By Peter Rowley
Just very recently someone made me aware of a really interesting role: Employee Experience Manager. Sounds great! However, what exactly does it mean? On further examination, it appears that the company is looking for someone who is “focused and fully committed to ensuring the work environment is class-leading....and is always smiling”. Furthermore they are also looking for someone with (amongst other things) “some HR experience, moving offices - facilities related, “budgeting - spend well and wisely” and “happy to roll up their sleeves”. Sounds like they need a politician....or a magician!
Other examples of these roles are much more specific on what they deliver in terms of ‘employee experience’.....such as a Global Leader for Employee Experience, who is accountable to ensure self-service HR tools are easily found and highly accessible whilst delivering high quality and effective results. This person is ultimately responsible for delivering high quality, positive employee experience – globally.
Now, it is all about ‘the experience’– be it the applications we engage with and our UX (user experience) or the stay in a hotel that we rate on TripAdvisor. For Millennials, in particular, everything is about ‘the experience’....even down to tweeting about that highly expensive burger in that hip little eatery (that no-one else except the cognoscenti can find)...... unless you have the magic password. And rightly so too! Now, more than ever, ‘the employee experience‘ is making a serious foray into the lexicon of business (and particularly) HR professionals.
We in Oracle have been investing a lot of time and effort in employee experience. For some time now, we have been hosting Employee Experience Journey Mapping or EXJM sessions, in locations such as London, Paris, Milan, Oslo, Dublin and also at Oracle Open World 2014. OOW normally attracts about 65,000 visitors each year.
No matter where we run EXJM, we always get an inordinate level of energy, enthusiasm and zeal from our participants. Our participants, who are usually Senior HR practitioners, learn to embrace the concept of employee experience really quickly.
What is EXJM? EXJM is simply a methodology we use to enable participants to walk in the shoes of an employee and to map their experience or journey. Central to the methodology is identifying the ‘moment that matters’ or a point-of-no-return in an experience. Ultimately, the session then shifts focus onto employee needs (both functional and emotional) and from there to helping the participants to build a better employee experience, through innovation.
Experience Journey Mapping is not necessarily new - marketing professionals will be very familiar with the concept of CX (customer experience)…..and of course we all know how there is a certain convergence developing between Marketing and HR, driven by the need to build powerful employer branding.
The EXJM workshops enable the participants to journey or walk step-by-step through the employee experience, in the shoes of the employee. Central to the experience for participants is that our EXJM methodology helps them to understand the correlation between employee behaviours and attitudes and ultimately business results. Highlighting these correlations enables them to understand and change the employee experience (where necessary) which in turn drives better behaviours and attitudes and ultimately drives better business outcomes.
In conclusion, whilst I was being a little ‘tongue in cheek’ about ‘the Employee Experience Manager’ when I set out, understanding the power of ‘Employee experience’ is very real. Companies are back to the 'War for Talent' days. Retention of our 'Top Talent' has never been more difficult. The old concepts of the Psychological Contract, such as security of tenure, loyalty, etc have changed, for-ever. The Psychological Contract is now founded on the tables being very much turned with employee experience and employee engagement being central to the value proposition. That is why many companies are now waking up to the concept of employee experience.
As a footnote, our image above, (courtesy of my colleague Emma Mullinger) is an image of one of the completed story-boards we use during our EXJM sessions. During our highly engaging EXJM workshops, we typically have 6-8 participants working each individual story-board, using hundreds of coloured post-it notes to build the experience journey. We caution participants to wear comfortable shoes as they will be on their feet for quite a while but having great fun!
Peter Rowley is a passionate advocate of how HR Technology can utterly transform HR and ultimately your business, through simplifying and automating your complex HR processes. Before joining Oracle in the world of HCM Solution Consulting, Peter worked as a HR professional with Blue-chip global companies, in sectors such as Medical Devices, Professional Services and Investment Management. He worked as a HR practitioner at Managerial and Head of Function levels in both generalist and specialist roles, such as HR Manager and Head of Reward and HRIS. Peter, who is based in Ireland, is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development (FCIPD), a member of ACCA and holds a Masters in Human Resource Management from University of Limerick in Ireland.