The key to engaging employees in their benefit experience? It's simple.

I’ve spent a lot of time in airports recently. Their sheer complexity never fails to strike me; sprawling sites filled with thousands of people on different journeys all attempting to navigate their way through a maze of corridors and seas of strangers, find the information they need in the myriad of ticker-boards, occasionally stopping to try to hear robotic announcements that might be critical to them, but probably aren’t remotely relevant. All whilst being sold to. It’s overwhelming.

I'm also struck by how often I see instances of businesses designing for complexity over simplicity. Of course many organisations, particularly some of the global firms that I’m privileged to work with, have an incredible amount to manage; legal, regulatory, compliance and legacy entitlements, rules and processes. Add in international offices, acquisitions, growth and you can start to see how the natural path for many of our businesses eventually leads to complexity. 

Mind the bias that comes with technical expertise

I spend my working life meeting with global benefits, HR, reward and wellbeing leaders. Their experience is vast and despite the diversity of difference between their organisations, many are wrestling with challenges that are underpinned by the same problem – that the structure of their business breeds increased complexity.  

When those clients speak about what they are seeking to do, never does anybody list ‘add more complexity’ as a key part of their strategy and yet as organisations get larger, they add more specialist roles, and specialists are inevitably and understandably biased towards a deep technical understanding of their topic area.

 I don’t want anyone thinking that I am anti-specialist; I absolutely appreciate that specialists are key to enabling our organisations to grow and to develop a deeper understanding of their particular expertise. But the deep understanding they bring does risk bias in the experiences they design, stemming from the assumption of a greater level of understanding in their audience than the norm.

What many clients have seen happen is as someone with a real expertise designs (or revises) an experience within their organisation in isolation, they do so from a profound technical understanding of the complexity, and what should have been a helpful and functional element of your employee experience becomes just another distorted announcement in the airport.

One of the most impactful changes any of us whose job it is to drive improvement in HR technology and practice can make to our organisations is to enable our people to use simplicity as their secret weapon.

Simplicity = your secret weapon

Simplicity is actually far harder to achieve than complexity. It's all too easy to fall into the trap of layering complex communication on top of complex processes delivered by complex systems with poorly designed experiences, because that has become our default. Most of the global organisations that I have worked with in the last year would admit to themselves that this is where they find their current experience.

Most of those experiences have been built over years, with every number of unintended consequences of poor design decisions or catering to systems and processes that needed to work in a certain way now apparent. Often when we ask, nobody actually knows why it’s like that, just that it is how it’s always been.

The way out of this situation is not to layer perks or happiness initiatives on top of what you already have, it is to meaningful and purposefully redesign your experience. You can’t window-dress your way out of a poor experience; a free coffee once I reached my gate at the airport might have temporarily lifted my mood, but it wouldn’t change anything about the stressful experience it took to get there.

Some of the most innovative organisations we are working with are thinking consciously about how they design each experience, for example how benefits work end to end, why they have them and taking the opportunity to consider what they want their employees to feel as part of this process.

When you think about the experiences you love at work, outside of work or with specific brands, I doubt that any of those are complex. Complexity has been engineered out by most brands because it creates frustration points. When customers are frustrated they just don't buy your product, they don't enjoy your service and they will eventually leave you. Employees are no different. We need to take the time to properly design a process that engineers out complexity. That doesn't mean to say the processes are not complex. Most of the processes that we design to be simple have been really well thought through, but the complexity is hidden to the employee. Delivering that type of complexity relies on specialists, but it also requires a shift in thinking. We need specialists to leverage their depth of understanding to design a simplified experience that reflects the intention of your employees.

One of the largest compliments our Product and Engineering teams receive is when our clients and partners comment on how simple and intuitive our platform is to use. But most platforms in the benefits and HCM markets are not designed with simplicity or the employee in mind. It's no surprise that 76% of people who buy Benefits and HR technology have buyer’s remorse within the first 6 months. For most it is because of poor experience, complex design and non-existent service – don’t get caught out.

Intention over attention

When designing for simplicity, one of the key lessons to unlearn is the fallacy of attention. Where you may have been taught to vie for your employee’s attention, in fact you need to design for their intention. Now that sounds like a small design nuance, but it does fundamentally change the approach to your design, workflow, process and the relevant technology that is required. Designing for attention in an airport leads to more ticker-boards and louder announcements. Designing for intention sends a notification to my mobile when my flight is ready to board.

If you design for intention you will inevitably focus on the core parts of the experience that you need an employee to go through. If you are committed to this focus on intention then you need to really challenge yourself on how many of those edge cases, how many of those exceptions, how many of those little quirks are you going to build into the system. Think about how you are going to design them out to simplify your organisation and experience design.

Design for your organisation, don’t just copy

The market is maturing around employee experience and its design, and it is a really exciting time to be working alongside people who are really looking in to everything their organisation does, working out what works for them and what doesn't. But that doesn't mean you must completely redo everything at once; there is a real opportunity to design better experiences using technology with an approach which is far better suited to your organisation. So much of what we see that's bad in the world of employee experience is because of organisations copying others in the way that they approach designing an outcome.

From designing thousands of experience loops and interactions, when you think about the design of your experience, utilise your experts to help focus on designing for the intention of the activity, keeping it simple and above all make sure that it's an enjoyable experience people want to do. Not everything we need our employees to do is fun, but there is no reason we can’t all build experiences that resonate through their simplicity. If we understand their intention, we won’t need to fight for their attention.