How This 30,000 Person Company Designs Great Employee Experiences

Just like technology changes everyday, so do the needs of employees. Successful technology companies know the importance of innovating to stay ahead of trends and growth, just like companies with successful employee engagement know the importance of innovating to meet employees’ needs and to reflect the ever-changing workplace. A hallmark company in both these areas is NCR (formerly the National Cash Register), a consumer technology company with more than 30,000 employees that started in 1884. Such a large number of employees might make it hard to address individual needs, but a recent push by the company has aimed to make life easier every day for every employee. NCR considers its employees “consumer-workers” and knows the importance of having the employees be the best advocates of the company.

Here is how NCR defines “consumer workers.”

The concept of the Consumer-Worker evolved from research that shows today’s workers approach employment in ways similar to how they engage with products and services. In the simplest terms, they consume workplace experiences as customers of employer brands. Consumer-Workers have high expectations of their employers, especially their managers and leaders, and want very personalized experiences that are relevant and meaningful to them. If they don’t feel their expectations are being met, they’re quick to begin “shopping” other employers and moving on when they find another employer brand that better fits their needs.

To help NCR understand their Consumer-Workers and create the most exceptional experiences for them, they use the Five-Star Experience Model, designed by Wendy Smith, head of candidate and new employee experiences, and Kevin Finke, culture transformation catalyst.

NCR and Wendy Smith are members of the Future of Work Community, a global brand council devoted to exploring the future of work. Many of these insights were shared privately with members of the community and I asked Wendy if she would allow me to share their company approach publicly since I think many companies can learn from what NCR is doing. Thankfully she said yes that is what is below.

The principles of their five-star model can easily be tailored to meet the needs of any size business in nearly any industry.

Discover. The first step is essentially gathering information of all kinds: the status, interests, and needs of your employees; their expectations for the company, their position, and career; and how you can best benchmark and measure their progress. In essence, discovery is creating a starting point with data gathered from employee surveys, focus groups, and more. This step might involve finding out that your employees tend to be very focused on career and personal development and expect the company to provide them with the resources to build a strong career, as well as the freedom to develop in all aspects of their lives. Taking time to truly discover your employees sets the framework for creating an experience that meets their needs and is useful to the individual and the company as a whole.

2.  Define. With a good understanding of your employees, you can define moments of impact, which include things like performance reviews and annual meetings, and personal milestones like marriage and the birth of a baby. These are the impactful moments that can make or break employee experience—if you can use these impactful moments to meet the employee needs you discovered in the first step, your employees will pay attention. For example, you could use a leadership training meeting to meet your employees’ needs of resources and information while also presenting the information in a creative and team-oriented manner to meet their expectations of the company. You can also use personal impactful moments as an opportunity to show the flexibility and understanding of your company, perhaps through maternity or paternity leave or an opportunity to telecommute.

3.  Develop. This step involves segmenting your employees and developing employee personas. This is important in every company, but especially in a business as large as NCR. Although you can look at employee needs overall, each department or type of employee may have unique, individualized needs. For example, parents may feel more of a pull to be at family events, so they may desire more freedom in their schedule, and young professionals may be anxious to gain all the career skills and information they can, which means training and feedback is important to them. Other segments can include role and function at the company (senior-level management has different needs than new employees) or region (employees in one office may have different needs and desires that employees across the country). As you develop these personas, keep in mind the overarching desires for the company—although employees may have differing needs, they still need continuity throughout the company with a united employee experience.

4.  Differentiate. Distinguish your company brand with a message and identity you can own. Instead of just talking the talk, differentiating involves walking the walk and putting the culture and experience ideals and principles into action. Decide here what sets your company apart and outline the tactics that can be implemented. Just like your products have a brand, you also need an employer brand to reach your consumer-workers. The brand should contain items that are ownable and measurable; this allows you to prove yourself to employees and leadership and provides metrics to see the success of your initiatives on things like employee satisfaction and the bottom line.

5.  Design. The final step is where the rubber meets the road. After identifying the needs of your employees and how they can mesh with the corporate culture, put the tactics identified in step four into action with experiences that address need and expectations. NCR focuses on experiences and programs that are SMAC-enabled (social, mobile, analytics, and cloud) to reflect the modern technological workplace. If your corporate brand is transparency and your employees need collaboration and feedback, a SMAC-enabled program could be using cloud software to easily share work and quickly get feedback from supervisors through mobile technology and applications. This innovative process not only streamlines communication but also allows employees and managers to be flexible with their time and resources, which can fulfill a need of employees at all levels.

One of the best examples of how NCR put the Five-Star Experience Model to work is in the development of their new global onboarding program, First Steps. Partnering with internal experts from the CX and marketing areas, Smith and Finke who both report into HR, applied the model to build a year-long program for new hires.

The project began by first listening to the voice of their customers—in this case, new employees—and continued with mapping a detailed journey complete with emotional stamps and opportunities to delight. From there, personas were developed to better understand the needs of key employee segments and to ensure the final program would deliver the highest levels of value and service. For the new hire population, this segmentation included key roles like software engineers, executives, university hires, and other audiences with unique needs, like veterans, who are transitioning from military service into corporate. The final step was to design unique SMAC-enabled experiences that would engage and delight employees. First Steps employs a social learning platform named Exploration Plaza that helps new hires engage with other employees around the world in a virtual classroom. They’re also provided with mobile-enabled tools, like an onboarding portal, called Base Camp where their new hire adventures begin and end. To provide even more personalization, activities tailored to specific audiences were also designed to make the program more relevant and targeted. For example, university hires have a unique curriculum that incorporates additional lessons to help them better navigate their first professional experience after college.

This is what “Base Camp” looks like:

When treating your employees like the best potential customers your company has, you can create engagement programs that are enriching for the individual and the business as a whole. The Consumer-Worker and Five-Star Experience Model are an effective way to do just that.

This month's content on the future of work was made possible by my friends at Work Market. Work Market is a freelance management system that brings freelancers and organizations together. As the freelancer economy continues to grow organizations are going to have to think differently about how they service, innovate, and compete in the future of work.

Jacob is an author, speaker, and futurist. You can learn more by visiting TheFutureOrganization.com. You can also subscribe to Jacob’s newsletter to get weekly content on the future of work and the first 30 pages of his new book, The Future of Work.