Employee Experience: It's The #1 Issue At Work - Even Right Now

For many years LinkedIn has helped us understand the world of work through research, economic insights, and thought leadership. The 2020 Global Talent Trends have perfectly summarized much of the insights I've collected, so let me highlight them here.

First let me say, the Coronavirus is clearly our #1 issue right now. Nearly every company I talk with has now halted travel, reduced the size of meetings, and even mandated that employees stay away from each other (a large pharmaceutical client of ours now has a rule that employees must stay at least two meters from each other in meetings).

I just finished a meeting with one of the world's largest software companies and everyone avoided handshakes, we all wiped our hands all afternoon, and we were all careful not to stand too close together. While these are important initiatives for employee wellness, public health, and value to society, they're part of the employee experience too.

What LinkedIn's Research Tells Us: First, EX has Arrived With Vengeance

Among more than 7,000 HR professionals, by far the #1 issue on the mind of leaders it the "employee experience or EX" (94% cited it important). That particular phase, which used to be another name for employee engagement, has now turned into an entire domain. What does it exactly mean?

As I like to describe it, EX means that "we work for the employees" and not the other way around. In other words, just as we've spent the last 30 years building new ways to understand, segment, and listen to customers - now we are doing the same for employees.

There are many elements to this topic:

• Instrumenting and measuring EX (surveys, employee voice programs, focus groups, and many forms of employee data collection)
• Employee voice programs (we just launched a program called Giving Voice to Values, for example, which explains how you can open the aperture and give your employees the freedom to speak up). This includes new tools like Waggl, Glint, Perceptyx, and hundreds of new "open listening" tools (recently highlighted in the WSJ.)
• Employee segmentation and personas (companies like Deutsch Telecom have built employee personas to help HR, IT, Finance, and Facilities decide what types of pay, reward, development, career, technology, and work at home programs are needed for different groups).
• Employee journeys (programs like onboarding, employee transition programs, retirement programs, candidate experience programs, management development programs) all focused on workflows and end-to-end experiences that are co-designed with the business. Companies like ServiceNow and IBM are developing these "intelligent workflows" on behalf of HR, making cross-application programs easier.
• Action platforms (a phrase I use) that provide dashboards, nudges, suggestions, and many forms of feedback to managers, HR staff, and employees themselves to help them understand when a person or group is out of alignment so problems can be addressed. These include new tech vendors like Glint, Humu, and feedback tools from CultureAmp, BetterWorks, and many more).
• Employee communication systems, a new breed of tools that helps employers communicate with employees in a personalized way. Vendors like Guidespark and new features in Microsoft Teams, Facebook by Workplace, Workday, and other platforms now let HR and operations message, communicate, and notify employees with laser-like precision. This has always been a messy difficult problem, but a new breed of technology is making this easy.
• A huge new generation of HR Technology (from Workday People Experience to SuccessFactors Human Experience to ADP's Next-Gen HCM, to Glint and much more) designed to help make HR tech more useful, helpful, and easy to use. Every major HCM vendor is redesigning their systems around what I call "Micro-experiences" to make their products easier to use than ever.

Where is all this going? Well as LinkedIn discusses, in many ways this is a "redefinition of HR." As I will be publishing later this year, EX is a major shift in the whole HR function, and it brings together HR, IT, Finance, and Facilities into a major new domain focused not only on employee engagement, but more important on employee productivity, employee wellbeing, employee safety, and security, and employee trust.

Companies that have an EX program are already well ahead for the Coronavirus. They are quickly turning on listening and communication tools to help employees adjust to "work at home" and travel restrictions during the last week.

The downside is that we have a lot of work to do. LinkedIn's research shows that only 52% of companies believe their EX is positive, and OC Tanner's most recent culture study found that almost 2/3 of companies believe "their employee experience is sacrificed on behalf of the customer experience." As most of you know, this is a terrible way to run a company. If you take care of the employees, they, in turn, take care of the customers. And as companies become more and more "service-driven" (even software companies are now service companies), this equation becomes more important than ever.

Second Topic: Explosive Growth in People Analytics

I've been writing about People Analytics for years (check out my LinkedIn course or our Josh Bersin Academy course) and I"m happy to say "it has arrived." 73% of LinkedIn respondents stay its a major priority over the next five years and I'd say 100% of my clients say it's a mandate for the year ahead.

This is not to say it's easy. Most companies have 11 or more "systems of record" for HR and the biggest problem they now have is not hiring statisticians, it's cleaning up and integrating the data. That problem is now being addressed by most big companies, but it's a never-ending project. So you have to get IT to help you.

Off the shelf solutions are getting easier than ever. We partner with Visier for our People Analytics course - and Visier can integrate and deliver people analytics solutions with almost no back-end work on your part. Most major HCM projects are cost-justified by the need to better integrate data but let me warn you, this is not really a technology problem. Yes, reducing the number of systems helps - but ultimately this is a business problem of building an analytics strategy.

The companies that thrive in this new world now have multi-disciplinary teams who understand where data is located; they put in place a governance model to make sure that data is integrated in a consistent way; and they build a data dictionary and set of user-oriented tools so the data is available to managers, executives, and HR teams. The old days of hiring PhDs and sitting around doing correlations (ie. the #1 reason people leave our company is that they don't have a "best friend" at work) are over.

Yes, there are lots of fun science projects to do - but today People Analytics has become Business Analytics. One of our clients is a large insurance company with more than 100,000 people in call centers, service centers, and healthcare advice centers. They use a wide range of people and business analytics to optimize where to hire people, what to pay people, what bottlenecks exist in hiring or onboarding, what drives high levels of customer service, and much more. They look at HR data, employee relationship data, engagement data, and business data - all in an integrated way. THIS is where People Analytics is going.

You don't have to be a giant company to do this. In my old company, I used to look at the resumes and job history of our highest performing salespeople. Through my own simple analysis, I concluded that we needed to hire people with a very particular background, and we later found that certain behaviors made even those people hyper-successful. This was a business analysis project which leveraged people data - that's what People Analytics at its best.

The Third Big Topic is Internal Mobility

I've been flying around the world (until recently) talking with companies about reskilling and the future of work for a few years, and by far the #1 topic of interest today is "how do we leverage the skills we have" to transform our workforce and reduce the cost of our recruiting. LinkedIn found that this is now important to 73% of companies, and again I'd suggest that 100% of large companies are working on this.

There are a lot of thorny issues at play here. First and most important of all is the fact that most companies have old, legacy job architectures so it's very hard to tell what people are really doing. (One of our clients has 17,000 job descriptions for 14,000 employees!). So if you do "open up" job requisitions to internal candidates, they aren't even sure what jobs they should apply for.

This gets to the second big issue: creating what I now call "Talent Marketplaces" to help employees find internal positions in a more deterministic way. Vendors like Gloat, Fuel50, Workday, Hitch, and many others are now focused in this area - so we're starting to get AI-based tools to help. This, to me, is the future of "Talent Management" - helping every individual find the job they want.

Not only does it tremendously increase the engagement and retention of people, it reduces the cost of hiring. You do have to invest in internal development programs to help people transition, but that's a huge growth area too.

Consider this. We studied technical recruiting in three companies last year and found that internal hiring (with some training) can be 6X more cost-effective than hiring from the outside. For scarce skills, "build" is a better solution than "buy" in many cases. So internal mobility is a very strategic investment. Companies like AT&T, Schneider Electric, Unilever, and most of the big companies I talk with are all investing heavily in this area now.

Fourth LinkedIn Finding: Multi-Generational Workforce

Last year I wrote an article entitled "The Distressing Story of Age In The Workforce" which essentially tells the story that "Age is the New Black."

While I'm certainly not downplaying racial, gender, or other forms of diversity and inclusion, the LinkedIn research points out that leveraging generational diversity is one of the biggest opportunities we have in business. Consider a few things:

• Younger workers (Gen-Z and Millennials) are the most unhappy and anxious workers in the world. They are also searching the hardest for good management, purpose, and growth in their jobs. So we need to be hyper-focused on giving young people fair pay and opportunities to grow at work.
• Driven by a reduced birthrate, older workers (age 55+) are now the fastest growing segment of the workforce - and they (we) are living longer.
• 89% of HR people (from LinkedIn) believe multigenerational diversity makes the company more successful, and older workers have what I call PowerSkills to help them perform. So finding ways to leverage (and not retire) older workers is one of the biggest opportunities we have in HR.
• Youth and age go well together. Young people crave mentoring and experience from tenured workers. Older people love sharing and coaching younger people through their careers. Programs that bring these groups together always pay off.

Consider Estee Lauder's reverse mentorship program. These types of programs (shown below) bring generations together to share technical and professional skills in amazing ways. And they don't really cost anything to build.

Bottom Line: LinkedIn Research Shows that Experience Really Is Everything

If I look over this in-depth report, it all comes back to one thing. Today, as we deal with the Coronavirus, an economic interruption, and lots of social issues at work, the most important topic in HR remains EX - a focus on employee experience.

In my 40+ years as an analyst, I've worked for big companies, small companies, fast-growing companies, and companies that feel like they're dying. In every single case, there's one lesson I've learned. People don't grow into the company: the company grows into the people.

In other words, Your Employee Experience IS Your Company.

If you read about companies in trouble (Boeing, for example), you always seem to find that "the employees were complaining about the problems long before management did anything."

Why is this? It's because employees are the "most vested interest" of anyone in your organization. They've voted with their lives, their careers, and their family's well being by coming to work for your organization. So when they point out problems, gripe about issues, or ask for help - they are the "most interested party" you can find that will make your company succeed.

We can't predict where the 2020 economy is going to go. I do know its going to be tumultuous, difficult, and uncertain. In this environment remember one thing:

if you take care of your employees, they will take care of you.

And that's the bottom line from this year's LinkedIn 2020 Global Talent Report.

---

Josh Bersin is a global industry analyst covering all aspects of corporate learning, HR, recruitment, leadership, and HR technology. He is also the Founder and Dean of The Josh Bersin Academy, the world's professional development academy for HR. You can read his personal blog at www.joshbersin.com .