Summary
Josh Bersin explains why employee experience has become a critical business issue rather than an HR initiative. As routine work is automated, he argues that organisational performance increasingly depends on how people feel, how well they are supported and whether they trust their employer.
Drawing on large-scale research, Bersin highlights the key drivers of employee experience, including trust, fairness, belonging, growth, appreciation and strong team relationships. He also explains the importance of simple, integrated technology and continuous employee listening. The interview concludes that employee experience must be owned cross-functionally, developed iteratively, and treated as an ongoing productivity and performance strategy.
11-minute watch
No one single action will move you magically to a great employee experience (EX) says Josh Bersin, global HR analyst and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company. So what do organisations with superior EX have in common?
In his latest research in conjunction with Microsoft he looked at some 80 EX practices to figure out what is driving the most results in three business outcomes: financial return, which is profitability; human capital metrics like retention, engagement and Glassdoor ratings; and then growth and innovation, how creative and innovative your company is. And what he finds is that different aspects of the employee experience contribute to different outcomes.
In this video Bersin discusses the top six practices that are driving superior employee experience in organisations and enabling leaders to build better and better EX solutions in different parts of the company.
About Josh Bersin
Josh Bersin is an analyst and thought leader specialising in the global talent market and the challenges and trends affecting business workforces around the world.
Transcript
Why employee experience became critical
Employee experience is a relatively new word that really encompasses a lot of history from many, many directions on how to manage people and improve engagement and retention and performance.
And so back around 2016 an HR guy came up with this idea: well, maybe we should treat the employees the way we treat our customers. Maybe we should study them and monitor their activities in each role and job they're in and design experiences or interventions of different kinds to make them more productive and healthy and engaged and happy.
And that became this market of tools and systems and methodologies and approaches to designing better experiences for employees. And of course the pandemic was a great accelerant of this because we all have been designing virtual workplaces and remote work policies and hybrid work policies and that's part of the employee experience too.
The other idea that's come out of EX is co-designing solutions with the business rather than the HR department sitting around and coming up with a new performance management model and then rolling it out and telling everybody here's how you do it. You iterably design these things with business units which is part of this whole trend towards more agile HR. So it's a very, very big topic.
Why employee experience is a CEO issue
So the question is why is EX a CEO or CFO level issue? And so let me take that on. I think if you go back to the early days of this topic, we did engagement surveys because we were mostly interested in retention and maybe employment brand and how hard it was to hire people.
But what's been happening for the last 15 years - much, much accelerated this last two years - is automation and elimination of more and more routine work. So roughly 90% of the jobs in companies are service human value-add jobs, even designers and software engineers and of course, retail workers and nurses and managers and project managers and salespeople.
I mean their productivity and performance is entirely dependent on how they feel and how trained they are and what kinds of tools they have. And so if the employee experience is poor, you don't really have a company. You don't have a very high performing company. Customers will see it. Customers will not want to buy from you because employees are not responsive to their needs.
Employees will be unhappy, you'll have high turnover, it will be hard to hire people, your business productivity will be poor, etc. So this idea that the employees may be one of, if not the most, important stakeholder that the CEO needs to care about is becoming very, very common.
And so they're leaning on the CHRO and the HR and the IT team and saying, hey, you guys better come up with some better stuff over here because we're losing people or we have low performance in this group and so there some very sophisticated things going on.
It's no longer a sideline little group in HR doing engagement surveys just to see how good we are. This is a very significant business issue in virtually every company that I talk to.
What actually drives employee experience
Because the topic is so complex, we did a very, very big study of it and we surveyed and interviewed more than a thousand companies. And we looked at 80 or 90 practices to figure out what seemed to be driving the most results and there were a couple of pretty interesting findings.
We looked at three business outcomes: financial return, which is profitability; human capital metrics like retention, engagement and Glassdoor ratings; and then growth and innovation, how creative and innovative is your company. And what you find is different aspects of the employee experience contribute to different outcomes.
So the basic findings are, first of all, that the biggest contributor to all of those things is trust, belonging and fairness. Regardless of how difficult the job is or complicated the IT systems are, if there isn't a sense of trust and fairness and equity and purpose in the company then the numbers are low.
And you see that all the time - employees might go to work for company A because they got a big raise and then after a while they're like I don't really like it here. And especially now people are worried about global climate change and DEI issues and income inequality, and so forth. So they really want their employer to be a trusted brand. Their brand is now on their resume so they want to be proud of the fact that they're working with this company. So there's that.
The second category of issues that comes up very, very strong has to do with the job and the developmental experiences in the job. In the job itself people want to feel like they're part of a team that cares about them.
So this idea of psychological safety, fit with the team and knowing the team well is a huge driver of EX because as you know in a big company there can be all sorts of dysfunctional things going on in other parts of the company but if your team is operating well you're shielded from a lot of it.
The second thing is growth. Growth, development, opportunity, internal skilling in the job you're in, are enormous drivers of employee engagement or employee experience because there are no perfect people and everybody is always learning and things are always changing. And if you feel that the company is not communicating to you and giving you opportunities to develop yourself, then you tend to underperform and you tend to be frustrated.
The third area that comes up high is appreciation. Not money. Money's important. Money is more of a hygiene factor, but do people appreciate what we do? Do we actually thank each other? Do we help each other? Do we work together? So these are very cultural things. I know a lot of EX leaders are working on technology, learning journeys and so forth. That's all good too, but some of these sort of cultural things are more important.
The role of technology and listening in EX
Now in the area of technology there are two things that come up very high. Number one is simplicity. People don't have time, nor are they interested in poking around and going through a three week long course on how to use the HR system. They're not going to do it. And they'll never learn it. So it has to be easy. And that means the systems or tools have to work in the flow of work. They need to be manifest into Microsoft Teams or Slack or Salesforce or wherever people are working and you need to build portals or EX tools on top that protect the users from the complexity of the back-end systems - and the back-end systems vendors will never build perfect systems, they're working on very complex technologies and transactional things. So that's number one.
The second thing that comes up in technology is listening. Of all of the things in the EX domain, and there's case management and knowledge management and all these other things you can do, the one that scores the highest in our methodology is getting data from the employees and hearing the data and using it to make changes. Surveys, open discussions, crowdsourcing, feedback forms, that's really important because in most companies there's constant change and trending issues that you want to know about. And you want to get that data in front of the service delivery team or the management as fast as possible. So natural language processing and other things can be used to get that data.So those are sort of the five big ones.
How to build employee experience that scales
The other thing I would say is having a cross-functional team. If an HR person is given the responsibility for EX they're really going to have to do it with one hand tied behind their back because EX is not all about HR, it's also about IT, it's also about finance, it's also legal and other things. So it needs to be an initiative that's managed at a slightly higher level so that the issues that come up can be managed as a group team. And then you work on it iteratively. You go after one problem at a time and as you focus on those problems and explore them, you understand how to build better and better EX solutions in different parts of the company.
There's a couple of things that are kind of gotchas here that I want to point out that I think people should at least think about.
The first is this is not a one-stop-shop, do it and you're done problem. The employee experience problem is a never-ending opportunity to add value because as the company evolves and the products and services evolve, the role of every job changes and you're going to get smarter and smarter and smarter about how to make any particular good business function better. So this is an iterative, continuous, new domain of effort inside the company and it will start to look more and more like a productivity initiative over time.
We can sit around in HR and we can design something that's great. We can design an onboarding programme, a new management programme, a DEI programme, some kind of programme to allow people to do their transactional work on their phones and so forth. But what happens when there's a problem?
Where do they go for help? You're going to run into the issue of your service delivery organisation very fast. Now, it would be nice if everything was just self service and it all worked, but that never quite happens. So the other part of EX is there's a whole operations part behind it. And many of the EX leaders are people who run HR service delivery or HR ops, because they're trying to figure out how to organise the call centres or the service centres around the types of issues people face.
Three ways to start improving employee experience
I think if you want to get started, number one pick a problem that everybody knows, or you can get consensus on is worth solving. Number two, co-design the solution with the business in an iterative way so that it comes to market quickly and immediately starts showing value. And, number three, develop a sense of scale. So you have service delivery and tools and systems that start to make this easier. And then you can go from problem to problem to problem, and you can build a whole EX strategy.
About the author
