7 lessons in employee experience design from leading practitioners
A great employee experience is not a fluke nor does it happen naturally – you must design it. What can we learn from top professionals currently working with employee experience design? We hear from Luuk Sombezki (ABN AMRO), Odette Wagemans (KLM), Sonja Slotboom (FrieslandCampina), Marieke Zuidema (Vodafone Ziggo) and Sandra Mertens (KBC Group). These are their seven key lessons.
What does employee experience design entail exactly?
Employee experience design is the art of designing a work experience that results in happy employees. Drawing on techniques from marketing, product & user design, and psychology, it allows you to creatively devise innovative solutions for (complex) problems. The basic principle is: people are central. Moreover, end users and stakeholders are actively involved in designing or improving the products and services.
1.Start employee experience design where the need is greatest
Where do you start when working with employee experience design for your organisation? “Just start,” says Luuk Sombezki, “you learn the most from experience and continuously adjusting your approach. More than one road leads to Rome. We started with a huge research. We got so many insights from this approach that we’ve been working from them for the past several years. Looking back, we wouldn’t be so quick to do that now, however. It’s better to start with one initiative, which you learn from and then scale up.”
Odette Wagemans: “We were motivated by the fact that employee experience lagged behind the customer experience. It had to be easier, more digitized and personalised, and based more on need. We started with the employee journey in 2016, having previously mapped the customer experience. And we started with what our employees wanted most, which turned out to be a single digital portal where they could find answers to their questions, but which was wider in scope than the HR portal. We used the most commonly searched for terms, because they told us which questions our employees couldn’t find answers to.”
Start from a problem, not from an assignment
“Start working from a problem, not from an assignment to design a new system,” says Marieke Zuidema. “We were tasked with developing a new Performance Management System, but what problem could we solve with it? We conducted a series of interviews, from which we discovered what our employees really wanted, including accelerating their careers and career paths and making it easier to draft settlement agreements. Consequently, we put personal development first. Performance management is now forward-looking.”
“We began by setting up the employee journey for FrieslandCampina,” Sonja Slotboom recalls. “We then asked employees to identify the major pain points in their journeys, the points where they wanted change. We don’t follow the employee journey chronologically; instead, we look at the points where the experience is lacking and impact high. Consequently, last year we not only worked on setting up a global onboarding program, but also a global recognition toolkit and global offboarding program.”
A digital butler for employees
Sandra Mertens: “We started with a digital butler for KBC Group employees. First, a basic app that we’ll develop further. This is what the employees needed most. Now, after four years, we still use some of the data and information about employee needs that we’d collected at the start. We’ve also created a desktop version, which we’ll continue developing. Innovation happens in small steps.”
2. Establish your decision-making process and mandate
“Employee experience design means you work from the employees’ perspectives,” Zuidema says. “You work from co-creation; the employees and managers are involved in developing new products or solutions. The target group involved becomes responsible for the decision-making. Consequently, the leadership team is no longer responsible for the resulting product. This approach can however clash with traditional hierarchical decision-making, so your MT must also be open to co-creation.”
Slotboom: “The journey teams work in an agile manner. During a sprint the journey teams’ mandate is to make decisions for themselves, that seem right to them, so as to deliver the deliverables at sprint’s end. We always conclude a sprint with a review, to which we invite the organisation’s employees. We’ve had reviews where a hundred people participated! During reviews we ask for feedback, so that we can make the end product even better and ensure it meets the employees’ needs.”
Wagemans: “We use storytelling to convince people. We’ve shown videos in which the customer speaks, and that really made an impression. Crucially, you must dare to request an agile budget, because you never know what exactly will transpire nor how much it’ll cost.”
3.Research the employee journey
“It’s vital to conduct good research at the start,” Sombezki stresses. “Resist the temptation to devise solutions based on assumptions and interpretations. You’ll see that adoption and positive feedback can be omitted. You must really delve deeply before starting to think of solutions.”
Wagemans: “Never forget the baseline assessment and eNPS measurement. Your work must always be data-driven.” Mertens: “Continue questioning employees via interviews, polls and pilot groups. And keep checking and adjusting.”
Slotboom: “We’ve currently developed surveys for the six parts of the employee journey, which we send to employees, including to applicants during onboarding or newcomers. We select a random group for other surveys.”
4. Organise your personnel
“We once had a group of redundant colleagues at KBC who enthusiastically started with employee experience design,” Mertens says. “If a dedicated team is working on it, it’s crucial that everyone involved has a stake in the importance and working methods. They must also have the same mindset, knowledge and skills.”
Slotboom: “Each quarter 10 to 12 employees from various HR disciplines are allowed to participate in the journey team for two days per week. This approach ensures that widespread support exists within the organisation for agile working and for thinking from the employee’s perspective. Consequently, everyone is involved and shares the same mindset.”
5. Involve the right target groups in the employee experience design
“When starting, always involve the employees or customers, otherwise you cannot validate when conducting research and developing solutions,” Sombezki says. “And when you have an idea, promptly check whether it fits the target group. Don’t elaborate too much initially, but validate as soon as possible with your ‘shitty first draft’.”
“During the development process we really had to keep monitoring the employee perspective,” Mertens recalls. “We needed someone on the team to keep a sharp eye on this and test each step and every idea accordingly, so as to prevent team members from acting in their own interests and from their own perspectives.”
Zuidema: “To gain support and insights we involved many people – a hundred at least. Workshops, sounding board groups, prototype reviews involving representatives of all kinds of groups…everyone was happy to participate. But it does take time. We’re still striving to find a balance between wanting to involve everyone and delivering effective results. We now take a simpler approach to the candidate journey, in smaller groups. That said, had we opted for a steering committee and the old way of working on projects, we’d never have had such good outcomes.”
Wagemans: “You really must keep an overview. If different teams get to work enthusiastically, you’ll end up with ten more apps. You must control this. You must be able to say ‘no’ and be consistent and avoid working independent of one another.”
6. Work agile and with personas
“We started by formulating our design principles,” Zuidema explains, “and this is important, as it allows you to reflect on all the choices you must make later on. We then used employee experience design to map the various steps in the Performance Management sub-journey, with the organisation still involved. We work with personas, and elaborate in an agile way.”
Wagemans: “We work from the KLM compass: 16 ’tiles’ representing what we stand for, including, ‘I make contact and connect’, ‘I feel supported ‘, ‘I feel encouraged’ and ‘I’m open to change’. This keeps us aligned. We also work agile with design sprints, which serves us well.”
Slotboom: “Because we want more speed and focus in the (HR) organisation, we manage in an agile way of working. Since the coronavirus hit, we now also do employee experience design digitally, which has the advantage of making it easier for international colleagues to participate.”
7. Devote attention to quality assurance and keep adjusting
“Quality assurance does not happen automatically,” Slotboom states. “It requires good coordination among all HR departments. We of course look at how we can automate wherever possible; for example, when implementing the recognition toolkit, we first ensured that a manager was sent various standard messages, like when someone has a birthday. This email also includes a link to the toolkit. Quality assurance remains a focal point, however.”
Mertens: “We search for digital solutions, also for the efficiency, but of course with a ‘human’ side. We need to find more ways for employees to feel rewarded and valued if they use the facilities. You can also pat someone on the back digitally. We remove any unused functionalities, otherwise there’ll be too many.”
Wagemans: “You must also dare to fail, pull the plug on time if something’s not working. Kill your darlings.”
This article was previously posted on XpertHR
