CALL TO ACTION: A New Workforce Experience

“It’s our time to take a different approach to how we as HR technologists think about our domain. HR leaders and colleagues need to understand the difference between Digital and Technology and take a fresh look at the role HR needs to play to be successful in today's world.”

I threw down the gauntlet when I kicked off Human Resource Executive’s webinar earlier today with over 600 global attendees joining to better understand How to Deliver the New Workforce Experience. We NEED to. Design and deliver a new workforce experience, that is. The stats proved it.

• Fifty-three percent of attendees reported they have NO digital HR/people strategy in their organization
• Another thirty percent reporting they’re working on theirs
• Leaving a meager seventeen percent of organizations feeling as though they have a TRUE digital HR/people strategy

This is critical, folks - to the HR/people function and our future, to the enterprises we support, and to the workforce whose expectations are simply not being met. If you want to build or maintain your competitive edge as an organization, you need to ask yourselves what it’s OK to to OK at versus what you NEED to be GREAT at. Design a workforce experience with that in mind.

I kicked off the webinar by inviting attendees to join the largest online community focused on the digital transformation of work (FuelWork) by scanning a QR code on their mobile. Aim your mobile device at your laptop screen, open the camera, and immediately receive a seamless, frictionless invitation to our online engagement community. We’ll start talking to you there immediately, we’ll put the presentation and recording there, you can ask questions and engage immediately.

We asked live participants on the webinar how that simple exercise made them feel.

“Easy.” “Wow.” “Cool.” “Love this.”

Imagine if this was the experience your employees had when they call your HR Service Center or interact with HR Self Service when they need to request time off, report a claim, process a promotion for a valued employee, change their mailing address, or just ask a question. “Easy.” “Wow.” “Cool.” “Love this.” This is what work should be, look, and feel like. It’s 2019, after all.

User interface is not experience. Service delivery is not experience. Digital Workforce Experience is evolving from attempting to enable self-sufficiency and efficiently deal with employee issues to a model that is more focused on delivering great experiences to the workforce. That starts with putting employees and managers at the center and really empathizing with what they are trying to do and what they are thinking and feeling.

A webinar participant shared this aha moment with us in our post-webinar chat (in the online community she so painlessly joined during the live webinar):

“I am an HR Director of a larger company and we see technology passed down often that not all employees can engage in.”

How does that make them feel, I wonder? If I had to guess, I’d use words like "undervalued,” “unproductive,” or “frustrated.”

A far cry from “Easy.” “Wow.” “Cool.” “Love this.”

Workforce experience is your greatest competitive differentiator and will pay massive dividends to the business. It requires data inputs to create one that is personalized, relevant, seamless, frictionless, and engaging. It requires a design thinking approach to understand the personas of your workforce, to define the moments that matter based on the outcomes you set out to achieve, and to produce people analytics the business cares about. Digital transformation of workforce experience will be the greatest undertaking of your enterprise if you approach it right, and it will produce the most significant impact. We’re here to help.

Thanks for a great webinar, Human Resource Executive and Achievers! See you at #HRTechConf in October.