Progress has a habit of leaving people behind. Working conditions are very different today than those dark days of the first industrial revolution. During that desperate period of high unemployment, employee experience came last and productivity first. In contrast, today’s low unemployment and significant skills gaps are driving a minimum desired standard that employers must meet to ensure they are getting their fair share of talent.
To date, much of the focus has been around company culture, pay, management experience, and job security. Whilst leading companies have turned to innovative approaches to introduce benefits and perks to an organisation, is this enough to bring us through to the future of work?
My view is that the next phase of employee experience will be centred around giving people the right and the best tools to do their jobs to the best of their ability, and in today’s world that requires the CIO and the CHRO to work together.
Here’s why:
- People are now accountable for outcomes more than ever. Measuring people on their output, rather than their input has become increasingly common as organisations seek more leadership and better alignment to the company’s goals.
- Stress is on the increase, and bad tools adds to the problem. Research has show that inadequate IT leading to ineffectiveness has increased stress on individuals in the workplace.
- New generations have no time for it. They have shown to have high expectations of their organisation’s IT performance and their own focus on what they can achieve.
Firstly, IT needs to evaluate itself from this new employee perspective through an IT experience maturity model.
Almost every IT maturity tool today places it’s focus on technical and operational aspects with IT’s panacea being an automated, self-healing infrastructure.
But what does that look like for users?
Typically, user experience is better when IT controls are loose. This means that as we move up along the IT maturity scale, we actually move down on an equivalent user experience scale. New IT projects bring complex change programs and control processes that disengage employees. The situation is that we have IT organisations lauding their operational efficiency without acknowledging their success or failures in terms of the end user. As IT becomes increasingly reliable, platform availability alone cannot be used to measure the user experience.
Organisations need to introduce a new metric to evaluate IT projects to ensure they are moving both up the IT maturity scale and up the experience scale. Let’s call it Experience Return on Investment (EROI). The logic being that whilst IT has a focus on the productivity of the IT staff, the projects they are driving could be having a negative impact on employee engagement and therefore employee or user productivity.
Understanding EROI requires an organisation to first understand what matters to the employees in their organisation. I have been working with several organisations to baseline what their current level of experience maturity currently looks like using these metrics:
- Physical: To what extent is the user’s environment conducive to empowered work? Some organisations still have challenges providing the right level of flexibility in terms of how and where people work. Jacob Morgan, author of The Employee Experience Advantage, identifies the physical environment as one of the critical design areas alongside technology and culture.
- Information: How accessible is the right data in the organisation? Users have been presented with a myriad of locations and ways to store and share data. Research has shown that the way individuals are able to access and share knowledge has an impact on their level of engagement in the organisation. User are also becoming increasingly conscious of the safety of their data.
- Productivity: How easily can tasks be executed with the applications we use? Application designers are embracing a level of user experience (UX) that is akin to “consumer” grade. The reality is that the expectations of individuals’ UX in order to part with their own attention (and money) for personal apps is much higher than that of business.
- Communications: How easy is it to richly interact with your team members and co-workers? Communications has a significant relationship to employee engagement and is often the first step taken by companies to improve staff satisfaction. Beyond just corporate messaging, this includes social, team, and peer interactions that increasingly rely on technology to make the connection.
- Assistance: To what extent does technology guide, automate, and make work easier? Repetitive, meaningless work is the enemy of employee engagement. The once-feared concept of automation taking our jobs has moved to employers seeking the support of AI to allow them to engage in more valuable work.
Each of these factors should be measured by evaluating the user’s IT experience. Two main factors to consider are:
- Functional: What tools are available to them to use? Perception of the tools and technology in place may be very different at a user level to the IT department level. Also just having the tools there doesn’t mean they’re utilised.
- Experiential: What is the experience like? Understand the challenges they face as well as the benefits they get from the IT they use. Whilst remote working might enhance the experience for one employee it may not for another.
These factors could be further considered in the context of personas. Personas are the profile of specific types of users and are typically used in the context of roles as often certain roles have similar demands in terms of experience (i.e. call centre roles are rarely looking for mobile-device usage).
However, personas should also be considered in terms of age, location and even personality type. Trends in experience demands from personas could indicate cultural differences inside the organisation. Some IT departments have created IT user stereotypes to help them understand what technologies matter when it comes to creating the best experience (i.e. Road Warrior or Power User).
The actual values associated with EROI will differ for each organisation, but most HR professionals can equate the cost:
EROI = Increase in Employee productivity + decrease in cost of staff churn + decrease in onboarding costs
Understanding where an organisation sits today can help map out a journey to better employee engagement and give balance to the heavily operations-focused models used in most organisations. Areas identified as having the biggest impact on employee experience could help target future investment or help identify areas of risk in future projects. The soft cost of a better employee experience needs to be evaluated in terms of the increased value of a more engaged employee and in terms of gained productivity and this then needs to be built into the business case.
Ultimately, understanding this journey requires to CIO to work closely with the users. This is more than engaging lines of business and HR management. It requires a greater understanding of how the user works — surveying users, monitoring behaviour, and leveraging analytics.
For many CIOs it’s time to get a new dashboard, where the blinking “engine problem” light does not dominate the screen, but instead you have a speedometer that shows user experience front and centre.
As the user experience accelerates, you know your business is ready to do the same.
