Today’s diverse employees seek a highly customized, intuitive workplace experience, opening up the need for hyper personalization. While the “Personalization approach” derives insights from data, hyper personalization, on the other hand is about tailoring a holistic experience by customizing a range of employee touchpoints. Hyper personalization has the power to create a highly engaged and empowered workforce by equipping employees with personalized resources and inputs.
Where to hyper personalize the employee experience
With digital natives taking over the workplace, organizations now have data on employee preferences. Millennials are actively expressing their work-needs, and organizations need to tune in, “listen” and make sense of these data-inputs.
Some of the key application areas for hyper personalization are:
- Work environment: Whether it is an employee’s go-to work applications, their preferred time of work, a number of data points can now be inferred using technology. Gathering data throughout an employees’ life cycle can help understand their propensity to be productive. HR professionals can contribute towards building the right mix of open offices versus private-hangouts. Scheduling meetings, brainstorming sessions, and other such activities can be planned throughout an employee’s day to day work, based on their individual work styles. Such micro-level customizations in the work environment and culture can help aid employee retention and better productivity outcomes.
- Recruitment & Onboarding: Sentiment analysis in recruitment tools helps gauge the expectations of future-employees. Keywords used in job-advertisements can be used to attract the right candidate with the desired personality. Hyper personalizing the employee value proposition as per distinct levels, functions and job roles can help build a pipeline of high performing talent. Including hyper-personalization in onboarding will help ensure that each employee is brought to speed personally.
- Learning and Development: Employee development tools are already being personalized to suit varied skill-gaps, learning styles, platform users and so on. L&D must provide a gamut of learning options, such as mobile learning, micro learning, LMS-based programs, gamification, and even Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD), since each person learns differently.
- Rewards and Benefits: The benefits basket is here to stay in an increasingly intuitive format. There are many ways to use demographics and lifestyle data to deliver the relevant rewards buckets.
How to hyper personalize the employee experience?
Organizations will have to upgrade their skill-set as well as mindset to be able to hyper personalize.
- Gather and process data: Data is the foundation of personalization efforts, and having an advanced people analytics software can provide insights to your employees quickly and continuously is the best bet. Data on likes, preferences and demographic and behavioural patterns from multiple sources.
- Use right technology: Building the right technological infrastructure will encourage employees to create more data, and capture relevant information from HR processes. At the same time, performance and LMS data can help hyper personalize. IoT communication devices can be used to capture in-person interactions and create data from formal as well as informal conversations.
- Cultivate a culture of personalization: Hyper personalization is based on individualism, rather than collectivism. It is important to build a culture of “speaking out” and “voicing one’s needs” at work. If employees are afraid of expressing what they truly want, there is no way organizations can hyper personalize the employee experience.
Hyper personalization gives employees a sense that the organization is “listening to them” and is taking into consideration their ‘asks’ as unique people, and not just “work machines”. Hyper personalization is the way ahead to make employees feel valued and empowered and gain a competitive advantage from a highly engaged workforce.