“If the 1990s and 2000s were focused on refining business process reengineering and building efficiency, the current decade has been focused on the experience economy – where competitive advantage will come from experience transformations that companies can make for customers and employees,” Lauren Huntington from Qualtrics said, on the second day of the People Matters TechHR India 2021.

Six areas of competency

Speaking about a new age of employee experience and on how to build and mature EX programs, Lauren noted that there are six areas of competency to look at.

“The first is around leadership and having a clear guiding style when it comes to what is your approach to employee experience. The next component is about realizing, and so this is where we want to be able to track our efforts, and be able to define our return on investment.

The third component is around activating. So this is where we're ensuring that the organization has the appropriate skill, support and motivation to achieve the desired extreme results. The next component is around responding and being able to prioritize and drive improvements based on this insight.

Once you have the strategy, the tools and you've activated your network on experience, it's time to focus on being able to enlighten your organization, essentially providing actionable insights across the organization.

And then the final component, after having competencies bedded down, we can really look to disrupt. So how do we identify and create experiences that really differentiate the organization?

Use cases across the business lifecycle

Holistic employee experiences account for various levels - the individual level, organizational level, workforce level and a transition level. At the foundational level, companies need to identify and improve experience drives to boost productivity, retention, innovation and customer satisfaction and they need to do this by regular pulse surveys and employee engagement census.

Individual experience may include things like leadership development, sentiments around pay and benefits, experiences of training and development and wellbeing. Organizations need to have the right signals in place to ensure there is less absenteeism and burnout risk.

At the organizational level, understanding how culture plays an integral part of the employee’s work life is necessary. And understanding whether or not employees are aligned with the strategic direction or a set of values and how diversity, equity and inclusion mandate plays out. Whether or not employees feel that they have a sense of belonging and finally on team and manager effectiveness – is there support when things go wrong? Is the technology stack aligned to the role you need to execute?

While workplace experience management covers the holistic technology assessment, there’s also a need to improve internal service SLAs by improving traditional IT and services support experience, and improve employee safety and ensure business continuity.

The fourth kind of use case is transition experience management which covers candidate experience, onboarding experience, moments that matter – that help differentiate the EVP and exit insights.

Speaking about the mix of listening tools to boost experience, Lauren highlighted a number of ways of capturing data that include a combination of traditional measures to regular, structured and event based tools. From always on feedback, ad hoc surveys, pulse surveys, employee lifecycle surveys, multi-rater assessments and census engagement surveys. And companies need to ensure that they’re investigating, initiating, mobilizing, scaling and embedding across the experience maturity model.