Approach to Enhance Employee Experience, During & After COVID-19

A growing challenge in many organisations is to understand and improve the employee experience. Providing an engaging experience helps in attracting and retaining employees. As organisation shift to a hybrid workplace, it is reported, working from home has increased productivity, with a cost of affecting employee wellbeing and with limited interaction at the workplace, measuring the experience quotient is challenging.

The time is now to reset the approach on people’s agenda  - to enhance employee experience. The emotional connect during these turbulent times, suffered, and social distancing created a feeling of isolation. For many, this hostile situation has caused panic, and they slipped into a deep depression.

Traditionally, HR has addressed enhancing its success models by incorporating OD interventions in their various processes to improve the satisfaction quotient. Process improvements were made to strengthen the hiring quality, improve employee engagement, create cohesive culture, benchmark to be at top decile in rewards bucket, new technology learning modules and accelerated career development modules. All these were working as separate, independent programs with limited integration into another. However, failing to understand the candidate or employee experiencing all these processes as an integrated journey. It is essential to design for the experience, not just to solve an immediate problem.

As a new approach, few leading companies used the design thinking process to identify the ‘moments that matter’. See the employee experience through the eyes of their employees. Every touchpoint in the employee’s journey is identified, mapped to help the organisation define their new process, emphasizing critical moments. As an HR professional, it is a new requirement to be agile, understand design thinking to map the employee’s journey to create a Minimal Viable Product for all the workforce.

Creating such a product and making it successful is not just an HR KPI alone. One department alone cannot solve the puzzle. Leveraging IT infrastructure has eased certain anxious moments. Usage of apps, leader boards, gamification, and AI-enabled chatbots helped enhance productivity levels in these challenging times. We cannot conclude having a new user interface with integrated systems on the best software platform alone create excellent employee experience moments. Thus, design thinking, mapping the moments, and integrating processes are part-essentials to enhance the experience.

Few may ask:

• What are the most significant things to be done to create the best experience? 
• How can we focus on employee experience when survival is the top priority?
• Should enhancing employee experience be the utmost priority?

The answer is to be vigilant and be empathetic, ensure all the business processes and systems make the candidate/employee feel inclusive. Employee experience platform strives on ‘Moments that Matter. But the way employee is being treated under challenging times, such as this Covid-19 pandemic, will define what type of employer they work for, what qualities does his/her manager stand for, and these testing times will impact employee’s loyalty, motivation, and overall employee and customer satisfaction. Being abrasive and not being empathetic enough makes the situation more complicated.

The best software, best process design can fail when an employee feels unsafe, and the star performer can fail if he feels insecure.

To be successful, build on trusting relationships and being cohesive create a disproportionate impact on employee wellbeing and effectiveness.

With the threat of a second wave of COVID-19 infections looming over the world again, HR should play a vital role in creating an inclusive environment and ensure that business leaders are well informed and guided in these troubled times employees require emotional support. Perfecting this will ensure employees’ work experience and wellness to reap its success. The experience you provide and the relationship you gain with your employee will define the long business haul.