IDC ANALYST CONNECTION Sponsored by: VMware

Employee Experience and Engagement in the Digital Age May 2019

Questions posed by: VMware

Answers by: Lisa Rowan, Research Vice President, HR, Talent, and Learning Strategies

Why is employee experience critical in the digital era? How does experience impact employee engagement?

Employee experience is a concept that covers everything that touches employees from the day they are hired to the day they retire. This includes the technology they use to accomplish their work and manage the relationships with their coworkers and employers. When employees have a good experience, they naturally become more engaged.

Employee engagement is a good indicator of how satisfied employees are with their jobs, managers, and place in the company. Research tells us that a highly engaged workforce is more productive and less likely to turn over. Unfortunately, according to recent Gallup statistics, only 34% of U.S. workers are engaged. Providing positive employee experiences is one of the ways employers can significantly impact employee engagement.

Employee experience and engagement are of particular importance today due to the current makeup of the workforce. Millennials and Gen Zers have their own distinct expectations and needs. These younger workers are looking for immersive digital experiences that mirror what they get as consumers. More mature workers are also looking for more modern approaches to digital technology.

The pendulum has also shifted in favor of employees, and in today's market, jobs are plenty and employees have their choice of positions. This has resulted in higher attrition rates and has made it more difficult for companies to retain top talent. Keeping employees engaged with great experiences has never been more important.

What are some best practices in providing a good employee experience?

All employees start their journey as candidates. Companies need to land top candidates, which means they need to attract applicants through the technology they are using. Once candidates accept a position, they are often in a "wait and see" period, with little communication coming from their new company. Best practices call for keeping the prospective hires engaged by virtually introducing them to their future team, sharing video messages from senior management, and having

Research tells us that a satisfied workforce is more productive and less likely to turn over. The employee experience and measuring employee engagement are key.

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them enroll in company benefits. Effectively communicating with new hires through all of these steps can go a long way to making them feel as though they are part of the organization.

The employee experience starts even before employees' first day on the job. Employees must be provided with everything they need to be effective from the get-go — equipment needs to be ready and available, employee credentials must be immediately on hand, and ideally a mentor should be assigned to help them acclimate. They should already feel like they are part of their working group. The need to engage employees continues until the day they leave the company. While the facets of the life cycle of the employee may be different, it's important that the experiences around them are inclusive and positive.

Technology is at the core of the employee experience. All employees — millennials, Gen Zers, even boomers — expect comprehensive technology choices to be available to them at all times. Leveraging technology to make them more productive is a win for the organization and the employee alike, and we have seen excellent examples of this in the form of productivity software, the use of micro applications to condense workflows, the addition of self-service capabilities to streamline onboarding, and the adoption of contextual solutions that provide employees with the right applications and information at the right time based on their location and/or device.

What needs to change in the way organizations are currently measuring employee engagement?

A year or two ago, engagement wasn't really measured. However, many organizations over time have tried to leverage annual employee satisfaction surveys to determine employee engagement. Unfortunately, although these annual surveys can measure employee satisfaction, they typically are static and look at only one fixed point in time. As a result, the information tends to become out of date the moment it is gathered.

Ideally, organizations need to look at the ongoing state of employee engagement, which requires measuring how employees are feeling at any given point in time about their jobs by checking in with them on a regular basis. This approach is needed to see how that engagement level ebbs and flows over the course of time. It's important to also keep in mind that engagement goes beyond just satisfaction; it also encompasses how employees feel about interactions with coworkers, bosses, and the workplace itself.

While HR departments often spearhead efforts to measure employee engagement, other areas of the organization should be involved in the process, including IT departments, senior management, and line-of-business (LOB) management. The output of these efforts should look at quantifying employee engagement and be accompanied by meaningful, actionable recommendations that are designed to improve engagement levels where they may be lagging.

To accurately measure employee engagement, organizations should conduct ongoing surveys and have regular touch points.

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What are the challenges in raising the level of employee experience and engagement?

As we've discussed, engagement is powered by positive employee experiences oftentimes supported by digital transformation in the workplace. First and foremost, the drive to improve employee experience and engagement needs to be recognized as a critical initiative at the top and throughout the organization. A failure to secure executive sponsorship around these initiatives will impede success and is one of the biggest challenges we see across organizations today. Initiatives to improve employee experience and engagement fare much better when there is buy-in from the C-suite. Getting top-down buy-in helps ensure that employee experiences map to an improvement in the overall level of workforce engagement with goals of improving talent acquisition, reducing attrition, and increasing productivity.

Other key challenges to raising employee engagement include the following:

» A lack of understanding of the impact of employee engagement vis-à-vis business objectives

» The absence of necessary tools to measure or quantify success

» Legacy, siloed, and inconsistent technologies across various organizations within a single company

» The lack of collaboration across teams (e.g., HR, IT, and LOB) to look holistically at all levers that can impact employee experience and engagement in an organization

When should an organization begin looking at improving employee experience and driving engagement?

Employee engagement can have real, positive, and lasting impacts on a business. Our belief is that all organizations need to be looking at what they can do to impact employee engagement today and on a consistent basis. Success means mobilizing the organization and looking at all of the experiences that impact employee engagement levels across the organization (e.g., tools, technology, services, access). Among today's workforce, it has been found that technology can perhaps have one of the biggest impacts on employee experience and engagement. As organizations look at improving employee experience and engagement, technology needs to be front and center as part of any successful strategy now and in the future.

This technology should help employees feel more included and connected to the organization from the day they sign their offer letter to the day they retire. Technology should additionally accommodate the demands of today's workers to be mobile, collaborate across locations, get a consistent experience across any device, and have access to exactly what they need at their fingertips.

Organizations that have not yet undertaken efforts to improve employee experience and engagement need to put steps in place to do so very soon in order to stay competitive.

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About the Analyst

Lisa Rowan, Research Vice President, HR, Talent, and Learning Strategies Lisa Rowan is responsible for global research on human capital and talent management software and services. Ms. Rowan provides expert analysis focused on both the business services and software used to address HR and talent-related dimensions. Her research addresses developments in human capital and talent management applications, human resources consulting, and HR outsourcing services.

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MESSAGE FROM THE SPONSOR

Business leaders involved in digital transformation say that finding the right people with the right skills is one of their biggest challenges. Today's employees are more mobile, have more choices and are incredibly tech-savvy. They expect a workplace that allows them to feel connected, motivated and productive from day one.

VMware Workspace ONE platform allows IT to maximize employee engagement and productivity by providing employees with a personalized "hire to retire" experience complete with out-of-the-box onboarding across any device, mobile or PC and immediate single sign-on (SSO) access to any app — SaaS, mobile, Windows/Mac, web, virtual. VMware Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub provides employees self-service access through a single app to all their services, applications and workflows — for easy access to the information they need within their SaaS applications. User apps and data are kept private, even at retirement when only corporate apps and data are selectively removed from devices.

VMware Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub

The content in this paper was adapted from existing IDC research published on www.idc.com.

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