9 tips for starting with employee experience

Employee experience (EX) has risen to become one of the top 3 HR priorities according to research among HR professionals. What advice is there for organizations looking to start or accelerate in this area? EX expert Inez Abels provides tips.

“Employee experience (EX) is truly the future of HR,” says Abels. And in light of the many strategic and complex challenges HR faces, this statement seems increasingly relevant. From the impact of AI on work to the importance of diversity & inclusion and the shift to skill-based hiring and working: HR is expected to play an advisory and initiating role. “EX helps to move from reactive to proactive,” continues Abels. “To participate in the right conversations.” But how do you take those first steps?

1. Educate yourself on what employee experience entail

“Deepen your understanding of EX, know what you’re talking about,” says Abels. She herself has 20 years of experience in this field. Until January 1, 2024, she was an EX expert at NN Group. Since then, she has been an independent EX consultant and interim project manager. “I notice that jargon and approaches are often unknown or incorrectly used. Some stakeholders think that EX is mainly about mapping the employee journey. That is just one of the tools, nothing more and nothing less. EX is not simply handing out ice cream or setting up a ping pong table. That’s why I recommend starting by reading books or articles about EX and taking a related course. Personally, I enjoy listening to podcasts about EX and strategic HR.”

2. Just start (and no, it’s not expensive)

“I believe that every organization can start working on EX. It’s mainly a matter of getting started. EX is often perceived as grand and expensive, but that’s not the case. Look for guidance at the beginning.If there is an internal customer experience team, ask them to be a sparring partner. After all, they master the method. I’m not in favor of assigning EX entirely to customer experience experts. Substantive HR knowledge, combined with other substantive expertise, is really important. However, I do think you can make very good use of the expertise from a customer experience team, but it goes hand in hand for me.”

3. Collaborate with other departments

“EX is not just an HR theme, but encompasses everything an employee experiences at work. This leads to an organization-wide approach to themes such as hybrid working and vitality. These topics can be addressed jointly with EX specialists from HR, facility management, communication, and IT. Working from different perspectives is valuable. EX is unifying and bridges between disciplines. It takes you out of your silo, so you develop a broader and more integrated perspective. Implement the solutions in an agile manner. EX and agile working really go together.”

4. Test ideas quickly

“HR is used to large programs and lengthy processes. Therefore, make use of EX design. This means quickly testing initial ideas, learning from them, and improving. Or stopping quickly if it doesn’t work, and that’s okay, it’s not a dismal failure. This method specifically requires daring to make mistakes and learning from them. This is often skipped now. To do so requires a different mindset but saves a lot of time and money.”

5. Use design thinking

“Implementing EX in practice works best with a clear division of roles. The ideal situation is a small, dedicated internal development team that prioritizes according to the design thinking method. Design thinking is the method that collects needs and translates them into a solution or improvement.” Abels has taken a design thinking training and is a certified trainer. “I can recommend it to every HR professional, and especially to starting EX teams: train yourself in design thinking. I truly believe in this method.” “At NN, I was able to put design thinking into practice, resulting in the first successes. This sparked interest within the HR team to further explore. I was asked to innovate other parts of the employee journey using the same method. So I worked on HR themes such as preboarding, onboarding, learning & development, the use of interns and newcomers, performance management, and offboarding for over 4 years.”

6. Expand the development team with experts

Back to the small dedicated internal development team that works best with a clear division of roles. What is the next step after that? “That development team is temporarily supplemented per project with subject matter experts and employees from departments necessary to implement the solution. This development team tests the innovation, confirms the hypotheses, and then delivers a tested solution – the so-called Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – to the owner, for example, an HR specialist who has the HR theme in their portfolio. This person is then responsible for scaling, implementing, maintaining, and periodically measuring. This person can then knock on the door of the development team again if innovation is needed.This division of roles is essential because it builds up real knowledge and expertise within a small group, and the transfer is necessary because it then frees up the development team’s hands for new projects and research.”

7. It’s never finished – you keep testing and measuring

“EX is a long-term journey and is never finished. You continue to innovate, test, measure, and improve. It’s taking small steps. I’ve learned to appreciate the small steps and the small successes for myself and to pay attention to them within a development team. Small successes can have a big impact.”

8. You must genuinely want it

“EX now has a high priority on the HR agenda. But if you start working on it because you ‘have to’, it won’t be successful. EX starts with genuinely wanting to: wanting to be an organization where employees enjoy coming to work and want to continue working. It means putting empathy into practice: wanting to listen to employees and letting their needs be leading. It has consequences for the organization, the role of managers, HR, and other support departments. If it’s just a ‘must’, those consequences won’t be accepted.”

9. Listen to your employees

“Organizations will therefore have to systematically listen better and in different ways to employees. Sending out a survey once a year isn’t enough. EX requires a listening strategy. This means asking employees more questions and listening in different ways. Research can also be done with data analysis, focus groups, conducting interviews, shadowing, and observing. wet employees themselves indicate which internal themes they want to discuss. Employees don’t quickly get tired of surveys, but they do if no insight is given into what’s done with the answers. Good feedback is essential.”

Inez Abels was an employee experience (EX) expert at NN Group until January 1, 2024, and is now a partner at HXWork, working as an EX consultant and interim project manager. She has 20 years of experience in EX, HR project management, and recruitment, and is a certified design thinking