This blog post is based on the webinar Designing Employee Experiences: How to Operationalize Your EX Strategy, which is available to view on demand now. The event featured the insights of Chris Voce, Customer Engagement Strategist at Citrix; Marc Curtis, Head of Innovation Workforce and Workplace Services at Fujitsu; and Shweta Bandi, Director of HR Technology and Employee Experience at Adobe.

In a recent Citrix survey, 43 percent of employees saw better employee experience (EX) lead to increased productivity, and more than 30 percent said EX led to improved profitability and better customer satisfaction.

Operationalizing EX has always been important, but the global pandemic and the prospect of a hybrid-work future have brought the subject firmly into focus. While culture and technology are key to improving EX, the journey must begin with the individual, and leaders need to build a clear understanding of their employees’ needs.

In this webinar, we explored how organizations can execute and define an EX strategy for the future. Five clear priorities and considerations emerged from our discussion.

Work-life balance, the safety of work, and well-being are top priorities for EX

EX can mean different things to different people, from company culture and our ability to achieve to employee development and recognition and rewards, says Marc Curtis, Head of Innovation Workforce and Workplace Services at Fujitsu. However, work/life balance and work safety have become particularly important, along with investment in technology and tools to support those priorities.

Shweta Bandi, Director of HR Technology and Employee Experience at Adobe, says that over the past year, “the lines have really blurred between workplace and home … and we have entered this world of digital presenteeism, which is creating a lot of anxiety for people.” Furthermore, once offices reopen, it will be important to ensure that the office environment is safe and resilient to the needs of individuals.

Fujitsu is currently looking to harvest employee physiological data, in real time, to track employee well-being and stress levels. It has designed a well-being app that collects data such as heart-rate variability as an indicator of stress. Once rolled out fully, the intention is to analyze all cross-company data in an anonymized way to get a pulse of the organization and well-being statistics across the workforce, Curtis says.

A good EX can encourage individuals to go above and beyond what is expected of them

A positive EX can bring huge value to an organization, including talent recruitment, greater employee retention, increased productivity, and a better customer experience. However, according to Chris Voce, Customer Engagement Strategist at Citrix, the biggest potential area of value is “discretionary effort,” where individuals engage in activities that are beneficial to their organization outside of their normal role. “That’s the holy grail for businesses — employees going above and beyond and unlocking productivity,” Voce says, “and this is also where innovation happens.”

Capabilities such as automation, to remove repetitive, mundane tasks from the workday, will be an important part of enabling this.

A human-centric approach to EX is needed

“Depending on where an employee is on their journey within an organization, the experience that matters to them is going to be different,” Bandi says. In a hybrid world of work, the EX strategy will need to give people the flexibility to do what is best for them individually. “We need design thinking where you are partnering with the employee, making sure the communications and transparency is there, keeping employees front and center and ensuring nothing is a surprise for them,” Bandi says.

It is important that within the operationalizing of EX, we don’t let IT, Facilities, or HR define what an individual needs within a given organization. Instead, businesses must take the time to understand their people and what they need to be successful. The development of a listening strategy can be helpful to achieving this. “We have undertaken massive surveys around what employees are looking for,” Bandi says. “Depending on where the pandemic has been at globally, those results have varied hugely, so context is very important.”

Curtis says that persona and journey mapping can be helpful for establishing a starting point. “Not everyone begins from that same point, and we need to be creating a person-centric experience,” he says. At Fujitsu he has been exploring what the minimum viable experience looks like for each individual, which can then be piloted, refined, and communicated clearly to staff at every stage.

A cross-departmental, collaborative approach is essential

A recent Citrix study identified three key principles in EX development — empowering individual progress; deepening empathy from human insights; and partnerships including fostering links and shared ownership across the organization — and offers guidance on how to infuse those principles in your company’s operating model. “IT, HR, and Real Estate should all be coming together to shape EX,” Voce says.

Curtis agrees and says operational managers and the executive team should also be included, to ensure that there is buy-in from senior leaders. In regard to the role of IT specifically, he says, “The IT department has to move away from infrastructure and look at digital technology and how it impacts the individuals at the coalface.”

Employee feedback and ongoing measurement will be important to EX maturity

Within the journey to achieving an engaged and personalized employee experience, organizations will need to gather feedback along the way to ensure their EX strategy is performing well for everyone. A good starting point can be to simply ask an employee about their experience. “Too often IT flies blind, where we rely on helpdesk ticket data and we miss the silent sufferers who aren’t calling in, logging a problem,” Voce says.

Establishing KPIs upfront is important because there is no linear path to EX, and what matters most will be bespoke to an organization, Bandi says. Workplace analytics can then be used to benchmark and measure progress on those KPIs. Voce also suggests that pulse surveys, or anonymous focus groups, can be a quick way of gauging progress and identifying issues. “It is important to continually gather feedback to shape solutions and show employees you are listening to them and taking action on their words,” he says.

Ultimately, checking in after a solution has been designed is just as important as talking to people at the very beginning. EX goals will continue to evolve and adapt with time, and as we progress to the new hybrid phase of work, there will be many lessons to learn along the way.

The full Designing Employee Experiences: How to Operationalize Your EX Strategy webinar is available on demand, and you can learn how a great employee experience can drive value in an organization.