A new space called Employee Experience
Recently, Josh Bersin, an international thought leader in HR & leadership, shared his perspective on Employee Experience.
Josh Bersin is one the top influencers in HR globally, he has made Bersin by Deloitte the “go to” source for HR decision makers seeking insight and expert advice. Josh is a world-renowned author on talent management and leadership topics in BusinessWeek, Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, …
So when he recently called Spencer, one of our portfolio companies, a key vendor in employee experience platforms — after essentially summarising our business case — we couldn’t help but paraphrasing his vision into our product’s reality.
Time to showcase how our portfolio company, Spencer successfully applies Bersin’s theory of employee experience for its customers.
AN INTEGRATED WORKPLACE EXPERIENCE
Yes — your employees are overwhelmed by the volume and diversity of software tools and their pace of change.
And yes — as consumers, we are all used to the convenience of applications such as Netflix, AirBnB or Uber. Resulting in high expectations, that aren’t always met by our tools at work.
The solution to the problem, according to Bersin?
“The answer is a set of software I call the employee experience platform. […] a user-centric software layer. And this is not just a good idea: it’s happening today.”
— Josh Bersin
That’s right! Over the past two years, we’ve been training Spencer to proactively assist our customer’s workforce through employee-centric journeys, across functions and departments. Empowering & connecting employees, boosting productivity by making the tools you trust work better together.
Read on below the video or get in touch if you’d like to learn more!
THREE MOTIVATIONS TO ADOPT AN EMPLOYEE ASSISTANT
#1 — Empower, engage and reach all your employees in a convenient way, in line with your company culture and brand.
Spencer improves employer branding, employee engagement and talent acquisition/retention in a globalised and transparent job market.
At Delhaize (Retail, Ahold Group), 96% of employees indicated Spencer helps them every day.
“Spencer helps us empower and reach everyone at Delhaize, stimulating communication, collaboration and driving operational efficiencies across functions and departments.”
- Dieter De Waegeneer, EVP Operations @Delhaize (Retail)
#2 — Increase productivity & profitability.
Spencer aggregates actions & information from different systems in one consistent user-interface. Proving his return on investment, by saving time, accelerating decision making, improving quality, and process adherence across the board.
At Proximus (Telco), we’ve improved the productivity of their Employee Self Service processes with almost 70%.
“An excellent example of how technology designed and fit for employees improves efficiency in the organisation”
- Serge Peeters, HR Director @ Proximus (Telco)
#3 — Digital transformation made simple.
Spencer is designed for employees. There’s no training or change management needed. But most of all, upgrading to new back-end systems becomes transparent to the end user.
Spencer allows companies to transform their ecosystem at lightning speed, whilst guaranteeing a convenient and consistent employee experience.
A CASE: DESIGN-THINKING APPLIED
On a mission to empower their diverse workforce with an intuitive Employee Self-Service (ESS) suite, Proximus (Telco) turned to Spencer. Instead of disrupting the core blocks in their IT ecosystem, they wanted to keep SAP HR in place and add a new experience & productivity layer on top.
Spencer always starts from the employee’s perspective. So instead of answering to the RFP, to bring existing processes or screens to a mobile device format, we decided to take a step back.
Imagine you have 10 vacation days left, combined over three absence types. In the existing SAP HR solution, booking a holiday would require three separate requests (one per absence type). But as an employee, wouldn’t you expect just one step, simply select the 10-day period?
So that’s exactly what Spencer does. One step for the employee, while Spencer manages all transactions involved in the background. And because he’s a proactive assistant: he will also block your calendar, help you manage conflicting meetings, remind you to set your out of office, and inform your team. Ticking every box on your checklist, so you can go on holiday with peace-of-mind.
THE ROI: EXPERIENCE + PRODUCTIVITY
A year ago, Spencer was introduced to 8.000 employees at Proximus, from top management to technicians, from desk to deskless workers. Within a few months, our adoption rate grew to 95%. Even though legacy systems are still available, 95% of employees actively chose to install Spencer on their private/personal smartphones, regardless of role, age, or department.
“The true power of Spencer is that it works in tandem with our existing HRM solution. Spencer adds a visually attractive layer on top of it.”
- Serge Peeters, HR Director @ Proximus (Telco)
The qualitative feedback on Spencer’s convenience, and ease of use positively reflects on the employee engagement and the employer perception. On top of that, we’ve benchmarked the time spent in the previous workflow to request and approve time off, versus the process in Spencer, only to conclude that Spencer generates significant time-savings, equal to 30k EUR every week.
Moreover, 30% of sessions take place outside of business hours, which adds another surplus to the ROI, both on the value for employees (convenience factor) and on the productivity metrics.
Spencer’s ROI cannot be reduced to one metric. It’s the combination, and correlation between the qualitative benefits of a new System of Experience, and the quantitative benefits of a System of Productivity. Lastly, as a “layer on top”, Spencer enables fast-paced digital transformation without disrupting your workforce.
BEYOND HR
Most of our customers start their search from a very specific, and sometimes narrow, problem statement, unique for one department or unit within their organisation. They want to be able to “communicate to the entire workforce”, “optimise time tracking and billables”, “flag company incidents rapidly” or “give access to their ESS on mobile”, etc.
With Spencer, we’ll always take the opportunity to assess things from the employee’s perspective, across functions and departments. Because an employee looks at his company as a whole, and expects a consistent experience whether he’s reading the latest intranet post, requesting time off, approving a timesheet, or reporting an incident.
This typically results in a roadmap of employee journeys that we’ll be facilitating ranging from Employee Self-Service functionalities to communication, collaboration and operational tasks.
In the end, our goal is to deliver an impactful employee experience across departments, connected with the relevant back-end systems and in line with the company culture, identity and physical space.
“Spencer helps us combine our critical applications into a single, easy-to-use, mobile interface. The result: a more intuitive way-of-working, increased productivity and happier employees!”
- Patrick Vincent, Chief Transformation Officer @Telenet, Liberty Global
Want to know more about our employee assistant? Check out Spencer.co for more information
