Employee Experience : A Lodestar in the War of Talent

Anjana Hariharan, Partner & Delivery Leader – Talent Transformation, IBM, in a conversation with Indranil Chakraborty, assistant editor, Industry Outlook, shares her views on the employee experience domain. During the conversation she also discussed the issues of performance analysis, employee & organization expectations and more.

According to a 2021 Willis Towers Watson global survey, 92% of employers said enhancing employee experience will be an important priority for their organizations over the next three years. In a massively evolving business process, How do you see the employee experience management evolving?

In the post pandemic era, the global work environment has undergone a significant overhaul in terms of how a work is accomplished. As the hybrid work model gains increased propulsion, the need for enhanced employee experience seems imperative. Looking at the employees, they demand a seamless and high quality engagement from their employers. In fact, employee engagement and experience has now evolved into a vital criteria for talent acquisition.

The Organizations are equally motivated and focused in attaining an enriched employee experience. Both in India and beyond, the companies are increasingly investing in concepts like culture management. With a deep understanding of the need to evolve beyond the implementation of softwares for employee experience, they are bringing in change agents, to make sure that the experience for the employees is pretty seamless.

The focus of the leadership is also vastly impacted as we note a great shift from engagement surveys to engagement by designs. Each engagement point is now analyzed in terms of its impact on people process policies, tools, technology, all of which is ultimately encompassed in regards to employee experience.

Performance analysis remains one of the key challenges for Human Resource. Poor implementation of performance analysis leads to unwanted attrition, employee dissatisfaction, and loss of motivation and productivity. How can effective performance analytics be achieved?

With an abundance of data, it is crucial for the HR team to identify the most relevant data that helps to maximize the return on investment. The given data set must be efficient enough to generate a pinpoint diagnosis of the employee performance while also effectively predicting and prescribing the change in an organization. This in turn can help the organization to bring out the best performance from its workforce.

Having said that, in the post pandemic era innovation has been the key driver for performance. Thus, the organization's needs to continually innovate and invest in technology that keeps the measurement systems on par with the changing scenario. Along with performing critical tasks like stitching the performance data together with multiple systems, creating a dashboards that delivers an unified view, it is also essential to opt for a technology that helps to drill down and drill up the facilities by which they can use the performance diagnostics for predictive analytics.It is crucial to invest in technology that not only takes data as a whole, but also allows the organization to continually innovate.

It is essential to understand what employees expect and find a middle ground that enables the HR to balance the organizational and employee needs. How should the HR’s of today proceed to overcome this challenge?

As Gen Z enters the workforce, a massive generation gap in between the employee base is noted. In this regard, keeping organizational and employee needs in sync has been more crucial than ever.

Having said that, the organization must play their part in clearly defining the outcomes that they expect from the employees. Things like job matrix, performance matrix must be set forward to employees in a clear format. This stance will help the employees to understand the criteria based on which they will be judged and allow them to deliver in a better way. Moving ahead, interim checks should be performed by the organizations on a regular basis to constantly keep the employee updated about his performance, while giving room for improvement.

For instances where an organization is proceeding towards massive change, the HR team must conduct an anonymous pulse survey to understand the employee reaction. This will provide the employee with the confidence to open their hearts out. Taking these few measures within the organization keep the employees engaged and give them a sense of ownership, while helping the employees to understand that their success is directly proportional to the organization's success and vice versa.

Organizations tend to choose tools without fully considering employee needs. Wrong technology often makes work even more challenging for the employees, hence it's imperative to find out the right solutions. How should this situation be approached?

Today, there are several technologies available for every conceivable situation, making it crucial for firms to comprehend the strategic goals of what is needed to be accomplished. In time, organizations can collaborate with the third party consultant who can play a significant role in performing the design thinking sessions to generate a clear intent of the tool. Key aspects like suitability in terms of functionality, the ease of use, the intuitive design, security, data, privacy, and more, must be considered before zeroing down to one solution.

In a nutshell, organizations must drill down on the need analysis before a particular tool is considered for an employee's needs. Companies must refrain from buying off-the-shelf tools and analyze a solution on the basis of strategic intent and the financial impact with the requirements clearly understood.

In your opinion which trends will impact employee experience the most in the near future?

Managing employee experience has evolved as important as managing costs and risks for an organization. In this context, there are two aspects that will be visible as we move forward. Firstly, in the coming days employee experience will gain an increased focus from the leadership and from the management in terms of matrix budgets and reviews, which in turn will help to improve the internal process and tools.

Secondly, the demand for centralized platforms that integrate multiple and disparate systems will see a rise. Through the use of these innovative technologies a seamless experience for the employee can be created. With that in mind, the expectation of employee experience is definitely bound to change as well; thereby forcing the organization's to make employee experience as the lodestar in their war of talent.