Music is my passion. I’ve spent years collecting vinyl, making mix tapes and discovering new bands. Back in the day, the folks at my local record store would recommend a new release, or a friend would insist I check out a new album. Now I have Spotify. I love Spotify, because it knows me and my music tastes so well.
Spotify puts together daily mixes for me, it shares new releases I might like via ‘release radar’ and it challenges me to get out of my playlist-rut via ‘discover weekly’. And as for my ‘time capsule’ playlist, it was so spookily spot-on I wondered what dark magic was at work!
Spotify is a master at ‘hyper-personalisation’ (HP), as are Amazon, Starbucks and many, many more. There are a few definitions of HP out there, but in essence it is a customised and real-time offering of content, services, products and customer experience, at an individual level.
HP uses big data to make predictions about you, to deliver a personal customer experience. It’s something that we’re now very familiar with as a consumer, but how about as an employee? If HP is helping to make our customer experiences better and better, is the employee experience being left behind?
Gartner cites employee experience as one of the top priorities for HRDs in 2019 (2019 HR Executive Priorities, Gartner). However the same research also shows that HR pros are struggling to bring their EVP to life and deliver a great experience for their people.
Increasingly we are seeing practitioners getting bogged down in the semantics of engagement vs. experience, which only contributes to this struggle. I think it’s quite simple – a great employee experience will contribute towards engagement and loyalty. But if the employee experience is poor, then it’s doubtful employees will be engaged.
Technological advances have enabled significant improvements in customer experience, and some companies are now beginning to explore the opportunities for employee experience. Swedish start-up Epicenter offers employees implants via microchips, that are basically like a swipe card: enabling access to offices, operating printers or buying lattes at the coffee bar, all with a swipe of a hand. Analytics provided by enterprise social networks such as Workplace by facebook could also provide insights to enable HP.
It’s easy to see how these technologies could enable companies to gather a range of data to help them understand the employee experience and behaviours in real time, and ultimately deliver a great employee experience.
There’s no doubt that Employee Experience is having a moment, but the gulf between customer experience and employee experience is huge.
If Spotify can remind me what music I was listening to in 1987, why is it that the company I work for can’t sort out my ‘log-ins’ for my first day? Or send me content that is genuinely useful for my job? Or help me to develop my performance? Surely with the advances in customer experience, employee experience doesn’t need to be this way?
As practitioners we need to understand how we can use these new technologies and approaches internally. Spending some time with our colleagues in marketing, digital and customer experience is a great place to start. We need to make the business case to stakeholders, to show focusing on employee experience is every bit as critical focusing on customer experience.
We need to embrace big data, AI and machine learning inside organisations to help create brilliant employee experience.
There’s no doubt that a great employee experience will positively impact a great customer experience, but first we need to understand what a great employee experience looks like. Jacob Morgan, in his book ‘The Employee Experience Advantage’, states the need to ‘purposefully design a work experience, to create a truly engaged workforce, which will in turn unlock business performance’.
I believe an ideal employee experience will involve a high degree of personalisation. This is something we at People Lab have been talking about for a long time. To get you thinking about how you do this, download our system integrity tool here which is an activity to help you review your employee life-cycle and help you to design an employee experience which will build employee engagement.
When we understand what the ideal experience looks like for our people we can begin to design and build it, and taking lessons from customer experience can help us. And if we develop a great employee experience, we’ll contribute towards an engaged workforce, which ultimately benefits not only your employees, but also your customers and partners too.
I’m going to be attending an event held in Barcelona on 22nd and 23rd May, with #ExGlobal. There’ll be over 100+ senior executives from global enterprises attending, all working to make workplaces more productive, interactive and enjoyable. We’re also able to offer our followers a 20% discount, just use the code ‘Bridger20’ when buying through this link: https://employeeexperienceglobal.iqpc.com/booknow
