Designing a better employee experience

Is your thriving organisation really involving and empowering people to do their best work? We think it’s timely to share some fresh insight from Deloitte’s new 2019 Global Human Capital Trends report. 84% of respondents surveyed said they were concerned about their people having a great work experience.

The idea of a positive and motivating employee experience evolved via design thinking, out of customer experience. We know it’s important: research shows that enterprises with a top-quartile employee experience achieve twice the innovation, double customer satisfaction, and 25 percent higher profits than organisations with a bottom-quartile employee experience.

Traditionally employers have focused their efforts on boosting employee engagement, better work life balance, perks and rewards. But people are still struggling at work, dealing with stress, burnout, and the challenges of being hyper-connected.

Are you ready for a new iteration of employee experience? Today people are looking for a career, purpose, and meaning from their work. They are seeking a social experience built around culture and relationships with others. Mainly, it's the meaning and growth people find in the work itself—and to improve that, the entire organisation has to be involved”.

Organisations now have the opportunity to reframe and elevate the employee experience to include the human experience”. So it comes from, and is focused on the individual, from the bottom up. When people ask ’does my work have meaning?’, they connect directly to the aspirations of others involved, and deliver a better result for all. It’s time to go from ground level up, to put the human into HR, and into business itself.

Tips to boost your people’s best employee experience

• Design thinking
  Design thinking takes aim at the heart of unnecessary workplace complexity by putting the employee experience first.” Smart organisations are using it to instill a culture of growth, improvement and to go beyond the expected to ensure workers have a great human experience with the company. Regular real-time surveys inform leaders from the ground up.
  
  
• Get the basics right
  Get the little moments that matter at work right, and flatten possible issues immediately. Operational roadblocks can have a vastly negative impact on a person’s attitude and performance. Well-functioning everyday practices and processes, clear communication, authentic diversity and inclusion, transparency, up-to-date technologies and tools, and appealing physical working environment are all the small things that enhance peoples’ daily employee experiences.

• Involve the entire organisation
  Co-create solutions together with employees and leaders - you simply can’t improve employee experience without the people who do the work being involved. The most effective employee experience is both bottom-up and personal. 

The human experience is good business. It’s more than an HR issue; it is an essential business priority for every part of an organisation large or small. HR’s involvement needs to extend across leadership, IT and finance to ensure growth and productivity, using new technologies, simplification of work and processes. When the whole organisation collaborates, to empower people to do their best work, nobody gets left behind.