Why is Employee Experience in the limelight, and how can leaders respond?

Popularity in ‘employee experience’ has surged due to the hasty adoption of new technologies and ways of working during Covid lockdowns. Forward-thinking organisations are seizing this transformative opportunity to design an employee experience suited to their culture and values. There is no easy answer to this adaptive challenge, but employing strategic conversations is a mindful way to kick start the journey on establishing the new normal. Read on to find out what leaders can do to start navigating strategic conversations on employee experience.

Defining ‘Employee Experience’

Employee experience refers to organisational aspects that empower employees to succeed, thereby propelling an organisation’s mission.

Providing the right resources to align employees with organisational goals has been a topic for management science and organisational research for decades, but the unprecedented pace of change due to the pandemic has prompted a surge in interest for ‘employee experience’.

The pandemic and global lockdowns sped up the adoption of digital technologies by several years, resulting in evolutionary leap in how we perform and perceive work.

Danger of Unplanned Evolution

With the pandemic easing, employees and leaders are taking stock and re-evaluating what work means, with questions like:

• Is my current work worth it?
• What is the purpose of an office?
• How do I prioritise health and wellbeing?

As employees envision what the future of work looks like for them, leaders are seizing this window of opportunity to design an employee experience fit for their organisations. Simply mandating colleagues to return to the office on specific days or maximising flexibility by allowing employees to choose for themselves will amplify frustrations for both employees and leaders. And while organisations should absolutely leverage technology to enable employees to be their best selves and do the best work, heedlessly throwing technology at the problem is not the answer.

Solving an Adaptive Challenge

Employee experience is an adaptive challenge, representing a complex opportunity with no easy answers. Solving adaptive challenges requires an open mind, shifts in perspective, and strategic planning to allow innovative solutions to flourish.

Start with defining the problem statement. For one organisation, the exam question was ‘how could we free up resources across the business so employees have more capacity to workmore strategically?”

With exam question in mind, challenge the organisation’s thinking by considering the factors that underpin employee experience — people, business and technology. How can we rethink these elements holistically, so we conceive solutions that benefit both the organisation and its employees? What changes or additions are needed so sum of the parts contribute to greater overall effectiveness?

Sometimes, innovative answers can come from an adjacent field. For example, the arrival of social media (new technology) changed how businesses communicate and sell to its customers, with new processes and technologies to support more valuable ways to interact and purchase. The organisation can borrow these concepts to employee interactions, such as a providing chatbot that supply answers to commonly asked questions to reduce the cost of servicing internal customers, or a one-stop portal with an intuitive front-end pulling together disparate HR systems and provide a seamless experience to end users, who consequently spend less time on finding information important to them.

Strategic conversation is a great framework to start exploring employee experience opportunities. Gather stakeholders with diverse views to align on the challenge before setting to work on creative problem-solving. Leaders looking for ideas on how to bring these topics to life for their organisations may wish to explore Moments of Impact by Chris Ertel and Lisa Kay Solomon, who provide clear steps to driving “interactive strategic problem-solving sessions” and creating impactful changes to defeat hard problems.