What is #EmployeeExperience?
Carlos Demetrio de Souza
Associate Director, Customer Technology Advisor @Kyndryl ? Solutions Architect ? Consultant ? Board Member ? Inventor
Most technical activities construct their own set of terminology and specialized terms. But some of them are so repeated — with or without context — that they end up losing their original meaning, taking on different meanings according to who uses them, or becoming so broad that they practically don't mean anything anymore. This is the case of Employee Experience.
There's ample evidence that a poor employee experience negatively impacts the staff's ability to deliver a good customer experience, hurting the bottom line for the company.
It is evident that employees with an unpleasant work experience will be less engaged, the customer experience (created by them) will decline and business results will suffer. But what is Employee Experience?
The subject is not new, but Employee Experience has been losing its definition and taking on new meanings over time. It is an example of a term that can mean several things or nothing at all.
The Employee Experience is the collection of all interactions of this professional in their day-to-day: with colleagues, employees from other internal departments, managers, customers, business partners, systems, policies, products (company-owned or third-party), technologies, equipment and with the physical and digital environments.
These small experiences develop and evolve during the employee journey:
?? The first challenge to specify Employee Experience is subjectivity: each worker is in a distinct career step, has unique expectations, interacts with different departments and customers, uses a specific set of technologies (technical support employees deal with a much larger pack of applications than other areas), have different work routines and experiences, and may or may not share the same physical location.
?? The key to this first challenge: engagement and flexibility. Employee engagement is required to allow them evaluate their own experiences, with a consequential and well-structured survey, is paramount. But instead of asking too many questions, it's better to ask the right ones. Flexibility means knowing that there is no single, easy and applicable solution to everyone, everywhere: it will be necessary to evaluate pros and cons, prioritize initiatives, test and even abandon some projects.
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?? The second challenge is to confine the Employee Experience: since it encompass all employee interactions, its scope is immense and its boundaries are not clear. Where exactly does it start? Should we assume it from the recruitment and hiring phase, when the worker is not even an employee yet? Should employees' customer experience evaluate the internal customers, or just external customers? How concerned should the company be about employee experiences commuting to the office or on business trips? How does a harmful business partner practice make your employee experience worse, and what could your company do about it?
?? This second challenge is more complicated, because the answer is it depends. It depends on many variables. It depends on the general maturity of the company, the influence of this inadequate experience on business results, the budget available to invest in this problem, the capacity to generate meaningful change, and particularly the current employee experience level. If employees are already extremely dissatisfied with basic aspects (having to deal with customer complaints about the products the company sells, for example), the company's outdated videoconferencing tool or unfriendly parking reservation system will lose a lot of priority or do not generate any effect.
If every experience matters and if everyone is somehow responsible, who owns Employee Experience initiatives?
Check out the Employee Experience article series:
?? What is Employee Experience?