Making the most of digital opportunities within employee experience (EX)
Employee experience (EX) is now on the radar for many senior leaders around the globe. This is being driven by survey after survey that are showing the gap in employee experience that exists within most organisations, and the importance of closing it.
Gallup’s 2017 State of the Global Workforce report, for example, highlighted that an extraordinary 85% of workers aren’t engaged at work. The 2019 Global Human Capital Trends report from Deloitte identified that 84% of leaders consider employee experience to be important, and 28% identified it as one of the three most urgent issues facing their organisation in 2019. Despite this, only 9% of leaders reported feeling ready to address this issue.
Projects are now underway to address employee experience issues, led by senior HR leaders, CIOs, internal communication teams and business leaders. These activities generally focus on staff engagement and organisational culture, as well as on key points in the employee journey, such as onboarding.
What these initiatives may miss are the broader opportunities for technology improvements, not just in providing new tools and functionality, but in delivering a greatly-improved digital employee experience.
The three elements of employee experience
It’s widely understood that there are three elements that make up employee experience:
The cultural aspect that encompasses the shared values, behaviours and ways of doing work among the workforce. It also considers employee engagement, which is a priority for many HR leaders.
The physical aspect that addresses the real-world work environment, whether it’s an office building, a factory floor or a home-office. This also includes the physical technologies provided to the workforce, such as laptops and mobile phones.
And finally, the technology aspect that consider all the digital tools and platforms that are provided to workers, as well as the digital interactions between employees.
Taking a strategic approach to digital employee experience
While employee experience is now being seriously considered at a senior leader level, the approach to technology solutions has often remained piecemeal.
In too many cases, key business units are delivering new digital solutions both at pace and in isolation. This leads to a richer set of digital capabilities, but also a worrying increase in complexity. Projects delivered in an uncoordinated way are also struggling to deliver promised benefits.
Common examples include new technologies for collaboration, launched without a clear business purpose; or new HR tools and apps that add to the clutter of existing digital offerings to employees.
There is fortunately an opportunity for leaders to shape a more strategic approach to the digital elements of employee experience.
Digital employee experience (#DEX) is the sum total of the digital interactions within the work environment.
As we speak, organisations are finding that digital employee experience (DEX) is a fruitful way of looking at the digital capabilities that are provided to employees, as well as how they work with each other digitally.
Early adopters are already seeing the benefits that can be reaped through a multi-disciplinary approach to DEX that engages all key business stakeholders.
Helping the buses to run on time
Stagecoach are the leading operator of buses and express coaches in the UK. They have over 20,000 frontline staff, mostly bus drivers and engineers, scattered across 145 depots.
While these frontline staff are the ‘engine’ of the business, there was previously no effective way to reach them. They didn’t even have email addresses, let alone a more sophisticated set of digital tools at their disposal.
In a project that won them a coveted 2019 Intranet and Digital Workplace Award, they progressively rolled out a rich employee app to all these staff across the country.
This was more than just a basic communication channel. The app provided a cohesive digital employee experience that encompassed safety incident reporting, near-miss reporting, and key frontline resources. The new tool also enabled everyone to collaborate and share, with the goal of delivering a better bus service.
Time savings were impressive, with 5,000 hours saved every week across the 20,000 frontline workers. More importantly, the increased efficiency led to a 5% increase in the number of buses leaving on time, a core metric for the business.
These benefits were the product of a clear focus on the employee experience for this key group of staff, not just the delivery of new tools and functionality.
More than just new tools
There’s no question that a multitude of extraordinary tools are now being designed with a specific focus on employee needs, closing the gap with customer-facing solutions.
These include:
- digital HR offerings, streamlining common employee tasks
- productivity and collaboration tools, enabling staff to work together more effectively
- internal communications tools, often specifically focusing on frontline needs
- staff engagement tools, to gather and assess employee sentiment
- innovation and ideation solutions
- … and the list goes on
These tools are making it easier to deliver a better digital employee experience, and CIOs are increasingly working with key stakeholders to bring them into organisations in a managed way.
This is only part of the picture, however, as there is an imminent risk of adding even more complexity into businesses, overwhelming the benefits that are delivered.
We’ve been here before, with the clutter of icons on our Windows desktops, and it’s a situation we would do best to avoid repeating.
For that reason, senior leaders should shape an expectation that beyond new functionality, a better and more cohesive digital experience should be delivered.
This will require a strategic approach to DEX that brings together key stakeholders, including CIOs, CHROs and senior business leaders.
Supporting isolated staff in a global business
Travelex is a familiar site in airports for everyone who travels, offering currency exchange services (and more). To provide these services, Travelex has over 7,000 frontline staff, working across 1,200 stores in 33 countries.
What’s not immediately apparent is that the majority of these 7,000 staff are ‘lone workers’, working by themselves with only the briefest of interactions with another employee at shift change. Unsurprisingly these employees highlighted a feeling of isolation and the average tenure in these roles was low.
In 2019, the business won a Gold Intranet and Digital Workplace Award for their rollout of a new engagement and communication platform (‘The Lounge’) to all these frontline staff.
The Lounge introduced new ways of connecting and engaging in two-way dialogue, as well as using ‘gamification’ to drive a healthy sense of competition between teams of staff.
Bringing all this together is a coherent digital employee experience that encompasses all the new functionality that was launched.
The impact has been extraordinary. Product sales have increased between 4% and 183%. Support tickets to the internal HR service desk dropped by 50%. Employee NPS increased by 25 points, with much of the gains slated to The Lounge.
Describing a vision for the future
In the client work that my business, Step Two, is doing on digital employee experience, we’re finding that the most productive first step is properly understand staff needs.
This requires rich, ethnographic research that spends as much time as possible in frontline and operational roles. From this, clear patterns emerge relating to key points of pain, and daily challenges.
With this foundation in place, narrative becomes a powerful way of describing a desired DEX. This is often in the form of ‘day in the life’ scenarios that bring to life how employees work now, and then what their working life might be in a year or two’s time.
This is not about creating more ‘blue sky’ visions, or pursuing a techno-utopian vision for how businesses can operate.
Instead, it’s about bringing together key stakeholders and helping them to align activities that are planned or underway. These narratives also make clear that the goal is to deliver a great digital employee experience, not just a next generation of technology solutions.
In Step Two, we look forward to working with more leaders to shape DEX visions and strategies, as well as uncovering and sharing great solutions already delivered around the globe.
