5 Best Practices for Achieving Success on Employee Experience

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Image: Ivan Chiosea - Alamy Stock Photo

As I wrote in my previous WorkSpace Connect post, optimizing employee experience will be a top workplace trend to watch this year––as it was last year. But getting started and/or ensuring success takes more than a little effort, given factors such as technical complexity and cultural hurdles.

To help reduce the friction as you initiate decision making around employee experience technology or begin implementing a platform of choice, here are five guidelines to keep in mind:

Seek cross-discipline perspective. Depending on the initial use case and scope, a top-level executive in HR, IT, or operations, if not the CEO directly, will likely be leading the employee experience charge. Regardless of who signs the contract, you can best make the decision with input from all of these disciplines, with line-of-business insight, guidance from an analytics expert, and oversight from legal and security professionals. Employee experience platforms are multifaceted and can be technically complex, particularly when they take advantage of integrations with other corporate systems and handle heavy-duty analytics. Do not make an employee experience platform decision in a vacuum.
Fully articulate data privacy policies. Get ahead of employee suspicion, reticence, and fear by clearly explaining the data sources in use in addition to what information these applications deliver for an employee’s own use and at a team, departmental, and organizational level. What data is private to an employee? Which data can a team leader or manager view in aggregate, for spotting trends? Which pieces of the platform use which type of information? Does productivity data feed into a performance management tool, for example? These platforms are only as valuable as employees’ willingness to embrace their use, after all.
Get influencers involved. Adopting the use of employee experience platforms often comes with the mission of cultural change or, in these days of working from home, re-establishing a sense of corporate culture. Identifying influential employees across teams or departments or with even broader recognition and then having those individuals share how they’re improving their own experiences using their data will go a long way in encouraging use among others. The same is to be said at the management level.
Integrate well-being as much as possible. Most employee experience platforms aim to improve an employee’s well-being, even if that isn’t a primary purpose. Be sure to investigate well-being options and incorporate them in your employee experience initiative. And be overt. If collaboration data shows that employees tend to spend their Fridays in back-to-back meetings, don’t just suggest that this isn’t a great practice. Rather, via corporate-defined and enforced policy, mandate that employees host no internal meetings on Friday. Instead, specify that they spend the time catching up on or heads-down in uninterrupted productive work.
Determine your success metrics, and measure regularly. Better engagement, improved performance, less burnout — the goals of optimizing employee experience will vary by company. But no matter what the aim, be sure to identify your metrics; gather and analyze data; and then act based on what you’ve learned. Do this at a frequency that works best for your company, but monthly or quarterly should be more helpful than annually for continuous refinement and improvement.

I’m encouraged to see increasing corporate interest in employee experience initiatives; Microsoft, for example, just reported that more than 1,000 customers licensed its Viva employee experience platform since it became generally available in November 2021. Hopefully, these guidelines will ensure these platforms deliver as promised.