HR is not alone creating a transformational employee experience. EX is not an HR Project. Instead, it is about transforming the day-to-day experience of work. EX is not repackaged employee engagement. Instead, it is the transformation of the day-to-day experience of work.
In 2016, when the Davos World Economic Summit declared the Fourth Industrial Revolution was upon us, it signaled to industry that digital transformation would impact more than listening to music and connecting on social media. It signaled CEOs to create transformational strategies that would go way beyond sales, marketing, and supply chain. It would impact how employees work across the whole enterprise, interactions with robots, and with each other.
“Technology would now be affecting our lives and reshaping the economic, social, cultural, and human environments,” said Profession Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum. “There has never been a time of greater promise, or greater peril.”
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is finally hitting the world of work with the integration of digital transformation and human workflows (see graphic from World Economic Forum- Weforum.org)
In human resources and information technology, we call this transformation "the employee experience", commonly abbreviated as “EX.” EX is not a new word for employee engagement. While employee engagement focused on alignment to a company’s brand and how well employees were treated by their managers and team members (all are important), EX is genuinely different. EX encapsulates what employees encounter and experience while engaged in work and is driven by digital platforms that can improve employee experiences and productivity and reduce frustrations and costs.
“EX” is not simply an HR Project. It has blown by the standard of having computer platforms handle the administrative tasks of recruiting or accelerating the generation of weekly payroll. It is about how employees interact with each other, ask questions, and do their work.
Industry Analyst Josh Bersin defines it as “A company-wide initiative to help employees stay productive, healthy, engaged, and on track. It is now an enterprise-wide strategy, often led by the CHRO in partnership with the CIO.” EX deals with all the day-to-day issues employees face at work, from email to safe working, to employee learning, pay, leaves of absence, benefits, and wellbeing. Data from McKinsey shows that companies that invest early and at the enterprise level to digitally reinvent themselves, and reap handsome financial returns.
How do HR leaders build an EX-Strategy? The technology supporting EX is so powerful it can support not only HR, but IT, Operations, Health and Safety, Legal, and Wellbeing. The strategy should be cross-disciplinary with organization-wide impact.
Josh Bersin’s advice is to create a cross-functional initiative owned by HR, IT, Facilities, Operations and Legal. Many companies have had separate service delivery call centers. The technology is advancing so fast that wise companies will see how the technology can accommodate all of their needs.
His second piece of advice is to determine the initial experience and focus for your organization. For some, that could be information dissemination, productivity, team effectiveness, onboarding, eliminating employee frustration with administration, or wellbeing.
As MeBeBot has worked with our customers, we have seen the use of our AI-driven chatbot, now more of an intelligent assistant, mature from answering commonly asked questions of HR to those of IT and Operations. The usage results of questions asked by employees to MeBeBot can identify new areas of interest or concerns for employees and alert management to any issues or needs by their employees.
Our customers are benefiting from our evolving machine learning and human training of thousands of questions asked by employees daily, from all over the world. We have found that about 80 percent of the questions asked of HR, IT, and Operations are extraordinarily similar. This intelligence can provide you a head start on organizing your questions and answers, and even with updating your policies. By using our knowledge base of pre-configured questions and answers, you do not need to create new content from scratch.
With onboarding new employees over the past year, new questions have arisen and MeBeBot has "learned" and created new questions and answers to address remote and hybrid work. If you are bringing employees back to the office or workplaces, we have developed questions and answers to address employee concerns. MeBeBot is easily installed on Teams or Slack in under one hour and your entire solution can be up and running (after testing) in two to four weeks, providing you a fast time to value and a great financial return.
Are you ready to create an award-winning EX for your employee that goes beyond being an HR project to being a transformational company-wide employee experience?
Contact us to chat for a demonstration on how we can get you started today
