Strategic Conversations on Employee Experience — Part 1: Preparing the Topic
My previous blog post touched on designing employee experience using the strategic conversation framework. This multi-part series will explore how to approach employee experience design with a challenge that many organisations may be dealing with. Let’s dive into the first step of the strategic conversation on employee experience — preparing the topic.
Employee experience embodies many touchpoints individuals have with their employer. When an organisation seeks to improve its employee experience, the strategic conversations can span across the entire employee lifecycle, from recruitment through to offboarding.
Working through a topic as big as employee experience could easily fill up a book, so this article will home in on a more specific user need and related outcomes. As we embrace hybrid work, one area for exploration for many companies is the growth of its employees, fit for the digital age.
In this instance, be specific on the question that will increase the organisation’s future success. A firm grappling with skills shortage may pose the exam question: “how do we provide learning opportunities to upskill our employees?”
With topic established, a complementary exercise is to rule out what issues are off the table for this specific discussion. For example, bringing in a skill management platform is one way to understand skill shortages; whilst an important issue in its own right, this will prove to be a distraction from the exam question we want to answer. Set the ground rules at the start of a strategic conversation by preparing a list of issues that are considered off-topic. Acknowledge the importance of these issues by assigning them to a ‘parking lot,’ which you can use during the session to park other off-topic discussion points that arise.
Finally, be clear on the outcome of the session. If it’s the first time bringing different stakeholders together on this topic, a plausible outcome may be “10 ways learning can be improved in our organisation”, with each option accompanied by who is the end user (e.g. office worker, manager, or everyone), what would the end user do differently as a result of this new solution, and what benefits does this solution bring to the users and the organisation overall. As an example, the Value Proposition Canvas can be a useful framework to solicit ideas from different stakeholders.
But which stakeholders do we bring into a strategic conversation? And what should we do with all these creative ideas? Stay tuned for the next blog posts to find out more.
