Employee experience- Don’t let COVID dampen your efforts or push it to back of beyond.

As the pandemic rages on, every organisation is figuring out, coming to grips, and adapting to everything that requires an urgent reset in thinking and approach. Financial services are grappling with increased volumes for processing govt backed loans, navigating through completely unchartered territory of managing credit risk, fraud, in a highly distressed world. Consumer goods, manufacturing firms, pharmaceuticals have to contend with supply chains in disarray, unpredictable customer demand. Every industry has enough on its plate. And then the overarching uncertainty around the ability of the workforce to continue to be productive and to be able to simply turn up.

Yet there are some stand out organisations who have put employee experience on the same footing as customer experience. This could be on account of the nature of their industry viz. knowledge-based, high touch, premium placed on every bit of the employee's time being well utilised servicing high-value clients, and so on. Notwithstanding this as you normalise, there is the undeniable value of ensuring your workforce is not frittering away time figuring out internal systems be it IT service requests, procurement, training, HR, expenses, knowledge searches, finance and more. Deloitte research on this topic calls this out. “The average number of systems workers must access as part of their day-to-day jobs has recently risen from eight to 11 and 27 percent of surveyed workers estimate they lose up to an entire day every week on irrelevant emails and messages.”

 Now what got me to pen this down was the exceptional lens that one of Genpact's financial services clients took as they laid down a high bar and called out employee experience as the top priority as they engaged Genpact to transform their corporate functions including HR. The transformation pivot was 100% oriented towards employee experience, aimed at creating what was broadly referred to as a platinum experience creating a unified front window experience for employees for all their requirements. Technology is not in short supply be it HR systems at the back end, collaboration and service orchestration tools, workflows for the virtual world, automation toolsets, or leverage of cognitive technologies. However, the starting point for the transformative effort is about designing the employee journey founded on deep research, built upon key personas and process science. Everything that many organisations and experience design firms undertake for customers with focus and passion ought to be brought in for employee lens. This organisation and design principle will then inform the design of processes and the right choices underpinning the use of technology to deliver the experience that workers could so benefit from and so deserve.

Back in 2018, a KPMG study found that only 25% of HR leaders and CEOs put EX as the top of the agenda for the coming year. If COVID and the duress in the current environment, pushes the employee experience transformative efforts to the back of the queue, it would be very unfortunate. Just as many leading organisations are doubling down their efforts on digital-led transformation recognising that to be non-negotiable for customer satisfaction, it is equally crucial for organisations to have the workforce experience as a key board room agenda. Employees have had to contend with so much in recent times and every organisation has seen heroic efforts from their teams. Many employees especially in service industries will have to contend with remote working for good measure and will have to adapt to such modes. Organisation must not lose productivity and can keep morale high via offering them the path of least friction in many of the day to day mundane administrative tasks whilst ensuring that they do the best for customers. It will be fascinating to hear of examples of what other organisations are doing to drive employee experience, be it smart and small or bold and big