Remember the last time you stopped purchasing from a brand because you did not feel valued as a customer? Don’t make your employees feel the same, and leave you.
Building your employee experience is similar to how marketers build customer experiences. There is so much that comes under the gamut of employee experience that it can feel overwhelming designing and implementing a good employee experience model.
But don’t worry. We’ve put together a rich, yet simple, framework that will help you build out your employee experience strategy from the get go.
It consists of four simple steps and is simple to remember as an acronym (DDEE).
To design a great EX, we need to start with understanding your employees. The understanding stage includes a set of practices to create a shared understanding of who your employees are, what they want and need, and how they perceive the interactions they’re having with your company today. It’s the thing that replaces management biases, everyone’s preconceived notions and best guesses about employees with real, actionable insights about employees.
Start by seeking these answers and thankfully, there is no dearth of employee data in most organizations.
Dig deep into your HRMS. Analyze results of your employee satisfaction surveys. Learn from your exit interviews. Check trends in attrition and attendance rates. Have focus groups and even one-on-ones with managers, if necessary.
The objective is to understand: Who are they? What drives them, motivates them? What are their needs and pain points? How do they see, feel, think and act?
Group employees based on similarities, patterns and trends you observe in your data to create distinct employee personas. For instance, you can sort your employees into “people who are remote employees” or “people in leadership roles” or “been with the organization for less than a year”.
Once you’ve created these clusters, identify common traits among them and create an individual representative persona. To ensure that your experience accounts for a diverse workforce, focus on creating a minimum of 3-4 distinct personas and to avoid making it unfocused, limit it to a maximum of 6 personas.
Awesome! So you now have your employee personas ready. The next step is to design the employee experience journey. The design stage helps you dive into the details and focus on the moments in the employees experience that really matter to employees. It starts by encouraging new ideas but ends with a clear set of actionable ideas that can be implemented. By anchoring yourself around the data you’ve collected from employees, and having informed stakeholders, you can come up with creative
SO, HOW CAN YOU DO THIS?
If you are sitting down with your HR team to do this, we would say, bring in a huge chart paper or use your large whiteboard to do this.
Discover moments in an employee journey that matter most to employees. Here are some for your reference:
Once you have mapped these out, pick a specific program (such as onboarding, return-to-work, process adoption) you want to reimagine.
Now that you have your personas and touchpoints ready, it is time to align them.
Find out what are the needs and pain points of your personas at each of your chosen touchpoints. And also, what they feel and how they behave at each of these stages. For each touch points answer the following questions:
Once you have identified what needs to change at each touchpoint, it is time to think of how that can happen.
Try the following to get your ideas flowing: Jot down every idea from the team and then choose the best. Generate bad provocative ideas that will lead you to the right ones (ex: What can you do to ensure employees quit within 30 days from hiring?). Sometimes best solutions come from ideas people are scared to share out of fear of failure or criticism.
And once you have your best solutions ready, align them with the touchpoints you had previously created and group the ideas into frontstage, backstage and support processes.
At the end of step 2, you’ll see that you have a massive plan in place with varied touchpoints for so many different personas! That’s why, we would recommend a guided approach that helps maintain focus and steers the employee in the right direction.
Each touchpoint is one step towards achieving the larger goal of the journey the employee is on. But to make it a guided process, it is helpful to breakdown the touchpoint further to ensure you are anticipating their every need.
By picking a pilot group (or a few) you get to test your experience out, get feedback and make improvements, so it is effective when you release it to all your employees. This could be an entire location, a department or people who are from a specific work-level..
Having a great plan is of no use if there is no way to put it into action. This is where it is helpful to pick an employee experience platform that you want to use to deliver this experience. Consider the following when picking your platform of choice:
You’ve done all the hard work and now it’s the moment of truth. Based on the platform you’ve chosen, you will need to set it up and follow the steps required to launch the experience to your pilot group. One final thing before launching - you should have initiated your change management process which would include stakeholder communication, platform training for key stakeholders and having a support process in place to ensure people know who to reach in case of any questions. Now you’re ready - time to hit the launch button.
Congratulations! You’ve launched and it’s working. But as Princess Shuri from Black Panther says, “Just because something works, doesn’t mean it can’t be improved.” - there’s always room for improvement. So, don’t skip on evaluation and measurement if you wish to build a sustainable employee experience strategy.
Using the right evaluation metrics can do two things: (1) continuously improve your employee experience strategy (2) put employee-experience on par with traditional-business metrics, such as sales and profitability.
Here is what you can do to deliver actionable insights to all partners in the process and also use it to continuously improve the experience for employees.
The Dive In - Design - Execute - Evaluate framework to design employee experiences is simple but note that we didn’t say easy. And that’s because, despite clear visions, we’ve seen employee experience frameworks fail under the weight of cognitive overload, lack of optimization for hybrid environments and so much more.
That’s why we built Tydy - to enable you to design and build as many employee experience journeys as you want for as many touchpoints and employee personas. Our platform is designed to connect people, systems and processes, to solve the challenges teams face in implementing a truly seamless EX, automateS to save you time and resources while you deliver the best employee experience possible.
The sky’s the limit when it comes to envisioning and optimizing the employee experience - but if you’re ever stuck, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
