The Employee Experience - b2bwhitepapers

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The Employee ExperienceWHAT IT LOOKS LIKE AND WHY IT’S CRITICAL FOR YOUR BUSINESSES SUCCESS

C O M M I S S I O N E D B Y

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 9

About this paperA Pathfinder paper navigates decision-makers through the issues surrounding a specific technology or business case, explores the business value of adoption, and recommends the range of considerations and concrete next steps in the decision-making process.

A B O U T T H E AU T H O R

C H R I S M A R S HR E S E A R C H D I R EC TO R , WO R K F O R C E P R O D U C T I V I T Y A N D C O M P L I A N C E

Chris Marsh sets the vision for and manages 451 Research’s Workforce Productivity and Compliance practice. His own research focuses on workforce productivity software including the project, team, task, content and innovation management applications into which businesses are putting more of their data and workflows; general worker productivity suites like Microsoft’s Office and Google’s G Suite; technologies such as on-device workspaces, containers, partitions and endpoint management tools giving access to and providing security around productivity software; and the middleware technologies and workflow engines influencing how application experiences are designed and consumed. Before 451 Research, Chris was a research manager in Nokia’s Global Consumer Analytics and Insights division.

2C O M M I S S I O N E D B Y C I T R I X


PAT H F I N D E R | T H E E M P LOY E E E X P E R I E N C E

People Are Any Company’s Most Valuable AssetThere is growing recognition that people represent organizations’ most valuable asset and that satisfied employees consequently improve business outcomes. For example, last year IBM cited employee engagement as the driver behind two-thirds of its positive client experience scores. It also noted that an increase in client satisfaction by five points on an account correlates to an extra 20% in revenue, on average. In another powerful case study, Airbnb explained how its strong internal brand advocates supported its sustained profit growth and ranking – advocates that emerged from the company’s renewed investment in company culture and unifying HR around the employee experience.

Employees who are intrinsically engaged in their work take their responsibilities more seriously, are more likely to generate new ideas about how best to do their work and find it easier to adapt to changing work plans when necessary. Engaged employees are also more personally invested in amplifying their employer’s brand within their social circle and in professional forums, and are more likely to stay in their role and not look for a new position at another company.

The idea that people matter – and happy people matter tremendously – to the success of a business is slowly becoming more common. The more forward-looking companies don’t just see happy employees as a matter of expediency but as their principal organizational purpose: the maximization of human capital across their workforce is the societal goal they should strive to achieve, as well as the means by which they can increase profits.



Defining the Employee Experience and Why Engagement MattersTo maximize their human capital, businesses need to design an experience that keeps their employees productive and engaged. Clearly, the employee experience has many dimensions; businesses should consider four main components: company values, personal recognition, career potential and execution culture.

Figure 1: The four components of the employee experienceSource: 451 Research

Although the specific context of each organization will determine the manner in which it frames and weighs each component, we suggest that primus inter pares (first among equals) should be the execution culture – the combination of work tools, systems and arrangements and the workplace behaviors and habits they support. Employees who believe they are supported by their company’s tools and resources, feel more connected to their colleagues, and clearly understand their priorities will be more productive; they will have the space, time and inclination to invest their own creativity and energies into improving their work. A strategy that supports this culture workforce-wide will quickly see a return on the investment.

The reason for this – as plenty of psychological and organizational research shows – is that people are most strongly motivated to action and to hold long-lasting opinions (in both their personal and professional lives) by positive, deep and regular involvement in an activity. That tends to hold true even for career-progression opportunities and compensation. Each can be motivating, but the daily work experience ultimately plays a bigger role in the quality and scope of

Company Values

Personal Recognition

WORK EXECUTION

CULTURE

Career Potential

Peer recognition

Financial compensation

Benefits

Corporate mission statement

Employer’s brand appeal

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) policy

Day-to-day company culture

Promotional opportunities

Diversity of experience

Peer learning and available mentorship

Skills acquisition and development

Work tools, systems, practices, behaviors and arrangements



contributions an employee makes. In fact, some studies have demonstrated that feeling engaged day in and day out can be twice as powerful a driver for strong contributions than feeling engaged occasionally.

A positive daily work experience can also have a halo effect on other components of the employee experience. However, productivity is weakened when employees are disinterested in their work, and neither recognition/compensation nor opportunities for advancement are likely to make up for a demotivating daily grind. Equally, it’s all too easy for employees’ engaged, energetic and happy feelings toward work to ebb away if they experience significant friction in getting work done. Disengaged employees may look for other motivations to keep going but will likely not feel as productive or inclined to invest as much of their energy in their work.

This relationship between engagement and productivity didn’t escape KPMG’s notice. In 2014, the company launched what it called a Higher Purpose Initiative using employee stories to highlight impactful work, as well as to strengthen pride, engagement and emotional connection to the company. The company reported that among employees who had discussed daily purpose with their managers, 94% said KPMG was a great place to work, compared to 66% who hadn’t.

The benefits of unifying personnel and technology strategies were also evident in Salesforce, which in 2016 hired 7,000 employees – a 35% growth in the size of its workforce – in one year. The same year, Salesforce moved strongly up the US Great Place to Work Trust Index score. Salesforce’s leadership attributed this to improving its work environment through a partnership between the company’s IT and HR departments that focused on deploying employee-first technologies.

It’s important for businesses to understand that that being productive and happy are two sides of the same coin. Our survey data shows that while a greater number of technology decision-makers see IT’s main priority as improving the productivity and collaboration tools experience, only about half of employees believe that providing a positive and engaging work experience is a high priority in their organization.



Removing Daily Work Friction is Key to Elevating the Employee ExperienceOf the four components of the employee experience, the execution culture has historically been the least informed by official policy and the least likely to be guided by a single coherent strategy. Improving the execution culture, however, will have the greatest impact on employee happiness/engagement because it most keenly defines each employee’s daily work experience.

The growing sprawl of mostly disconnected and siloed applications that are owned by different parts of the business inevitably leads to methods of work that were never intended. Employees end up spending too much time ‘working on their work’: fixing problems that arise and mitigating friction in their daily work scenarios because they have inadequate tools. Many employees find that accomplishing even simple activities – such as finding the right information or people, requesting and approving items and handling simple workflows – highly challenging.

• Only one-third of employees are ‘very satisfied’ with the mix of tooling to get their work done. Having to use too many apps is the biggest overall work pain point; 40% said that the number of apps they have to use will increase over the next year.

• More than two-fifths (41%) of employees said that it took them five months or more to begin adding value to their organization after they were recruited.

• More than four-fifths (81%) of early-adopter employees said that if they were to look for a new job, they would regard the prospective employer’s workforce tools as important in their decision about whether to join that company; a staggering 43% said they would regard those tools as a ‘very important’ part of their decision.

Figure 2: Pervasive friction in day-to-day work impedes employee engagement and productivitySource: 451 Research

Ineffective search

Siloed information

Lack of automation

Poor usability

Weak metadata

Technology Friction

Silos

Replication

Manual error

Dead ends

Rejection

Productivity Friction

Disjointed collaboration

Undifferentiated processes

Fragmented reporting

Weak governance

Context-switching

Weak Execution

Lack of vision

Lack of business agility

Impaired morale

Stifled innovation

Low customer engagement

Strategic Debt



The Framework for a Strong Work Execution CultureEmployees need a more personalized, contextual and seamless experience to prime them for purposeful and efficient work. Eliminating the friction most employees experience has traditionally been a low priority for management and technology decision-makers, however. Clearly, establishing a strong framework depends on a range of factors including existing technologies and owners, digital maturity, business model, corporate culture, company size, type of customers and partners, and industry. However, there are standard guidelines that all businesses need to think about when strategizing which workplace technologies would best elevate their organization’s employee experience. Below we present the three main areas for establishing a strong execution culture: strategy, execution and experience.

Figure 3: Experience, strategy and execution provide the framework to drive employee engagementSource: 451 Research

Strategy Principles

Our Voice of the Enterprise: Digital Pulse, Organizational Dynamics 2019 survey found that the IT group is the lead on digital transformation initiatives in only 47% of businesses. As more technology ownership, decision-making and budgets occur outside of IT’s direct remit, it becomes even more important for companies to establish a basic set of principles and to frame their workforce execution strategy in a way that helps them achieve new positive work habits, opportunities and contributions that drive employee engagement – while avoiding building more silos in the process.

Company Values

Personal Recognition

WORK EXECUTION

CULTURE

Career Potential

Exec

utio

n P

illar

sWork Execution

Culture

Experience Parameters

Strategy Principles



The way these principles come into play will depend on the company’s specific circumstances, but the following six tenets can be used as a general framework for a technology strategy focused on improving the work experience.

Figure 4: Strategy principlesSource: 451 Research

• Agility: Technologies supporting rapid decision-making and execution across the workforce so that businesses can be focused and anticipate and respond more quickly to the changes that digitization brings.

• Autonomy: Technologies that support that organizational agility by granting the maximum amount of sanctioned autonomy for the design and execution of work for those closest to or owning specific business outcomes.

• Alignment: Technologies that support autonomy in a way that also allows work to align with strategy, execution, governance, security and compliance requirements.

• Abstraction: Leveraging the various levels of software abstraction across workforce tooling – such as connectivity; work, resource, skills and planning management; and process automation – to balance autonomy and alignment.

• Automation: The constant introduction of automation across the long tail of employees’ routine and manual tasks, freeing them up to do more creative, non-routine and unanticipated work.

• Attribution: The measurement of employees’ productive lifetime value becomes easier the more consolidation there is in the employee experience – new levels of abstraction and automation converting manual tasks into units of work make them more easily quantifiable and measurable.

Exec

utio

n P

illar

sWork Execution

Culture


Strategy Principles

Agility

Autonomy

Alignment

Abstraction

Automation

Attribution



Execution Pillars

Businesses need to think about areas where they can remove work friction to improve the employee work experience and drive engagement. The organization’s execution culture should prioritize personal relevance for employees while adding new levels of abstraction to help optimize the overall employee experience within applications.

Figure 5: Execution pillarsSource: 451 Research

• Personalization: Combining application usage data, behavioral analytics and direct employee feedback to continuously optimize employees’ work experience, intelligently organizing and prioritizing their tasks, and surfacing contextually relevant information, people and initiatives.

• Document automation: Automation across the document lifecycle so that the experiences across content discovery, creation, collaboration and workflow are less manual and piecemeal, and more productive and seamless.

• Line of sight: A clear line of sight across the workforce from strategy to goals to execution – including broader workforce visibility and involvement in workforce planning and resource management.

• Workflow design: More options for IT and admins to design and deploy widespread workflow automation across regularly occurring, manual, transactional tasks. And, where relevant, a degree of autonomy for teams and individuals to customize their specific workflow requirements.

Exec

utio

n P

illar

sWork Execution

Culture


Strategy Principles

Agility

Autonomy

Alignment

Abstraction

Automation

Attribution

Personalization

Document automation

Line of sight

Workflow design




Finally, businesses need to think about the parameters within which the employee work experience should be designed. Organizations can take inspiration from some of the key pillars of successful customer experience strategies. The goal for both employees and customers should be the continuous delivery of a unified, engaging, personalized and responsive experience across every touchpoint. To achieve that, businesses can apply the following tenets of the customer experience to the employee experience:

Figure 6: Experience parametersSource: 451 Research

• Designed as a journey: Mapping the employee journey from recruitment to upskilling and talent development – and understanding the milestones along the way that can drive productivity.

• Mobile optimal: As much as possible, abstract the lightweight, task-based processes that create friction into just-in-time notifications, one-click actions and intelligent recommendations that are optimized for quick and easy completion over mobile.

• Conversational: Embedding interstitial conversational capability within the context of structured work so decisions can be carried into workflow, and the provisioning of digital assistant interfaces to automate employee requests for information.

Exec

utio

n P

illar

sWork Execution

Culture


Strategy Principles

Agility

Autonomy

Alignment

Abstraction

Automation

Attribution

Personalization

Document automation

Line of sight

Workflow design

Designed as a journey

Mobile

Conversational



The comparison between customer and employee experiences is a useful one, but there is, in fact, an even greater opportunity for organizations to provide a compelling employee experience than there is a customer experience because employees spend more of their time with their employer than customers typically spend directly engaging with a single brand. Arguably, there are additional, more involved touchpoints from which employers can leverage behavioral data to understand and improve the employee experience. While we tend to think of customer-experience-focused professionals as being one of a few personas seated in marketing, advertising, customer service or sales, in fact, the interactions and efforts of all employees have an effect on the customer experience with the organization, not just a few specific personas.

Conclusions and GuidanceLeaders need to invest in technologies and tools that bring the same kind of contextual, engaging experience to their employees’ daily work that they’ve found in their personal lives. It’s important to prioritize experience-driven solutions that help employees guide work and automate routine tasks to cut through the noise so employees are engaged and can do their best work. Removing complexity and distraction will allow for more creative thinking and higher-value output.

Creating a unified and engaging employee experience can, therefore, help enable a more impactful customer experience, while freeing up employees to fulfill their potential and be more productive in a healthy way. It’s clear that companies that do not prioritize their people will forfeit potential innovation, give up productivity and, ultimately, lose their footing in the digital age.

About 451 Research451 Research is a leading information technology research and advisory com-pany focusing on technology innovation and market disruption. More than 100 analysts and consultants provide essential insight to more than 1,000 client organizations globally through a combination of syndicated research and data, advisory and go-to-market services, and live events. Founded in 2000 and headquartered in New York, 451 Research is a division of The 451 Group.

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