Will COVID-19 kick employee experience (EX) off the priority list for HR? No. Nor should it. In fact, understanding and re-imagining the experience of your people has never been more important.
And it all starts with empathy.
EX for an employee, is the experience they have of you from the moment they hear about you as an employer – whether they’re tempted or not – to the moment they’ve forgotten they ever worked for you. So, EX is about expectation, the moment, and the memory.
Right now, as people, and organisations made up of people, we’re in unknown territory. Our expectations and lived experience of work are changing on a daily, if not an hourly basis.
I really hate reaching for this overused-used acronym, but these are indeed volatile, uncertain, complex, chaotic and ambiguous – VUCCA – times. (Sorry, I’m so bored of it, but if anything quickly sums up where we’re at, it’s this). This is not the point to pedal backwards on developing an employee experience mindset and/or to stop putting it to work.
We’ve seen the horror headlines – people made redundant in group Zoom calls. Employees losing their homes, along with their jobs, with no warning. People being forced back to workplaces where they don’t feel safe, or are indeed not safe.
But these headlines are just that – the most visible and usually negative of experiences people are having in relation to work right now. Beneath the headlines are a multitude of different experiences that can be thought about and intentionally architected. In fact, they should be considered and designed if we are to look after our people’s wellbeing; deeply connect (or reconnect) them to the purpose of the organisation and each other; and inspire and support them to do their best work, to learn and innovate.
Sound big and crazy? Of course it does. But design thinking – at the heart of our approach to employee experience design – is all about working with complexity and uncertainty. And it works, helping us to see the big picture, find the most important problems to solve, and then collaboratively work with colleagues to find solutions we can rapidly test and learn from. Find out more at our next EX Design Virtual Workshop starting June 24, 2020.
Perhaps you are already working with some of the tools. Design thinking is about tools, not rules, and they are flexible, practical and, of course, human-centred. I’ll leave you with three practical empathy tools to get your head and hands back around the experience you need to be intentionally understanding and designing for.
- Personas – dust them off. Do they reflect the groups you need to be working with now? Is it still all about tenure, seniority, role etc? Or are other dimensions more urgent? Furloughed returnees? First time virtual managers? New ‘virtual joiners’? It’s time to think about the common elements of your population in a different way. Personas will help you do that.
- Journey maps – there’s a reason metaphors around journeys keep cropping up in relation to how organisations, leaders and employees are and will respond to the ongoing waves of the COVID-19 crisis. Within that big journey we’re all on, are many smaller ones – it’s like Russian dolls. And many of them are new. If you have existing journey sets – eg management HR journeys, learning journeys, hiring / on-boarding, departing etc – now’s the time to rethink them and address the gaps. Take life journeys – does returning from parental leave look and feel the same during a pandemic? What do returning parents feel, need, worry about and do now that is different? What do they need? You’ll only know if you do the work and you work at an empathic level. Which takes me to the third tool.
- Empathy maps – Empathy mapping is a truly brilliant process that makes you stop, think and step into someone else’s shoes to look at a moment or a whole journey through their eyes. It’s the tool that really goes deep to the heart of human needs, to ensure we design the experience that is needed – not the one we think we should create. It’s not only the right thing to do. It’s also the most cost-effective. Because we create solutions that make a difference and can rapidly ditch misguided ideas and activities.
COVID-19 will prove a challenge to the maturing of EX design capability in increasing numbers of large and small organisations. But I believe EX design, with empathy at its heart, has as vital a part to play as ever as organisations seek to come back from COVID-19.
@Belinda
