Ignoring Employee Experience Could Jeopardise Your Digital Transformation

By Samir Bedi, Asean Workforce Advisory Leader, EY

Organisations must adopt a human-centered approach by listening closely, personalising experiences and inspiring purposeful change.

Many business leaders are accelerating their organisation’s digitalisation efforts to evolve their business models for the post-pandemic new normal. With new technologies introduced and implemented, job roles, work processes and ways of working are being transformed.

As the velocity and extent of these changes intensify, the employees’ experience of these changes could directly impact the speed and success of an organisation’s transformation. Many organisations could face strong employee resistance to digital initiatives when employees have negative experiences with new technologies.

In a survey of 900 global HR professionals and 900 full-time employees that was conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of SAP SuccessFactors, Qualtrics and the EY organisation in July 2020, nearly half of the employees surveyed said the technology they have been provided with was difficult to use. Over half said it lacked key features and three quarters indicated the applications and data they needed were not always accessible on desktop and mobile. What is of greater concern is that HR leaders seemed to be disconnected from the realities of employees’ lived experiences. More HR managers than employees felt positive about their organisation’s technology.

Data-driven listening

Organisations need to close this perception gap through robust insights on employee sentiments and their behaviours. However, many organisations do not have a method for measuring overall employee experiences, and others are not collecting and analysing that data effectively.

Listening effectively requires designing consistent programs or mechanisms to collect feedback and gather information – from capturing employee interactions and mapping employee journeys, to introducing voice-of-the-employee feedback programs and ongoing employee engagement surveys. For example, it is worth questioning if organisations should move from annual engagement surveys to frequent and focused pulse surveys that deliver more in-time, valuable insights.

Equally critical is that any listening should extend beyond the individual, to understanding how people in the business influence each other and the informal networks and connections that really drive behaviour.

As employees experience change, they need to know the purpose for these changes, the outcomes to be achieved and how the organisation will be transformed.

Personalisation at scale

In the past, organisations may have applied a one-size-fits-all solutions such as mass employee activities to drive up employee satisfaction and engagement, but such methods cannot effectively address experiencerelated issues. The organisation has to personalise, segment and tailor its solution to truly address the diverse needs and nuances of its people.

This is where the approach of “listening-aligning-designing” is iterative and made more complex when it has to be applied to thousands of employees.

In other words, organisations will need to pace themselves. Moving the employee experience needle in segments of the workforce can happen fast but delivering better business outcomes and cultural transformation will take longer.

Purposeful change

By improving how they listen, organisations can better understand employees’ pain points and begin to address these issues. While this is a good starting point, organisations must go beyond simply meeting employees’ needs. As employees experience change, they need to know the purpose for these changes, the outcomes to be achieved and how the organisation will be transformed.

Business leaders play a key role in inspiring and galvanising their organisation behind these changes, but they first need to ask themselves fundamental questions about their organisation’s purpose, strategic direction and market aspirations. Only with greater clarity of purpose, can they effectively communicate and be a role model for the required behaviours to deliver on cultural change.

Experience-centered transformation

Transforming the organisation to embrace a personalised and insightsdriven approach in delivering people experiences will require human and technology innovations. This includes implementing new data gathering processes and structures to obtain timely feedback, measure experiences effectively, and to align this understanding with the broader needs of the business. To effectively address experience issues and drive behavioural changes, businesses and HR leaders will need new skills and ways of engaging with the workforce.

The broad impact and scope of work involved to deliver purposeful employee experiences means that organisations must consider this aspect early in their digital transformation strategy. In the pursuit of their digital transformation where there are many competing priorities to address, organizations must not miss a fundamental point — technology is but an enabler and only a human-centred approach that understands, supports and inspires employees to embrace the change experience can truly unlock the power of transformation.

The views in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organisation or its member firms.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Samir is EY Asean Workforce Advisory Leader, with extensive consulting experience in helping organizations to develop business strategies linked to people-organization dynamics across Southeast Asia. He has worked on numerous competency, performance and rewards design and implementation projects for public-, private- and third-sector clients. His experience covers all aspects of human resources consulting, ranging from organization structuring and manpower planning to job redesign and the future of work.

ABOUT THE COMPANY

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