The "Employee Experience" - What is it exactly and how do you create a positive one?

Over my 16 year HR career, I have helped many HR functions across many industries around the world in Fortune 100 companies. Most of the engagements have essentially revolved around the following areas. Area #1: How do we enable effective and timely self-service to employees and people leaders. Area # 2: How do we enable HR professionals to be a strategic partner to business leaders. Area #3: How do we enable a culture of "XYZ" supported by aligned HR practices to attract, retain, and grow people capabilities in an equitable way. These are three major areas to address and tackling even just one of them at a time is a massive effort especially if the organization is over $1B in revenue and in multiple countries.

In my opinion, the employee experience is defined by all three of these areas carefully orchestrated and designed with the current and future needs of your customers (employees) in mind. Make no mistake - the employees are customers of HR as equally as management. When your employees begin to feel that going to HR for help or with problems is like going to management, then Houston there is a problem!

Here's a practical blueprint for a roadmap that I have created over the years to help HR and talent leaders architect the nebulous domain called the employee experience.

Clearly articulate your goals and the success metrics that will guide you with progress in the journey. For example: What is the employer brand image you want to build with your current and future employees? Do you want to be a company that is known for developing technical skills, or developing business leaders, or known for top trendy perks, or all of the above? Once you determine this, what are the top 3-5 Northstar metrics that you will hang your hat on?

Draw what I call the "Experience Building Blocks"

• Basic Needs of Employees: How easy is it for your employees to get to basic and personalized people services such as payroll, benefits, vacation balances, perks, learning transcripts, productivity tools, etc.
• Insights Packaged For Your Employees: How do you articulate the value that the organization provides to your employees? Personalized insights about their careers from the day they joined your organization. Areas such as time spent on key projects, skills attained, their total rewards trend, their promotion or growth pathways, why they got promoted or why they didn't get promoted at a certain juncture, what developmental areas can the organization help them with, how equitable is their pay and promotion rate, how included are they in key decisions/meetings, etc. All of this articulated in the moments that matter to your employees.
• Communicate with Transparency: Organizational changes are constant in today's world and these are very disruptive so be sure to minimize corporate jargon like "restructuring or re-organization" and be transparent about the "Why" in addition to the "What." Treat your people with trust and truth and they will reciprocate in multiples.
• Insights To Help Management Be Better: How do you listen to your employees and candidates consistently to generate insights for management? Trends (over time) uncovered around how people feel about working for particular leaders, their styles, and what works for your organizational culture that you can replicate and scale. Promote those leaders who instill your values consistently and do away with leaders who struggle with this in spite of appropriate coaching and development.
• Make Your HR Function "For The People, By the People": The surest way to lose trust with your employees is when the HR function is perceived as being closely aligned with management versus the people at large. Listen to people and take that feedback to continuously coach line leaders on what they need to work on and what people need to develop and grow.
• Have A Solid HR Technology & Analytics Backbone: Under constant budget pressures, the HR function needs to leverage more technology to free up capacity and build capability to get closer to the ground and the people and spend more time with line leaders.

When you embark on a journey to focus on the above areas, over time you will be on your way to an organization with exceptional "Employee Experience."