Key Takeaways: What is Behind the Importance of Rethinking the Employee Experience?

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1 Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies Connect Educate Achieve CAHRS Working Group Consumer Driven HR and Employee Engagement: Rethinking Technology, Workspace Design and the Role of HR Hosted by Accenture London January 31, 2017 Participating Organizations: AbbVie Accenture BAE Systems Cornell University Estée Lauder GE Capital HP IBM Lloyds Banking Procter & Gamble Shell UK Oil Products Key Takeaways: To better attract, engage, and retain key employee groups, HR leaders need to spend more time identifying the key moments that matter those HR processes or activities that can positively shape or enhance the employee experience instead of focusing on bureaucratic processes that increase the burdens or diminish the experiences of current and prospective employees. It s important to think about how technology (artificial intelligence, chatbots, etc.) can help to create more personalized employee experiences while also potentially keeping down the costs of HR delivery. Following learnings from design thinking, HR departments should think about how and when (identification of key issues, brainstorming solutions, prototyping and testing, etc.) to include employees in the redesign of key aspects of the employee experience. The underlying drivers or barriers to an enhanced employee experience may differ across employee groups (job types, generations, locations), so HR leaders need to think about how to create greater flexibility while also keeping costs reasonable. This could lead to the focus on personas, as pure customization to every individual is likely to be too costly to maintain. What is Behind the Importance of Rethinking the Employee Experience? Over the course of our early discussion, participants noted quite a number of factors that increase the importance of rethinking the employee experience and how HR helps to shape how employees work, get access to information, and can connect to the company and coworkers. First, people across generations have come to expect improved experiences and access to greater amounts of information on which to make personal choices based on their experiences as consumers. Increasingly these experiences are spilling over to impact current and prospective employees expectations of the workplace such that they expect seamless access to information that they need, reduced burdens in how they

2 Page 2 access and interact with the organization, and their desire to shape a personalized experience with the employer. Second, these changing expectations are compounded by tight labor markets for key talent and lower levels of employer loyalty. Individuals are more likely to leave employers or pass on employment opportunities if they are frustrated by seemingly bureaucratic processes, feel that they don t have access to knowledge and opportunities to perform and develop in their roles, or if the employer feels rigid and inflexible. Third, employees across generations are looking for an enriching and rewarding set of experiences a seamless interaction with HR in which obstacles and barriers to an enriched employee experience and performance in their jobs have been removed or mitigated. Strategically, participants in the working group noted that they have been creating a mind shift in thinking about how HR processes, systems, technology and HR employees can: 1. enhance the employee experience, improve use and access to information that employees need to make better decisions about their employment experience, and 2. develop a deeper understanding of the needs and issues of different groups or employees rather than providing a one-size-fits-all set of processes that generally work well for few employees. There was a general feeling that in the quest to make the HR function more cost efficient, many companies have lost the human touch instead companies need to think about how to keep costs down while simultaneously delivering a more personalized and potentially higher touch and richer employee experience. Iden fica on of Key Processes or Ac vi es That Nega vely Impact the Employee Experience During our discussion, participants identified that one key aspect to this new line of thinking is really to identify the moments that matter when it comes to how employees feel about the organization. 1. Key moments may differ by employment stage. Some key moments that impact prospective employees include application and recruitment processes that may seem overly burdensome for applicants or that are not personalized. For new employees, the focus seemed to be around the initial employee experiences tied to onboarding and early integration with their new team and departments. For longer term employees, the key moments seemed to focus around personal development and career paths, personalization of benefits across life stages, and letting employees design and drive their own experiences. HR can enhance the experience of more tenured employees by enabling easier access to the data/information that they need to get their jobs done; and enabling more information and help in how to navigate and grow their careers. 2. Segmentation by Personas to create multiple options. Across the course of the day, participants noted that one solution to create flexibility and be responsive to different needs and create more customization is to identify unique groups of employees or perspective employees and to create unique solutions around these different groups (personas). For example, applicants/job candidates may look for unique information based on their past experience levels (e.g., new college graduate, experienced hire). Providing different background information across each of these different personas can help candidates understand how they would fit into the organization, unique opportunities open to them, and enable them to feel that they have received information or messages that are a fit to their needs

3 Page 3 and expectations. It is important to both create options across HR programs and activities so that employees have the opportunity to uniquely shape the right experiences, but HR must also enable these employees to navigate the range of options that are available based on segmented needs or backgrounds. 3. Employee experience initiatives can occur across a wide range of HR areas. During our discussions, participants identified quite a wide range of new initiatives and options that they are creating for employees across: i. pay and benefits, ii. career paths and job roles, iii. learning and development, iv. location, work arrangement, and technology, v. workspace design, and vi. volunteerism and experiences. 4. Example of redesign of the candidate experience. One of the participants shared an extensive example of the segmentation approach in the context of external recruitment. The company was looking to reshape the recruitment/application experience to be more responsive and provide unique information bundles across different groups (personas). The goal was to help create greater attraction (help candidates see how they would fit the company and opportunities), feel a higher level of personalization (make it easier to navigate and access information that was critical to them), and help to build or create relationships (connecting/matching individuals to current employees with similar backgrounds). Much of the customization came in identifying and setting up different candidate personas with unique information sets and matching connections to current employees. In addition, the company used artificial intelligence and chatbots to navigate promptly to matching job opportunities, quickly navigate the application process, match to existing employees, etc. 5. Examples for established employees and navigating careers. Multiple participants noted that the increased complexity of developmental and growth opportunities (lateral and project work opportunities in additional to vertical promotions) was making it difficult for established employees to understand how to navigate careers and internal labor market opportunities and was often a source of frustration that could lead to disengagement and turnover. In response, these organizations have looked to use technology to (1) push career and developmental assignment opportunities to employees based on completed employee profiles, (2) help employees identify and compare opportunities and to match them with a coach through artificial intelligence and algorithms, and (3) create information boards or matching sites that help employees navigate internal markets for projects, assignments, and tasks that can help them build new skills and experiences. Use of Technology or Ar ficial Intelligence is Key As noted in the prior section, multiple participants provided examples of how their organizations are using machine learning, algorithms, or artificial intelligence to help employees navigate options or to push potential opportunities to those employees. Over the course of the day, it was clear that technology and artificial intelligence is a critical resource for increasing the customization of HR delivery, helping employees

4 Page 4 more effectively access information that is essential for the jobs and navigating careers, providing personalized information that enables choice in HR offerings, etc. Further, use of technology may help enhance the personalization of the employee experience while simultaneously keeping down costs as algorithms and artificial intelligence are more scalable and repeatable than trying to accomplish these same activities through shared services call centers. However, there are a few key issues to keep in mind when thinking about increasing the use of technology and artificial intelligence. How does this become seamless? Much like their experiences as consumers of products and services, employees are increasingly demanding more seamless service from HR which can be complicated as they move between self-service portals, interaction with their HRBP, their people leader, and interactions with the HR teams in shared service centers. We need to look more closely at how to make these experiences seamless in terms of the pass-off from one to the other, consistency in messages and data from one to the other, the service experience between the different groups, etc. Help employees make the transition. Not all employees and all companies are at the same place in terms of use of technology and comfort with technology. Companies need to remember that this could be a large scale change effort to get employees and managers comfortable with these new technologies. Development of information and customization based on research. Much of the perception of customization comes in taking the time to effectively research and build personas that match the mix of needs and unique employee groups inside the organization. Further, the use of artificial intelligence and matching algorithms is highly dependent on having good information in the system on both employees, job opportunities, HR options, etc. This often takes time to build up the base of information and employee patience to continue to use the technology as the interface grows more sophisticated and as matching algorithms improve over time, usage, and feedback. Bringing in the Voice of the Employee Companies need to make sure that they develop and follow a balanced approach to how they understand the voice of the customer given the diversity in companies across lots of dimensions (e.g., generations, gender, nationality, job type or level). Companies need to make sure that they are getting a well-balanced sense of the needs and barriers for all of the different populations of employees and aren t oversampling the loudest voices. At the same time, we need to be careful to not burn out employees on exercises of providing insights, co-designing solutions, etc. as we need to be mindful that they are also working full-time jobs. When to Bring in the Voice of the Customer Across the day, participants noted that bringing in the voice of employees can have a positive impact across different stages of rethinking the employee experience, including: Identification of key processes or practices to address; Brainstorming; Prototyping;

5 Page 5 Evaluation and enhancement; Value as a change management tool. Openness of sharing the data with employees is critical for employees to know what is already being done, what issues have already been identified, what opportunities exist, who is working on which problems, etc. Sharing increases employees perceptions that participation in activities related to data collection or idea generation is mutually beneficial for themselves, other employees in the organization, and the organization itself; and Potential techniques. To ensure that HR is getting broad and representative data on needs, issues, and ideas, participants identified a wide range of data collection activities that they are pursuing, such as: Pulse surveys. Consistency of data collected over time, potentially add in special questions that track against new initiatives or pain points; Free flowing questions to employees while interacting with an HR activity or service for example, asking open-ended questions about the employees overall work experience or experience with a particular activity or supporting technology while employees are on the self-service portal or interacting with a live HR person; Use internal social media technologies to communicate ideas and get employee responses and conversations, and potentially crowdsource innovations or changes. Most suggested keeping these conversations visible to all. Our discussion raised a number of questions on how to process the data, how to ensure distribution of participation, and ways to curate the information to make it easier for later conversation participants to follow the stream of the conversation, etc; Companies have also used in-person and virtual focus groups and crowdsourcing methodologies (e.g., hackathons) to identify issues, solutions, and new delivery mechanisms; Some participants noted that they also use anonymous Dropbox style techniques for employees to share concerns, identify employee experience challenges etc. and then have senior managers speak to these comments, questions, suggestions in some public forum potentially through newsletter, video; and Leader listening lunches are a potential way to bring together senior leaders and employees from all levels and parts of the company to create opportunity for employee voice and for senior leaders to hear issues, concerns, and needs directly from employees. Changing Competencies of HR to Deliver a Be er Employee Experience As companies move more to this approach, participants noted that there will be a resulting impact on competency and skill needs for a number of key roles: HRBP Act as the voice of the customer to understand needs or challenges that get in the way of work; Agent of the change - Supporters and drivers of change rather than detractors/resistors; Deeply understand the drivers of the business and what the business might need to manage/interact/support employees differently to drive the results that they are trying to accomplish; and

6 Page 6 Empathy understanding pain points of process and what is getting in the way, translating that into actions or requests to drive change. Competencies of line leaders Empathy and trust required to understand and drive to their needs; Stewardship and accountability; Willingness to empower employees; and Ability to coach and have conversations.

7 Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies Connect Educate Achieve This Summary Report was prepared by Chris Collins for use by participants of the Consumer-Driven HR and Employee Engagement: Rethinking Technology, Workspace Design and the Role of HR Working Group. The Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies (CAHRS) is an international center serving corporate human resources leaders and their companies by providing critical tools for building and leading high performing HR organizations. CAHRS mission is to bring together Partners and the ILR School s world-renowned HR Studies faculty to investigate, translate and apply the latest HR research into practice excellence. Cornell University ILR School 193 Ives Hall Ithaca, NY Phone: Fax: E: cahrs@cornell.edu W: cahrs.ilr.cornell.edu