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Beyond the Obsession with Employee Engagement

RESEARCH PERSPECTIVE

Delivering a Superior Employee Experience

Prepared for:

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Engaged Employees Aren’t Enough Employee engagement is a work behavior characterized by high levels of commitment, enthusiasm and purposeful involvement in one’s work and the organization. Engaged employees perform better and stay in the organization longer, and increased engagement often correlates with greater productivity. This is important because even modest improvements in productivity can translate into increases in incremental value. For example, consider a medium-sized company with 3,000 employees that has an average revenue-per-employee of $100,000. If individual productivity improves by only 5 percent,

that productivity gain is worth $15 million across the company. Unfortunately, an engaged employee isn’t always an optimally productive employee. One’s talents may not be a good fit for the role he or she currently occupies, or the work to be done may not match an individual’s need for tasks that foster growth. And individuals change over time. This means that being engaged is not neces-sarily a permanent state. An organization looking to maintain employee engagement

over time must deliver a superior employee experience. This is analogous to an organization’s relationship with its customers; to retain their loyalty and keep them invested in its brand (and make them advocates and ambassadors for its success) it must consistently deliver a great customer experience.

Delivering a Superior Employee Experience Ventana Research recommends the following four-pillar framework as a blueprint for achieving a superior employee experience.

• Pillar 1: Enable employees to satisfy their need to do meaningful work, feel valued for their skills, competencies and contributions, and be productive.

• Pillar 2: Enable employees to envision their career growth and see how the organization is supporting that growth.

• Pillar 3: Ensure that employees perceive that they are evaluated and rewarded fairly and that the organization invests in them.

• Pillar 4: Provide systems and tools that enhance rather than drain employee productivity and focus.

Organizations should embrace these principles and implement policies, processes and programs that support them. One element of this support is seeking out

An organization can sustain high levels of engagement only when it delivers a superior employee experience.

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technology systems and tools that make it possible to effectively build these pillars. Embracing this four-pillar approach will represent a shift for many organizations. In the past, companies have typically tracked specific skills to understand their employees’ capabilities and growth needs and to deliver a tailored approach to

managing them. But this approach has limita-tions since the employee experience is not limited to skills advancement. We recommend embracing instead employee journey tracking, which provides a more com-prehensive view of the relationship between the organization and its employees. Journey track-ing includes skills tracking, but it also examines employees’ personal drivers and considers how these factors change over time. Some skills are easy to track because they are visible or otherwise demonstrable — for exam-ple, proficiency in different technology tools or the ability to write well. There are also, how-

ever, less-visible skills and competencies that organizations should strive to track and even cultivate. Examples of these other potential sources of value that an employee can deliver include building informal cross-functional networks across the organization or identifying to management opportunities for operational improvement. When these competencies are tracked, they can then be considered in the evaluations of both Pillar 1, where the employer recognizes this additional source of value in the employee, and Pillar 2, where the employer reflects this strength in that employee’s career-nurturing process. Beyond looking at employee skill growth, journey tracking also considers the personal drivers of each employee. Some are motivated by financial rewards, others by flexible work hours, while others might react positively to an opportunity to be exposed to different aspects of the business and its processes. Many employees today also find motivation when their personal values are reflected in the employer’s corporate citizenship priorities and the company culture. This can include the technologies a company uses, the type of customer experience it provides or how it responds to a crisis. And to the adaptations an organization may make to accommodate generational shifts must be added flexibility – the recognition that the relative importance of an employee’s individual drivers is likely to change over time. This is why skills tracking, while important and a worthwhile use of a human capital management system, should be expanded to track the employee journey in a broader way. Employers need to know how and when employee goals,

Employee journey tracking is a more comprehensive way to understand the relationship between the organization and its employees.

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interests and drivers change so that they can adjust the personalized aspects of their engagement, retention and rewards strategy. Organizations of all sizes, whether 500 or 5,000 employees, can significantly benefit from delivering a superior employee experience. This benefit can come in the form of an improved ability to attract and retain the best talent, or in being able to ensure the highest levels of employee engagement and productivity. Both will contribute to improved organizational agility.

HCM Technology Implications To be effective, managers should have the tools they need to respond deftly to information about employees’ interests, goals and drivers. Our Next-Generation Human Resources Management Sys-tems benchmark research finds that the benefit that most often motivates orga-nizations to invest in an HR manage-ment system platform is simplifying the job of managing employees. Improving productivity and tracking key or rele-vant skills also are common motiva-tions. A unified platform that automates core HR processes and facilitates employee transactions delivers even more value to an organization when it can track all the data that potentially relates to engagement and the employee experience. This includes data on communities to which the employee belongs and on mentoring and other ways the employee delivers value. This value can relate to the job — referring top candidates, making suggestions for operational improvements, referring sales leads — or to other, less obvious ways an employee contributes to the company. When the platform also offers a web-based mobile app that delivers an experiece similar to that of a native mobile app without the associated concerns about downloads, staying release-current or being device-compatible, it likely will improve user adoption and therefore ROI. What’s key in the design of the app is ensuring that available screen space automatically determines the best way to display and interact with the information and that needed clicks and keystrokes are minimized.

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An HR platform built using a data model designed to track and report on a host of engagement-related data fields can provide views and visual representations of each employee that highlight more usefully than would otherwise be the case an individual employee’s challenges, risks and opportunities. Managers can then take appropriate actions and consult with or coach the employee accordingly. Such an approach helps an organization better sustain engagement. A platform designed for both HR administration and improving employee engagement has advantages over a platform focused simply on one task or the other. Employees, just like customers, want to be known and valued for what they represent to your business, and an enlightened modern approach using the right technology can play a significant role in this process. #1904-0751-01RP

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