The customer or the employee — whose experience matters most?
2018 is the year of the employee. It is the year where leaders realise that the less they think about the experience of their employees, the less likely they are to achieve their customer experience objectives.
We’ve been tracking the problems we’re being asked to solve for our clients over the past year and we’ve noticed an interesting trend, a transition of sorts.
You may not notice a difference but we do, and it’s the lightbulb moment we’ve been waiting for. The moment when the leaders of companies start to understand that great customer experiences, and in fact great businesses, are built from the inside out.
In this article from HBR the CEO of Popeye’s speaks about this revelatory moment, when one of the employees at a franchise said:
“there’s no place for me to hang up my coat in this restaurant, and until you think I’m important enough to have a hook where I can hang up my coat, I can’t get excited about your new guest-experience program.”
When people feel dignified, and believe the environment has been designed for them to achieve the organisation’s goals then they feel valued and that translates into making the customer feel valued.
When the employees experience is thought about, and their performance journey is matched to the business or customers then it is more likely that everyone wins, conversely when people feel like everything in the organisation is an obstacle or barrier, or that they are less important than the customer it creates negativity and low levels of motivation.
I feel like I need a caveat here. Employee experience design has nothing to do with nice-to-haves like foosball tables, an Ice Cream Bar or a dress-up day.
We believe that:
Employee experience design puts purpose back in the work, improves people’s relationship with their teams, their work and their space and ensures that processes and technology are there to support this.
Our hope is that 2018 CEO’s, Marketing, Human Resources and People teams start working together to develop their plans for the year, each strongly advocating for the people they represent so that equal attention is given to the business, the customer AND the employees in a systemic way.
We try to look at the employee experience from a few different lenses (all oddly starting with a P): People (including Team) Processes(including technology)and Place (physical and psychological).
Instead of performance reviews, why not start the year co-designing a successful 2018 with your teams?
- First build employee experience journeys — map their day from when they wake up to when they go home, including the small interactions. Ask them to do this for a week so you start to understand their rhythms.
- Then develop employee stories, the narrative of what you’d want them to accomplish and experience in a day.
Then assess this relative to the P’s:
- Does the team have the right mix of people to enable this person to achieve their objectives?
- Do the processes and technology support this person or create unnecessary tasks and obstacles for them?
- Does the physical space create an enabling environment, or do they spend unnecessary time in traffic, or without air or natural light? If they sit a lot, are the chairs supportive?
There are many other aspects of the employee experience we’d love to discuss but this would mean I’d be typing reams of text forever and not actually on improving the employee experience in the teams we are working with.
If you’d like to spend more time assessing your employee experience and designing a better 2018 please get in touch with us at crew@inquisition.co.za
