The Future of Work: Creating an exceptional Colleague Experience

A whitepaper from Nile

Author: Neil Collman (Practice Director, Nile)

C O N T E N T S

Introduction 3

What is Colleague Experience? 3

Why is it more important than ever? 5

Applications of Colleague Experience design 6

What are the benefits of investing in Colleague Experience? 9

Conclusion 10

3A white paper from Nile

The Future of Work: Creating an exceptional Colleague Experience

I N T R O D U C T I O N

T oday, we expect that companies will treat us well as customers. The days of getting away with sloppy customer service are

over. With over 90% of companies duking it out over customer experience, customers being more inclined than ever to share their experiences on social media and review sites, and investment in customer experience marketing on the rise, expectations for our interactions with companies have never been higher.

But, what about when we approach those companies as a job seeker? Naturally, the expectations we have as a customer - for exceptional support, a frictionless user journey, a consistent brand - carry over to our expectations when we’re considering our next employer. What’s more, not only do Human Resources professionals need to match the high expectations of the customer experience, they also need to tackle the constant shortage of talent in many critical employment areas.

In the words of Henry G. Jackson, CEO and president of the Society for Human Resource Management, “It should now be clear to everyone that, whether we’re in good economic times or bad, in a period of stability or disruption, the skills shortage is an ever-present challenge.”1 And, even if you manage to attract the talent you need, you’re still faced with the problem of keeping them motivated and loyal in the face of what Gallup calls a “worldwide employee engagement crisis.”2 Major leaps forward in HR technology, automation, and artificial intelligence, and radical new organisational structures add further complexity.

You don’t need us to tell you that Human Resources has never been more important, or more challenging. So how can HR professionals hope to compete and build a strategy that will stand the test of time in a job market that is constantly changing?

1 https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/0617/pages/the-war-for-talent-is-now-a-way-of-life-for-hr.aspx2 https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/188033/worldwide-employee-engagement-crisis.aspx

In this white paper, we’ll make the case that the answer is to focus your attention on the growing field of colleague experience. Also known as ‘employee experience’, or EX, colleague experience design offers HR leaders the key to attract talent, build employee engagement and loyalty, and future-proof their HR strategy in today’s evolving business landscape. We’ll outline what colleague experience design is, how it can be best applied, and what it can mean for your company. Finally, we’ll explore ways in which Human Resources professionals can take on a strategic role in helping their organisations compete in this new playing field.

W H AT I S C O L L E A G U E E X P E R I E N C E ?

Customer experience (CX) is a deliberate and thoughtful approach to the interaction between the customer and the company, from first engagement to post-sales support. Colleague experience, also known as employee experience (EX), takes the techniques developed in consumer marketing - design thinking, journey mapping, user experience design, segmentation, branding - and applies them to the way that employees experience their engagement with the company.

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The Future of Work: Creating an exceptional Colleague Experience

In his book, The Employee Experience Advantage, Jacob Morgan suggests that employee experience comprises three basic elements - the cultural, technological, and physical environments that companies offer their employees. Culture could be anything from meeting practices to interview techniques, from codes of conduct to free beer on Friday afternoon. Technological elements could be making sure that your employees’ user experience with in-house tools is as considered as your customers’ experience with your product - or it could be as simple but critical as making sure that every employee has access to the tools they need to get their job done. Physical environments should be carefully designed to make sure that your employees have a workspace, which is not only comfortable but also reflects your brand values - for instance, allowing for easy collaboration or allotting areas for quiet focus and reflection. Most importantly, Morgan writes, “All three of these aspects should be focused on creating an environment where people want to show up!”3

While colleague experience design is usually thought of as a part of the human resources sphere, it essentially marks a new unification of multiple functions, including corporate communications, office design, IT, and even marketing and branding. It differs from what is usually termed “employee engagement” - employee engagement is one of the many positive results of well-implemented employee experience design. It also differs from corporate branding. While many companies create appealing recruitment brands to attract new talent, EX designers are more focused on creating experiences that have a positive impact on existing employees.

Mark Levy, former head of Employee Experience at Airbnb, describes EX as: “Anything that sets employees up for success or improves our culture should be a part of EX.”4 In other words, colleague

3 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobmorgan/2016/04/22/what-is-employee-experience/#2946d98873864 https://www.forbes.com/sites/deniselyohn/2018/01/02/2018-will-be-the-year-of-employee-experience/#7fba42501c8f5 http://www.globoforce.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/The_Employee_Experience_Index.pdf

experience design is not about simple perks or benefits - rather, it is the careful curation of the global experience an employee has when interacting with an organisation.

Every organisation designs employee experiences, whether deliberately or not. Every decision about office design, facilities, recruitment procedures and training programs has an impact on what the Globoforce Workhuman Research Institute

calls “the set of perceptions that employees have about their experiences at work in response to their interactions with the organisation.”5 However, those companies making deliberate decisions to create an optimal employee experience will be able to compete more convincingly over those who allow the employee experience to simply happen - in just the same way that companies designing exceptional customer experiences trounce their competitors.

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The Future of Work: Creating an exceptional Colleague Experience

W H Y I S I T M O R E I M P O R TA N T T H A N E V E R ?

At Nile, we are getting an increasing number of requests from HR professionals to help them improve the experience of employees; everything from pre-interview to onboarding, the key lifecycle milestones and finally offboarding. We were fascinated to understand more about this trend and why creating a positive colleague experience has become a fundamental part of the future of work.

Our research points to some global business trends that are driving the growing EX movement.

Shifts in employee needs and expectations

In a recent study of the future of work and employee behaviour, Deloitte turned up a clear shift in the attitude towards work held by millennials, now the largest demographic in the workforce. “Millenials expect more: Among this group, social capital plays an outsized role in where they work and what they buy, and 86 percent of millennials think that business success should be measured in terms of more than just financial performance”6 they reported. As a result, job seekers no longer consider only a company’s bottom line performance when choosing a new employer - rather, organisations are being judged on how they treat their workers.

Increasing transparency through social media

Platforms like LinkedIn and Glassdoor offer potential recruits and existing employees unprecedented levels of insight into the inner workings of their organisation. The so-called “Glassdoor effect” has radically changed the HR landscape. Failing to take into account the new age of social proof can cost businesses their competitive edge when it comes to hiring and

6 https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/focus/human-capital-trends.html7 https://www.benefitnews.com/opinion/thanks-to-the-glassdoor-effect-companies-will-never-be-the-same8 https://www.hrtechnologist.com/articles/employee-engagement/5-predictions-on-the-future-of-the-employee-experience/9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/samantharadocchia/2018/04/27/how-to-develop-an-organic-culture-within-a-blockchain-compa-

ny/#3b77c0c44901

retaining employees. On the other hand, by designing the kind of colleague experience that employees want, even less-known businesses can harness the power of social sharing to attract exceptional recruits.7

Personalisation

Sean Nolan, CEO at Blink, has observed another major new trend in the sphere of HR management. Writing for HR Technologist, he points out that we’re moving away from encouraging teamwork and collaboration, towards customised policies adapted to each individual, maximising productivity at the one-to-one level: “We’re now seeing a huge shift away from the age of collaboration and a move towards the era of personalisation and productivity.”8 Employees these days expect an environment which works for them personally; whether that be offering private booths for increased concentration and “deep work”, or allowing individuals to choose their own software. Part of this trend is the rise of AI - detailed data on each individual allow HR professionals to move away from one-size-fits-none standardised policies to create customised packages for every employee. When it comes to the future of work, organisations on the fringes appear to be experimenting with hybrid hierarchical models - holocracies - where the ultimate form of personalisation is encouraged, letting employees self-select. This type of structure allows individuals to do roles where they can excel, have passion and most importantly committed to the outcome making responsibility evenly distributed amongst the team.9

The blended workforce

In 1995, Gallup reported that just 9% of the workforce were working remotely, either full- or part-time. Today, more than a third of all

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The Future of Work: Creating an exceptional Colleague Experience

employees in the US have worked remotely in their current role, and that trend is spreading worldwide.10 Employee experience design is both more challenging and more critical when working with remote teams.

More challenging, as remote workers may need to become fully operational faster than in-house employees, may operate in different time zones or with different cultural assumptions than local workers, and, if hired as contract workers, may also be less likely to be looking for a long-term relationship with the employer. And, more critical because without the personal relationships built over the water cooler and meeting table, remote workers have a largely, or entirely, virtual interaction with their employer. This places increased pressure on HR to prioritise creating engagement and building loyalty and connection at every opportunity.11

10 http://www.gallup.com/poll/184649/telecommuting-work-climbs.aspx11 https://www.forbes.com/sites/sujanpatel/2017/03/25/3-tips-for-building-employee-engagement-with-remote-employees/#66fd-

b9921c1112 http://www.iftf.org/fileadmin/user_upload/downloads/th/SR1940_IFTFforDellTechnologies_Human-Machine_070717_readerhigh-res.

pdf

New technologies

A report by the Institute for the Future argues that we are currently entering a “new era of human-machine partnerships.” Some examples include “work chasing people” - using matchmaking algorithms to find talent from a global pool; collaborating with “colleagues” who are in fact artificial-intelligence robots; asking natural-language questions of your data sources the way you do of your team; and people working as “digital conductors,” not merely using technologies but seeing them as an extension of their professional selves. In an increasingly automated workplace, building an employee experience which creates a sense of human connection becomes more important than ever. These evolving technologies not only force companies to adapt their culture; in some cases they lead the cultural change. For instance, the IFTF report argues, “Work chasing people could also reduce personal biases and stereotypes in the job seeking process. Integrating VR technology into recruitment protocols, for example, enables the prospective worker to demonstrate competency by showcasing skills without revealing gender or ethnicity.”12

A P P L I C AT I O N S O F C O L L E A G U E E X P E R I E N C E D E S I G N

Colleague experience design is a holistic process and one that should inform decisions throughout the organisation, from recruitment strategies to Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) tools, from intranet design to training management. Here are some ways in which today’s businesses are applying customer experience techniques to their human resources programs:

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The Future of Work: Creating an exceptional Colleague Experience

Global Human Resources strategy

A company wanting to begin designing a better colleague experience would do well to start off by drawing on their experience with creating positive customer experiences.13 Some examples might be:

• Segmentation

Instead of segmenting the workforce by generalisations like location, job title or division, companies could start to organise staff by professional characteristics, or even personality traits. As with customer marketing, more accurate and granular segmentation can enable you to create a more worthwhile connection with individual employees, based on more relevant criteria.

• Journey mapping

In the same way that service designers build user maps that identify points of interaction between the customer and the company, HR professionals could build employee journey maps that identify the ways in which the employee interacts with the employer throughout the full employment life cycle. This kind of user map can enable you to spot areas that could use a boost or that are hurting your relationship with your employees, making it harder to recruit or retain talent, or reducing productivity.

• Recruitment and onboarding

Airbnb makes a great case study for applications of employee experience design to recruitment. Jill Riopelle, Airbnb’s Head of Global Recruiting, makes the case for storyboarding the candidates’ hiring experiences to explore both the touchpoints

13 ttps://insights.staffbase.com/blog/3-essential-elements-of-employee-experience-design14 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2015/07/21/the-future-of-work-airbnb-chro-becomes-chief-employee-experinece-of-

ficer/2/#70554f0b553515 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2017/01/05/the-employee-experience-is-the-future-of-work-10-hr-trends-for-

2017/#67b2e8b020a616 https://hbr.org/2018/03/the-new-rules-of-talent-management

with the company and the candidates’ emotional journey throughout.14

Harnessing the power of social media can also point the way to creating an exceptional colleague experience during the recruitment process: Zulily, for instance, requires candidates applying to its social media team to deliver their application via an Instagram post.15

• Agile talent management

Switching to a more flexible, responsive model is fundamental to this new approach to employee management. This more agile approach leads to effective, new ways of developing talent. For instance, taking a user-centric approach to Learning and Development led Cigna to create a system of real-time feedback, which gives employees a more iterative and relevant development program.

Similarly, an employee experience design focus prompted Cigna to deliver management coaching via weekly videos to fit around managers’ busy schedules and allow for on-the-job application of new techniques, instead of pulling them out of their workdays to attend training seminars.16 Managers and employees

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The Future of Work: Creating an exceptional Colleague Experience

in an organisation that embraces colleague experience help to define, test and optimise the processes that form talent management, instead of receiving decrees from on-high.

17 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2017/01/05/the-employee-experience-is-the-future-of-work-10-hr-trends-for-2017/2/#7cbc9927226b

18 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2015/07/21/the-future-of-work-airbnb-chro-becomes-chief-employee-experinece-of-ficer/#8b3b9b742327

• Internal communications

Focusing on providing great colleague experiences led Forrester to recruit a Head of Employee Experience who came from a background of communications, rather than HR. His priority? To “forge an emotional connection between Forrester employees and the Forrester brand.”17 This emotional connection is critical to creating positive interactions between staff and their employers. Strangely enough, some companies are turning to “human-like” chatbots to help build that connection. Where HR teams are overwhelmed by demands, chatbots can step in to field front-line HR queries, allowing the HR professionals to focus their attention where it is most needed - creating a great place to work in a way that only fellow humans can understand.

• Office design

No discussion of colleague experience design can pass over the design of the physical spaces offered to employees. Anyone who has ever worked in HR has heard the squabbles over heating and desk allocation. More importantly, considered office design should enable companies to design spaces that promote, rather than hinder, the culture they hope to build. Airbnb, for example, has redesigned their offices to reflect their nomadic company ethos by enabling employees to work anywhere from the kitchen to the communal living room.18 Office spaces with open plan areas mixed with private booths cater for extroverts and introverts, and replacing monotonous cubicles with multi-functional spaces allow you to make conscious, thoughtful choices about how interior design can best cater for different types of work.

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The Future of Work: Creating an exceptional Colleague Experience

WeWork takes this interaction between design and culture even further; the company is built on the assumption that people want to work in a space that reflects their values and provides an optimal experience while they work. Founder Adam Neumann sums up their mission: “WeWork was, and still is, a company that’s making its best efforts to create a world where people make a life and not just a living.” This aim is built into every aspect of client experience, with WeWork slogans (“Never Settle”, “Hustle Harder”) on everything from their mugs to the bathroom wall. WeWork’s understanding that people place a high value on the experience delivered by their workplace is attracting big organisations like Microsoft and Citibank to open offices alongside the entrepreneurs and freelancers. Will we see more organisations like Microsoft shift towards this “inside out” work environment?

• Wellbeing in the workplace

Company wellness programs are now taken as a given, at least in larger organisations. What makes them different in a company designing for employee experience is that they provide what employees actually want, rather than simply paying lip service to the whole wellness concept. For instance, SunTrust Bank offered a financial fitness and savings platform to help reduce employees’ financial stress.19

• Team development

While HR may be becoming more personalised, in EX-led companies the process of goal-setting is shifting from the strictly individual to the collective. The vast majority of employees experience their work as a series of group projects. As Ashley Goodall of Cisco puts it: “One of the big misses in HR has

19 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2017/01/05/the-employee-experience-is-the-future-of-work-10-hr-trends-for-2017/2/#7cbc9927226b

20 https://hbr.org/2018/03/the-new-rules-of-talent-management21 https://hbr.org/2017/03/why-the-millions-we-spend-on-employee-engagement-buy-us-so-little

been our nearly exclusive focus on individual development and performance. At Cisco, we noted great accomplishments are delivered through teams, not just through individuals working alone. This led to our insight that an individual employee’s experience is really their team experience and this is different for everyone.” Innovations in this area include tying benefits to the team, rather than individual, performance, by giving employees the power to award fellow team members micro-bonuses based on recognition of helpfulness and support.20

W H AT A R E T H E B E N E F I T S O F I N V E S T I N G I N C O L L E A G U E E X P E R I E N C E ?

Employee experience design sounds great, but the million-dollar question is, as always - does it actually make a difference? Or, is it another of those ideas that sound great in theory but in practice translate into little more than a gimmick? Well, the jury’s in, and fortunately, the answer is a resounding “YES!” Here are some of the benefits you can hope to see by taking a colleague-experience led approach to HR management:

A boost to the bottom line

While token efforts towards employee engagement (think pool tables and office parties) do little but spend the company’s hard-earned profits, investments in positive employee experiences can pay serious dividends. Research by the Harvard Business Review found that companies that invested time and money in the day-to-day experience their employees had at work saw “more than four times the average profit and more than two times the average revenue”21 than their less attentive competitors.

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The Future of Work: Creating an exceptional Colleague Experience

Improved productivity, engagement and innovation

These same experiential companies were also up to 25% smaller than similar organisations. Jacob Morgan suggested that this would point to employees working more efficiently and being more productive than the staff of larger but less profitable competitors. This is not really surprising - employees who are having a positive experience in their day-to-day interaction with the company have higher levels of engagement, and thus are more productive. For instance, a global survey of over 12000 employees found that workers able to control their workspace were 88% more engaged at work.22

Reduced turnover

Turnover is an incredibly expensive HR problem, costing organisations up to 2% of the bottom line and holding back productivity significantly23. A study by UrbanBound found that up to 20% of all employee turnover happens in the first 45 days of employment - but most onboarding programs last for only a month. Longer onboarding programs, designed to give new hires a great experience from day one at your company, not only cut down dramatically on turnover, they also get new employees up to full productivity more than 30% faster24.

C O N C L U S I O N

Today’s workers have come to expect more from their employers. They are used to being delighted as consumers and require nothing less as employees. Companies hoping to compete for top talent, both now and in the years to come, need to create future-proof strategies to attract, retain, motivate and engage their staff.

22 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2017/01/05/the-employee-experience-is-the-future-of-work-10-hr-trends-for-2017/#659a6eed20a6

23 https://www.urbanbound.com/blog/onboarding-infographic-statistics24 https://www.urbanbound.com/blog/onboarding-infographic-statistics25 https://www.forbes.com/sites/deniselyohn/2018/01/02/2018-will-be-the-year-of-employee-experience/#5495cf01c8fc

Designing your HR programs around the concept of building a positive and inspiring experience for your employees, from the first point of contact to recruitment, from onboarding to exit interview, and everything in between is the surest way to keep your organisation ahead of the curve. Colleague experience design creates employees who are more productive, more innovative, more loyal, and more profitable. It boosts both your brand equity and your bottom line. No wonder Forbes Magazine is calling 2018 “the year of employee experience25.

My philosophy has always been, if you can put staff first, your customers second, and shareholders third, effectively, in the end, the shareholders do well, the customers do better, and your

staff remains happy.

—Sir Richard Branson

I N D E X O F R E F E R E N C E S

1. https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/0617/pages/the-war-for-talent-is-now-a-way-of-life-for-hr.aspx

2. https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/188033/worldwide-employee-engagement-crisis.aspx3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobmorgan/2016/04/22/what-is-employee-

experience/#2946d98873864. https://www.forbes.com/sites/deniselyohn/2018/01/02/2018-will-be-the-year-of-employee-

experience/#7fba42501c8f 5. http://www.globoforce.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/The_Employee_Experience_Index.pdf6. https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/focus/human-capital-trends.html7. https://www.benefitnews.com/opinion/thanks-to-the-glassdoor-effect-companies-will-never-be-the-

same8. https://www.hrtechnologist.com/articles/employee-engagement/5-predictions-on-the-future-of-the-

employee-experience/9. https://www.forbes.com/sites/samantharadocchia/2018/04/27/how-to-develop-an-organic-culture-

within-a-blockchain-company/#3b77c0c4490110. http://www.gallup.com/poll/184649/telecommuting-work-climbs.aspx11. https://www.forbes.com/sites/sujanpatel/2017/03/25/3-tips-for-building-employee-engagement-with-

remote-employees/#66fdb9921c1112. http://www.iftf.org/fileadmin/user_upload/downloads/th/SR1940_IFTFforDellTechnologies_Human-

Machine_070717_readerhigh-res.pdf13. https://insights.staffbase.com/blog/3-essential-elements-of-employee-experience-design14. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2015/07/21/the-future-of-work-airbnb-chro-becomes-

chief-employee-experinece-officer/2/#70554f0b553515. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2017/01/05/the-employee-experience-is-the-future-of-

work-10-hr-trends-for-2017/#67b2e8b020a616. https://hbr.org/2018/03/the-new-rules-of-talent-management17. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2017/01/05/the-employee-experience-is-the-future-of-

work-10-hr-trends-for-2017/2/#7cbc9927226b18. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2015/07/21/the-future-of-work-airbnb-chro-becomes-

chief-employee-experinece-officer/#8b3b9b74232719. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2017/01/05/the-employee-experience-is-the-future-of-

work-10-hr-trends-for-2017/2/#7cbc9927226b20. https://hbr.org/2017/03/why-the-millions-we-spend-on-employee-engagement-buy-us-so-little21. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2017/01/05/the-employee-experience-is-the-future-of-

work-10-hr-trends-for-2017/#659a6eed20a622. https://www.urbanbound.com/blog/onboarding-infographic-statistics23. https://www.urbanbound.com/blog/onboarding-infographic-statistics24. https://www.forbes.com/sites/deniselyohn/2018/01/02/2018-will-be-the-year-of-employee-

experience/#5495cf01c8fc

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