How to implement Employee Experience or „Who the hell is Carl?“

In today’s world everything is about experiences. Customer satisfaction has advanced to customer experiences, websites don’t just deliver information, they create a user experience. In HR departments the talks have started about employee experiences.

What is Employee Experience?

Comparable to the customer journey, employees have a certain journey within the company. Starting with the application, the recruiting, on-boarding processes, everyday communication and work environment. Employee experience describes the general perception of a company from the employees' perspective. This perception is formed by the the sum of moments, interactions and impressions an employee experiences in an organization. Therefore it is also closely linked to the company culture and the company image.

Why should I care for my employees experience?

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, Entrepreneur

In the end no company is a secluded island. Your employees interact with people. Be it suppliers, customers or strategic allies. Unhappy and unmotivated employees will not represent your company the way you would wish them too. Give them a positiv experience when it comes to organizational structure, company culture and technology used within the company. Work motivation and ethic can be increased long term. On top of that, employees will share their positive experiences and recommend the company as an employer.

How to implement Employee Experience

Define Employee Personas

As tempting as it is to define the „perfect employee“, someone who is already happy is not going to help you any further. Try to define a minimum of 3 realistic personas that cover various viewpoints within a company. Meaning, don’t create 3 personas of the sales department. Think about which departments in your company experience most distress and take a look at a sample personas. E.g. Carl from customer care is 50 years old, has worked for the company for more than 20 years and works for claim management all day.

Creating personas behind closed doors is not gonna get you anywhere. Talk to your employees to find out more about their every day hassles.

Personas are supposed to be a symbolic representative. Their purpose is to create someone who represents more than one person in the company. Let your HR department talk to your customer support team, based on the answers you can create Carl who is unifying the common opinions and issues of the whole team.

Identify Touchpoints 

Think what touchpoints Carl has in the company and what measures or cultural changes would make Carl happier and keep him motivated. One touchpoint definitely is the claim management system - this could be simple emailing and an excel sheet or something more sophisticated. How well does this tool work for Carl? Who does he talk to within the company? Does Carl work together with your product department or your repair department to clarify customer claims? Those touchpoints of Carl could be further personas to look at. E.g. Simon the product manager or Karen the repair engineer. Usually starting with one persona will trigger the rest quite naturally.

Identify disruptive factors 

Most likely Carl will not be very popular within the company because he always has bad news. Customers are not happy with the product or the service or something did go wrong in shipping.

Simon from product management could be annoyed that he has to start a product development project because Carl keeps coming around asking for adaptions. This touchpoint will then not be a happy one for either side. What can you do about it? Addressing that not Carl himself but customers want the changes could be a start to a better communication between these two. An in-depth assessment could bring deeper insights and solutions to disruptive factors.

Continuous adaptation

Once the touchpoints of each person have been analyzed and optimized a regular re-evaluation circle makes sense. Especially after implementing new processes or communication structures reevaluating within 3 to 6 months is feasible. Once processes are checked and approved by all parties involved the time span of the re-evaluation can be expanded. Still, it shouldn’t take 10 years for the next evaluation to take place. After all, employee experience needs to be up-to-date to be effective and motivating.

To implement employee experience successfully, teamwork plus empathy are as important as open communication and know-how. We can help you to optimize your company's employee experience. Contact us for more information on our different workshops.