the feedback, they would be more likely to stay.
By not acting on feedback, organisations are effectively impacting their ability to improve. If people feel that they are not being listened to then in the end they will stop sharing their views, and response rates (even on regular surveys) will begin to decline.
To fix this gap it is useful to have an employee experience platform. There are many on the market which have a number of built-in tools that support managers to take action, monitor progress and re-survey to evaluate the impact the initiatives have had.
Employees are not receiving a personalised employee experience
When people do not believe they are treated as individuals by their organisation, this directly impacts their commitment (wanting to stay), any discretionary effort (going above and beyond), as well as overall job satisfaction (pride).When you look at this alongside the ability to be able to influence, you can see why engagement levels are at an all time low in some sectors.
Delivering a personal experience starts with communication, particularly when sharing survey results. But this is not by looking at demographics and pigeon-holing people to show that feedback is representative, it needs to be more holistic in its approach. Organisations have invested heavily in customer experience and brand and now people have high expectations when it comes to employee experience, and how the brand communicates with them, and how does their experience create more good days at work?
This means that organisations need to engage and inform people through timely, relevant communications that use a variety of mediums to reach them, and not just be paper on a wall.
The key to getting personalised employee experience right is to deliver personalised messages. Build campaigns like a marketer and engage with timely, lively content that will keep people focused and energised with their own objectives as well as those of the organisation overall.
Feedback across the lifecycle journey
So, whilst many organisations are moving away from the annual survey and are collecting regular feedback, we are not ensuring that feedback is gathered at key touch points of the moments that matter. This does not have to be just the core, standard points i.e., onboarding or exit. It can also include those softer touchpoints i.e., work anniversaries of career pathways. All these add up to employee experience.
Often data is collected at the wrong time. The Tivian report shows that two-thirds of organisations surveyed collect exit data when people resign. Whilst this is invaluable data, it can be collected at earlier points to try and identify those people who are at risk of flight (I am thinking of leaving in the next twelve months rather than I want to leave now), so that we can build interventions that reduce avoidable turnover and improve talent retention.
Taking a lifecycle approach, including the softer experiences, can help improve personalised employee experience. Problems are flagged and dealt with earlier, thus reducing the disruption on the individual experience, as well as bigger issues being able to be improved sooner.
If you want to know more about employee lifecycle; the MAGIC-CA model of employee experience and how you can use a holistic, scientific approach to understanding the needs of the people in your organisation, feel free to contact us and say hello.
@Karen
