Harnessing Employee Experience

There is a lot of data in an organization – some organized, some random. The challenge is to channelize it and use mediums to generate more data, to be able to deliver a better employee or candidate experience.

BY AMIT AVASTHI

When we buy a product on Bestbuy or Amazon, it is always the final product in which we are interested, and, are in no way concerned with the associated supply chain management. Looking back, we can assuage what E-commerce has transpired to achieve; it has transforming our buying into an experience, and, simply has revolutionized the very shopping experience.

Bringing Experience To Employees

If we were to extend the same logic to an organization and assume that HR functions in a way where users (employees) get the services without the interfaces, it would definitely translate into a better ‘employee experience’, and, this is the opportune moment to deliver it. The argument is built on the following three key trends that are shaping the today’s workplaces: –

• Crowdsourcing: Crowdsourcing is leveraging the wisdom of crowds, instead of making isolated decisions, viz. tripadvisor.com
• Enhanced Social Media usage: While Social HR is still in a nascent stage, it promises to be a leading trend in the coming years, as it works on constructs such as Talent Marketplace, Employee Experience and Big Data Analysis Capability.
• Increased data: This is becoming increasingly important, given the benefits a data oriented HR approach can give.

The pertinent question is how does this translate to a superior employee experience? Traditionally, HR would operate based on the structure outlined below (Figure 1), where HR Business Partners play the business-facing role, with HR Shared Services, HR Analytics and CoE, supporting the model.

The traditional approach is bereft of three aspects:

• Employee Connect – The touch-point to an employee is issue dependant and this creates a lot of delays leading to his frustration.
• Process design and implementation – CoE are often left balancing best practices and business needs, which result in design not aligned with the needs and demands.
• HR Reporting – While organizations may be at different capacities on how they utilize this, one common aspect is that the use of data is restricted to what is available in repositories.

Redefining the traditional model (fig.2)

1. Experience the core focus – Here, the focus is on delivering a superior, consistent and a uniform experience – to the candidates as well as the employees. This would be possible only if HR is seamless, integrated and data oriented in their approach. Employee/Candidate portals need to be social in order to integrate real time feedback and support for collaboration.
2. Big data and not just analytics – HR has the opportunity to gather information from feedbacks which may be crowdsourced across processes. This when added to the data repository renders it more meaningful and aids in betting better perspectives around policy, processes and work environment.
3. Crowdsourcing information – This is a potential source of collecting a lot of information, everything from JDs, career paths, development plans and training programmes, which can be enhanced by the CoE team.

Here Are The Benefits!

1. Crowdsourced information is more validated. It is like the star ratings on your favourite travel destinations.
2. It helps in extracting ‘meaningful’ data out of a pool of unorganized information – imagine comments in the form of feedback and process validations- all being churned out to extract meaningful information. Post this, you now know what you need to act on.
3. It helps defining the right interventions since HR interventions are often not about aping best practices, but being able to define the precise measure that can tackle a problem.

There is a lot of data in an organization – some organized, some random. The challenge is to channelize it and use mediums to generate more data, to be able to deliver a better employee or candidate experience.