Qualtrics Culture X4 EX Management: Key Takeaways

By Rika Banerji, Managing Partner at McCann Synergy

I had the pleasure of attending the Qualtrics Culture X4 , The Experience Management Summit last week, where hundreds of leaders from across Europe gathered to gain invaluable insights on the topic of experience management and unlocking its value by deeply connecting with employees and customers.

As part of the event, Rahaf Harfoush, New York Times best-selling author and Digital Anthropologist, discussed the importance of honing digital culture skills to prepare future-ready leaders, and James Timpson, CEO of Timpson Group, spoke about “happiness” being at the core of business success, which were particularly awe-inspiring.

Here are my key employee experience (EX) management takeaways from the event:

Democratising EX ownership while establishing a group-wide governance structure

Your local leadership and teams are closest to the 'people' challenges faced in-market, in-division, or in-department. They would be the quickest to spot and solve any gaps in employee expectations and engagement. Empower them with the right tools, consistent methodology and consolidated tech to actively and passively listen to employees and design their localised EX solutions right for their micro-business and micro-culture.

The key is in instituting a clear governance structure with an even listening approach and simplified data collection and management practices to enable group-wide or macro data interpretation and continuous improvement.

Exceeding employee expectations by focusing on leadership, culture, customers and growth

High-performing businesses that are exceeding their employees’ expectations today and actualising year on year commercial growth are focused on continuously improving in the following core areas:

• Trust in Leadership: These organisations that report significantly higher in this area, leaders are perceived as setting a clear vision, role modelling core values and good at responding to employee feedback.
• Culture: In these businesses with a high score for culture, employees believe communication is transparent and honest, business is run ethically, and change is managed effectively.
• Growth & Development: For those businesses that are scoring highly in this area, employees believe that they have good opportunities to learn and develop. Development may mean different things to different employees and these businesses can identify and deliver on diverse employee development expectations.
• Customer focus: In these high-performing companies, employees believe that they are empowered to make decisions in service of their customers.

Becoming AI savvy is no longer a good-to-have but a business imperative:

Leveraging AI in employee listening can not only remove manual effort needed in data collection and comprehension, but can also free up the capacity of your leadership and people teams to focus their efforts on shaping the right solutions and improving overall EX.

Moreover, AI is continuously evolving and its role in changing the world and our everyday life will become increasingly invasive (just like computers did three decades ago!). To future-proof your organisations, we need to redefine the value of human creative labour and prepare future-ready leaders. Building intentional knowledge and expertise in generative AI will unlock your workforce to be digitally savvy critical thinkers who collaborate with AI to solve the problems of tomorrow. ?

?If you're interested in hearing more, reach out to Rika Banerji at McCann Synergy.