The Data Universe of Employee Experience is Defined

We know a lot about EX – are we done?

Customer Experience has become the new face of Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service. Employee Experience (EX) promises to redefine HR into a people success function. Reason enough to explore the power of employee experience in depth. And we have: We know from this piece that managing the employee experience (EX) yields business benefits. And here we have studied how HR as EX facilitators can work with business managers owning most of the actual employee experience. We understand how EX can drive culture. And we know how to implement EX in a transformative way, how to measure it and how to drive conclusions from benchmarking and analyzing EX data. 

So, is this the end of EX exploration? Do we know what to do? Are we done? No, we are not. There is an important bit missing: What data model do we use to focus efforts of the entire organization, its front-line managers and support functions on EX, track and benchmark it over time? 

With all our previous work we are now in the position to share what makes the data universe of EX, the data elements it takes to manage EX:

 Not only have we spent a lot of time defining these data elements together with F500 companies. We have also co-created a pragmatic measurement and management of these data elements. We call it the “Employee Experience Index” (EXI?) – you can look at it as a simple-to-use EX in a box approach to provide focus and to maximize ROI. It consists of these chapters:

Journeys & Types of Experiences

First, let’s be clear: Employee experience is the sum of all experiences an employee (or manager, candidate, alumnus, freelancer) is having with an organization. As experiences happen in moments, we measure them ‘in the moment’. But the experiences are having a context. This context, from the employees’ perspective, is what we call journeys. The set of journeys where the relevant experiences happen are these four journey clusters with single journeys underneath:

The journeys as such are ‘big’ enough to ask the net-promoter-score (NPS) question: “Based on your experience with [e.g. Onboarding], would you recommend this company as an employer?” And the NPS score is what we are measuring in a 1-click / 1-second survey (or text message or chatbot call or popup window) for the entire journey.

Now let’s look at the types of experiences we are trying to measure and manage along these journeys. We have identified five of them. And don’t forget – we want to measure them in the moment, as they happen during journeys:

Wellbeing, belonging, physical and digital workplace experiences are somewhat ‘always on’ offerings of a company, and less of a ‘moment’. Yet they are important for the employee experience. We therefore made them a moment by focusing on the first time an employee experiences wellbeing, belonging, and the physical/digital workplace. That happens during onboarding – and that’s the moment wellbeing, belonging and the workplace will leave the biggest impression.

Moments of Truth

Some of the moments matter more than others: We call them ‘moments of truth’ – highly emotionally loaded moments with disproportionate impact on engagement. These are the moments where employees discuss their careers, receive performance feedback and pay, etc. We need to provide a thoughtful experience, as here we can impact engagement – and hence, attraction, retention and work productivity (the full business value model is here). In various iterations with CHROs and practitioners from Global-2,000-companies and with EX and CX experts we have built and tested the right set of moments of truth that cover the experience types above while they are still focused enough to be measurable and manageable. We have identified a set of 22 of these moments. Here is an extract:

 We know from our pilots and research that the best question to ask in the moment is the CSAT (customer satisfaction) question, e.g.: “How satisfied were with receiving feedback after your first interview?” [Read more...]