Try to think of an organization that isn’t focused on charting a path to bring employees back to offices. Or determining the balance of where and how employees work as part of a hybrid-work model. It’s nearly impossible.
All of us have had to react, adjust, and cope with turbulence and loss in our personal and professional lives that’s happening just outside the frame of webcams and below the threshold of microphones. I’ve experienced the joys of taking a quick break to join my kids for some fun in an inflatable pool or a story, and the harder moments like comforting them when they’re sad about not seeing family and friends and greater losses in our family.
But in the face of adversity, there’s inspiration. I’m continually awestruck by the prodigious amount of innovation and advice continually streaming in from LinkedIn, Twitter, business publications, news articles, and an even greater set of diverse sources on how to adapt and make positive changes inside and outside of work. In the professional world, faced with an environment and conditions we haven’t seen before, leaders from HR, IT, Real Estate, and their line-of-business peers around the globe have turned the eyes towards the future, are pushing past old boundaries, and pioneering new ways to answer a question: “What does it mean to go to work?”
Those that are seeing the greatest success have turned to employee experience (EX). Even prior to the pandemic, the benefits of a strong EX reduced employee turnover and improved customer experiences were apparent. Now it’s a ubiquitous “must” — weaving EX into the way your company operates offers a way to unlock potential within your workforce and paves a clear path towards a more effective hybrid-work strategy. Not giving EX special attention right now can set an organization back, perhaps permanently.
In my work with our customer as part of Citrix’s Strategic Advisory team, I regularly see the need of leadership teams for more actionable guidance on how to move the EX needle. In 2020, Citrix set out on a mission to surface, collect, and honor the wisdom of leading minds nurturing EX to make that journey toward hybrid work a successful one and share it with you. Through a quantitative study with nearly 800 IT, HR, and corporate Real Estate leaders, we’ve gathered insights to understand the behaviors and activities of organizations that are advanced in how they approach EX. We interviewed a diverse group of leaders and practitioners in IT, HR, and Real Estate driving revolutionary changes in EX today to delve deeper into their strategies.
From the insights we gathered, we identified three guiding principles for creating a thriving employee experience. We saw the greatest success in organizations guided by these three principles:
- Empower individual progress
- Deepen empathy from human insights
- Partner to foster linked and shared EX ownership
An operating model defines how your organization delivers value and how it is run. Following these three principles gives rise to a clear set of actions you can take an incorporate into your operating model.
Citrix has just launched a digital experience, which includes a full report — Thrive With Employee Experience — that will help leadership teams develop a deeper understanding of EX, offering clear tactics to help you operationalize it within your organization, and create an effective flexible remote work strategy. In the report, available free to download, you’ll find out about dynamics like employee well-being, and insights on how to infuse EX into culture, services, technology, governance, and more.
As organizations across the globe reckon with the pandemic, depending on where you live, this journey might be further along. No matter where you are, we hope that it helps you in your journey and look forward to being a partner along the way.
