Research from Gartner (2019) found that the ROI on Employee Experience (EX) is disappointing: despite an average spend of $2,420 for each employee, only 13% of those participating in the study, said that they were satisfied with their experience at work. But we know that when you get the EX right, it pays off.
Caroline Walsh, VP at Gartner’s HR practice says:
“Simply investing in these programs is not enough – companies taking that approach only drive up expectations, creating a vicious cycle in which employee desires and organizational spending fuel each other.”
We talk about ‘employee experience design’, as the application of design principles, and positive psychology. At the heart of our approach is the empathy principle; we need to invest time to understand the people we’re designing for. We need to understand their needs and expectations. Once we genuinely comprehend our employees’ needs and expectations we can develop, test and iterate solutions to design a compelling experience.
There is no substitute for taking time to understand the people you are designing for, or with. Being intentional about understanding your employees ensures you avoid making assumptions about what a good experience means to them. As humans we all have implicit biases, and this means we have assumptions about what constitutes a great experience. Our natural biases can be the downfall of good intentions when it comes to EX design. The way to overcomes these biases is to ensure we use data, insights and evidence to inform our design and subsequent solutions. And we are big fans of using employee personas to avoid bias.
A simple, evidence-based set of employee personas will enable you to ensure your approach is employee centric. In particular, personas will unlock a deep understanding of your people and culture and increase employee-centric design capability within your teams.
To illustrate the power of personas, I wanted to share this story with you.
We were recently ‘journey mapping’ a reward and recognition approach with a client. We mapped the current journey and then the desired future journey. This in itself was a really insightful activity, and immediately unearthed issues with the current approach, some of which could be fixed straight away. But the real magic happened when we revisited the current journey maps using the lens of the employee personas we’d developed with them a couple of years ago…
We used a tool called an empathy map, to understand the current journey from the perspective of each of the employee personas. And what did we learn? First up, the current experience had clearly been designed by a specific persona, it worked for them but not for any of the other personas. It became immediately obvious why the current approach wasn’t working.
And secondly we learned that a ‘one size fits all’ approach was never going to work, and that it needed to be more flexible to accommodate different employee needs, motivations and preferences. And best of all – we reached these conclusions, and agreed actions in a 90 minute workshop.
If you would like to find out more about personas, how to develop them and use them you can download our guide here. If you would like to talk to us about developing your personas we’d love to hear from you.
