14 minute read
A formula for return on experience
TRACKING THE RETURN ON EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
HR practitioners and employee experience and people analytics experts are pondering the passage from thinking about ROI to a ROX mindset.
Advertisement
BY SUNGULA NKABINDE
The concept of return on investment is widely understood. It’s simply a matter of bang for your buck. However, as HR leaders who need to implement various solutions to improve the employee experience, you may find it is often a complicated endeavour to explain the financial return on expenditure towards something so intangible. A better metric to consider is the Return on Experience (ROX). That is the extent to which improvements in the customer and employee experience will drive profits and revenues.
Measuring this kind of metric is tricky as it requires a fundamental mindset shift, from thinking about products and services to customer experiences; and from company processes and benefits to employee experiences, none of which can be easily measured because there are many inter-linking and interdependent elements .
ROX provides a way to holistically look at all parts of the business that impacts experience, productivity and effectiveness. “But what are those correlations that make a meaningful difference which, when multiplied, provide exponential value,” asks PwC South Africa’s leader for HR Technology and Culture, Barry Vorster. He, together with PwC South Africa People Analytics leader Bernice Wessels, Microsoft SA Business Applications lead, Natassia Katopodis, and PwC senior manager Robert Sutherland, have pulled together their thinking on ‘employee experience’ in an effort to elicit dialogue that results in a widely accepted, community-built, robust technique for measuring the ROX. Natassia says that, with Covid-19 changing the world of work “as we know it, employee experience has become the most important element of managing people, who are now detached from a centralised place of work. We need to hit refresh and transform the employee value chain and rethink assumptions about what was previously viewed as best practise to provide an exceptional employee experience.” “Remote working has gone from something that was a nice-to-have option in companies’ employee value propositions to a reality that every single
Bernice Wessels
organisation has had to adjust to whether they were prepared for it or not,” says Natassia, adding that mandatory remote working has brought with it a new set of challenges with regard to the employee experience. Natassia says it is now more important than ever for companies to be able to have real-time information and updates on how their employees are performing, feeling and engaging with the company. “And to do that, companies need data from across the enterprise including a 360-degree view of the employee to create new and enhanced employee experiences,” she says.
Culture is the key
Barry says the organisational culture speaks to the ability to mobilise emotional and rational forces within an organisation to reinforce new behaviour patterns required to underpin lasting change. The trick is often to uncover the causal and mutually reinforcing loops between the two and to show how shifts in one affect the others.
Employees who are suffering physically, mentally or emotionally, for instance, miss more days of work and are less productive when they are working. Chronic stress, too, could lead to an employee losing an average of 10 days’ productivity a year due to absenteeism and an additional 12 days a year due to presenteeism. These are the touchpoints to look for when evaluating an organisational culture. Says Barry: “It’s about being able to measure either an organisation’s cultural health or just depict the cultural situation as good and bad. This is a delicate area and we would suggest the use of an index or a percentage change from a base index as the unit of measure – effectively benchmarking against yourself. Because you cannot copy a culture. Each organisation should find and leverage its own cultural strength. There is also a link between employee engagement and wellbeing with low engagement often correlating highly with taking more unhealthy days, depression, high blood pressure, and so forth, while employees with high engagement tend to fall sick less often. A new and emerging factor that has started to affect employee experience is substance dependence, as this profoundly affects availability, productivity and engagement.
Show people you care
By having a seamless platform to engage, Natassia says it becomes a lot easier to take action that will enhance the employee experience before a problem arises.
“For example, we can see now that with people working from home, productivity levels have gone through the roof. People are working harder than they have ever done. The downside of that employees are not switching off and there is a much higher risk of burnout and stress-related illness,’ says Natassia, adding that having a dashboard where companies can monitor the activity or employees and run quick pulse surveys to learn about their wellness, can make the process of managing that risk far easier. That is where it becomes important to incorporate tools, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources, which is an HR solution that helps take
better care of your teams. This system offers an array of ways to foster employee connections and empower managers to influence the key drivers of the ROX. Expanding this toolkit, Workplace Analytics, which taps into data from everyday work, identifies collaboration patterns that impact productivity, workforce effectiveness, and employee engagement. Having such a unified view and the toolkit to take action, helps speed transformation.
“Dynamics 365 has AI-driven insights and realtime dashboards that allow managers to monitor performance metrics for overall employee satisfaction scores and benefit from real-time insights based on customisable variables,” says Natassia adding that the platform also makes it possible to gauge how the employee experience is affected by the physical workplace and environment, unbalanced workforce numbers, inefficient processes, and so forth.
Measuring employee experience
Bernice says that an increase in employee experience suggests an increase in productivity that leads to an increase in the effectiveness of processes, innovation and the customer experience, which ultimately leads to an increase in shareholder value. But what is the employee experience exactly? Without simplifying matters, but for the sake of a succinct and practical formula, the PwC teams suggests that Employee Experience = Positive Culture (PC) x People Wellbeing (PW) x Learning Agility (LA), with each element in the equation serving as a multiplier in affecting employee experience This formula, however, only represents a heuristic with which to firstly appraise your organisation and to set an ‘Ex’ baseline. It doesn’t provide a complete answer, but rather attempts to cover the key aspects that require attention should you want to create an organisation that creates an environment and a technique to measure the employee experience. “it would also perhaps be wise to create a healthy culture index for your organisation, based on your cultural traits and aspirations. What is important
Natassia Katopodis
is to triangulate culture and engagement data and supplement quantitative insights with qualitative dialogue,” says Bernice.
Improving employee experience
Rob says that, ultimately, ROX is an amplifier rather than a self-standing approach. At the core of the approach is to find a holistic (as opposed to an individualistic) perspective that has both quantitative and qualitative value. Knowing this as a value, an organisation can pull levers to drive performance, productivity and creativity. A company cannot manage what it does not measure, and measure regularly. It requires that organisations set clear, ambitious targets for all the aforementioned elements of the employee experience and couple that with learning expenditure.
“But you have to monitor your targets regularly. Expenditure on learning is not enough. The environment and space within which to learn are crucial. Multiplying the expenditure on learning by the opportunity to learn on-the-job provides our measurement for organisational learning agility,” he says.
COURAGE & CULTURE SHOCK IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Hellman Worldwide Logistics Chief People Officer for Africa Marlize Kriel shares lessons from a 10-year stint in the Middle East where she navigated a volatile working environment and complex cultural norms.
BY SUNGULA NKABINDE
Hellmann Worldwide Logistics Chief People Officer for Africa, Marlize Kriel meticulously carved out an adventurous and calculated local and international HR career. She spent 10 years in the Middle East and describes it as an experience that changed her entire approach towards people and life in general.
Her journey in that part of the world began with an unexpected call from the United Nations (UN) Headquarters in New York in April 2005, after she was referred by an ex-South African colleague who was working for UNOPS, which is primarily a service provider, technical advisor and overall operations arm for the UN. Its mission is to help people build better lives and help countries to achieve peace and sustainable development. Their services extended to infrastructure rehabilitation, project management, procurement, financial management and human resources.
Marlize was offered a unique opportunity with UNOPS in Afghanistan, which had been left in ruins after the 2001 US and Allied invasion, in retaliation for the Al Qaeda 9/11 attacks on the United States. The culture shock was severe, to say the least, but Marlize describes the local Afghan people as humble, kind and respectful, with a sense of sincere hospitality.
She says: “I was gripped by the unimaginable human resilience of the most vulnerable among us, woman in burqas walking in small groups, tribal segregation and extremism that drew a virtual line through every geography and social engagement, political tension at a constant boiling point, and an overwhelming international military presence visible wherever you go, sincere humility like I have never experienced before, endearing hospitality that left me searching for words.”
Marlize says her HR role was peculiar in that it required substantial emotional resilience, the ability to mitigate risk, think on her feet and make decisions quickly. She had a team of 14 colleagues consisting of a blend of international, regional and local staff to support the general management and administration of the HR function.
The scale and magnitude of the projects were significant and, because the environment was so volatile, every foreign deployment came with a heightened risk component. The vast blend of foreign cultures in the team very quickly proved to be a fertile territory for miscommunication, misinterpretation and conflict.
“I learnt very quickly to calibrate my approach to suit this unique environment and did my best to influence my international colleagues to do the same. The local staff were particularly withdrawn and very reserved. At first, it was very difficult to distinguish whether they were being uncooperative or simply did not understand me.”
Navigating complex cultural barriers
Afghanistan has a history of volatile attempts of occupation, civil wars and brutal rule of the Taliban
and Al-Qaeda. Marlize would often travel to work and back in a convoy led by armoured vehicles. Depending on where she had to travel to, she would occasionally have to wear a bulletproof vest and helmet as part of her work attire.
The local staff would make use of taxis to get to work, and in some instances, the young female colleagues had to be accompanied by a male relative into the compound, and walked to their office to ensure they did not transgress on cultural values.
For instance, sitting in close proximity to any male colleague and engaging in discussions with men on their way to work could get female colleagues into trouble as it is seen as extremely inappropriate, bringing shame to the woman's family name and father.
“This would result in the young lady being forced to stop working immediately, and possibly being punished for her transgression. In some instances, a male relative had to be hired on a small income to oversee the female relative’s conduct during working hours. The most challenging part was by far the complexity of the cultural barriers,” says Marlize, adding how critically important it was to be constantly mindful of cultural protocol, conduct and customs, and to not allow her own ignorance to jeopardise anyone’s well-being.
Saving child brides
A number of women in Marlize’s UN Office were borderline illiterate because young girls were prohibited from getting an education or engaging in formal employment. Under Taliban rule, women were only allowed to work in the family home and were not allowed to leave their homes unaccompanied by a male relative. If they did they were punished.
The most heart-warming experience of Marlize’s entire career came at the end of her two-and-a-halfyear contract when she and the country director of UNOPS negotiated a six-month work contract in Dubai for three Afghan women who had to be hidden in dungeons under their homes so that they wouldn’t be married off as “child brides” to the Taliban. Today they can now work and earn an income as UN contract workers.
“They were denied an education and could hardly read or write but it was arranged that the ladies would stay with an Afghan family in Dubai that was already employed by the UN. They would be transported to work and back by a UN driver as long as they conformed to all cultural and religious practices,” says Marlize.
One of the ladies moved into an HR operations role in Sudan as an assistant HR manager, while another is working for the UN in Canada. All three of them now have successful careers and have taken up further studies.”
After Marlize’s UN HR experience in Afghanistan, she worked for Microsoft Dubai as the HR manager for the Gulf Region on a one-year maternity relief contract. During this time, she was offered an HR management role by ES-KO, an engineering and catering service provider for the UN and NATO in the Middle East and Central Africa. With their HR regional office in Dubai and headquarters in Monaco, Marlize worked for ES-KO until 2014 and during this time completed her master’s degree in Strategic Human Resource Management at Wollongong University in Dubai. Marlize and her family then moved to Thailand for 10 months and finally returned to South Africa in 2015.
A mindful approach to change and people
Throughout her career, Marlize has never taken her role as a people leader lightly. Her motto over the past 20 years has been to ‘add value, make a difference and leave a legacy.’
“HR is all about people. So if you get into it, you have to get involved, change people’s perception of their own limitations, seek fulfilment and personal growth for people, and put them in the driver's seat of their own success,” she says.
In her current role at Hellmann Worldwide Logistics, she has focused on improving engagement because there is so much change happening in every work environment and hers is no different. It is why she is very cautious and mindful of having a rigid approach to HR unless the merit warrants her to do so.
“But, when people start experiencing the signs of change without any engagement, it can create an undercurrent of anxiety and fear of being unemployed, fear to risk and make mistakes and may have an adverse effect on performance,” she says. “That’s why I’m so focused on early engagement, frequent
Marlize Kriel
Work: Marlize joined Hellman Worldwide Logistics in January 2016, almost a year after a 10-year stint in the Middle East where she worked with the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), Microsoft Dubai and ES-KO, an engineering and catering service provider for the UN and NATO in the Middle East and Central Africa. Education: B.Tech Degree, HR Management (University of South Africa), Masters degree Strategic HR Management (University of Wollongong)
communication on anticipated change, total transparency on the impact of the anticipated change, and a clearly defined strategy that leads to change.”
Hellman’s performance improvement plan
Marlize introduced an open platform where managers and employees can iron out discrepancies and performance concerns. Within Hellmann, they call it an – “offline” approach, in the form of a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP), which is an eight-week process of correcting performance discrepancies, changing a work process, or working on skill enhancement. The most valuable parts of this are the people engagement, talking things through, and the impact this approach has on people’s morale. This process ensures weekly “check-ins” and has a structured framework, so “critical matters” are identified and “action points” and timelines agreed.
This is a highly engaging and interactive process between manager and employee. This is not a disciplinary process, but rather a remedial and engagement process. It is well structured, has clearly identifiable action points and a timeline. The frequent engagement and focus on changed behaviours and skills have made this a very successful process at Hellmann.
“We have an increased focus on ownership and accountability that supports the successful outcome of our PIP process," says Marlize.
