Leading companies have recognized that the foundation for a great customer experience is a great employee experience. During this economic downturn, companies that are prioritizing both the Customer Experience (CX) and the Employee Experience (EX) are taking action to re-design their workplace practices around their people, much like they’ve built relationships with customers.
Traditionally, the Human Resources or People team has been the primary driver of change for EX workforce transformation. With the recent pandemic, the move to remote work (practically overnight) was a catalyst towards collaboration of teams within organizations…with IT, Operations, and management sharing the responsibility of protecting their team members ensuring business continuity during this crisis.
The responsibility for employee experiences falls on everyone at the organization. The executive team (and the CEO specifically) need to act as the champion of employee experience. While HR will continue to take the lead to execute on actionable tactics, the strategies to be implemented across the company require a cross-departmental planning effort. With this shared approach, also comes shared resources and the budgets and funding for new technologies, infrastructure and overall culture.
Here, we’ve outlined three areas on which to focus when making the case for a shared approach toward the employee experience:
Collaborate on shared goals with other internal teams.
The employee experience matters across the entire company, from administrative roles to senior management. As support departments, HR shares a lot of commonalities with IT (and Operations) and technology can be used to resolve some of the same needs: Productivity, communications, databases, and business process automation solutions that support all employees, especially distributed and remote teams.
Related: Digital Transformation: Why Internal Teams Need to Collaborate
Build budgets and spending strategies together in order to share the costs/benefits across organizations.
The cost of new technology for the employee experience doesn’t have to be 100% an HR or IT budget line item. Digital transformation (and the technologies that can facilitate it) have use case that expand beyond human resources and IT and drive productivity and the employee lifecycle.
Related: What is the Cost of Lost Productivity?
Plan for quick wins. One of the most critical milestones for measuring success of any digital transformation project is the rate of adoption within the company. Enabling technology that seamlessly integrates with the “flow of work” or that the workforce is already familiar with (i.e. Slack, Microsoft Teams, your company’s intranet) facilitates and drives toward adoption.
By identifying solutions, like MeBeBot’s Intelligent Assistant that can be implemented in weeks and provide an immediate time to value, you can prove success and celebrate wins along the way. Set both long and short term goals, focus on strategies for company-wide adoption, and metrics for success towards automating communications and answers to employe frequently asked questions.
Putting people at the heart of digital transformation. This requires both human vision and a collective commitment to make change happen, with careful management to ensure that the metrics for success have been established. But it’s not just about managing change. People need real-world knowledge of digitalization and its benefits.
For a complimentary 15 minute meeting, click here to speak to a consultant who can share best practices toward digital transformation of the employee experience.