Senior Vice President, People Analytics & Insights for Mastercard
Customer journeys are increasingly digitized and seamless across industries like retail, media and entertainment, financial services and healthcare. Similar to how customers expect seamless digital journeys, employees expect consumer-centric experiences at work as they get at home watching their favorite show on a streaming service.
But are companies ready for this digital disruption of employee journeys? The trend is increasingly recognized by people leaders, with 44% of CHROs believing that employee journeys as well as AI or analytics will have the biggest impact on their organizations.
However, transformations rarely achieve their full potential. Being intentional about the accelerators to jumpstart digital transformation of your employee journeys can maximize your chances for success. Here are five steps to get started.
1. Start with the business and user problem.
We all experience products and services with a compelling value proposition day to day, whether it is a smartphone, cloud storage or an electric vehicle. What is common across these is that they solve a user problem differently. For example, as opposed to simply making floppy disks smaller or the experience of transferring data with floppy disks better, cloud storage solutions get to the root of the user problem to store data at scale, securely, seamlessly and at low cost.
The first step in any transformation is to have a documented and validated set of business problems and associated metrics, whether it is experience, productivity or quality. For example, a digital marketing function may be focused on the productivity of marketing tactics because its metrics may be below the industry average.
The key here is an agreed-upon burning platform that the CEO and leadership team are aligned to. While agreement on the business problem is necessary, it is not a sufficient first step. It is imperative to have agreement on the user problem, which needs to be addressed to make progress on the business problem. If the business problem is low billable utilization due to workforce skill gaps, is the employees’ skill development hampered due to a lack of prioritized skill areas that matter, or access to content associated with the areas or time and space, as well as a nurturing environment to facilitate skill development?
2. Create an employee digital storefront to unleash clarity and adoption.
Over the past decade, digital storefronts for customers have mushroomed across a variety of industries. While this has helped obfuscate organizational complexity to customers, in many cases, this has also resulted in too little incentive to simplify organizational structure and organize work around the customer.
Just as customers expect seamless digital storefronts, so do employees. This transparency unleashes clarity for the employee where they can get answers to questions that matter to them, like, “What is my vacation policy?” but also for the work they do, like “What dashboards do we have for managing expenses?” Clarity enables adoption, unshackling employees from following up on mundane questions they can readily get access to on the storefront.
When a high-adoption enterprise digital storefront is created, it also creates the channel for step-change in experience and productivity, for example, by having an AI-powered conversational experience at the front end.
3. Activate an operating model with user experience as the glue to galvanize the organization.
Just like software or product organization operating models have become more standardized with the competency areas around product management, development and design, other capabilities that organizations deliver, for example, accounting services, sales operations and human resources, need to operate with clarity of accountability points and structure. This is even more critical in moments of significant change and requires intentional moments of conversation and reinforcement:
• Co-creation with users and stakeholders.
• Continuous improvement with an outside-in lens.
• Candid feedback, creating safe spaces for difficult conversations.
• Celebration, coming together as a team to reflect and celebrate key milestones.
In short, make the user the glue of the operating model to galvanize the organization.
4. Diagnose and instrument root causes versus the symptoms.
The maxim “garbage in, garbage out” is often used to describe why poor data quality is an inhibitor to robust data-driven decisions. While the symptom is poor data quality, the root causes typically may lie not only in data architecture and management (Did we define the right metric and use it consistently across dashboards? How did we handle missing data?) but also in technology (Did we use the right technical requirements process and release testing processes?) and processes (If a seller needs to update sales prospects status in a sales management system, or a manager needs to update employee job role in an HR information system, did they do that accurately?).
Since the root causes span across process, technology and data management, the solutions need to be multifaceted as well, including automated data quality management, defined software testing process and user-centric journeys.
Quick wins matter. Communicate how progress is being made via improvements in data quality. But remember that the right quick wins that address root causes (versus only the symptoms) matter more.
5. Compliance is table stakes—set the bar with voluntary adoption of higher ethical standards.
Enterprises operate in increasingly complex environments with emerging privacy and ethics regulations. They have a choice: react to the next regulation on the horizon or have a proactive and declared framework on privacy and ethics and a roadmap to achieve it.
Taking a compliance-centric approach is table stakes. Set the bar for your organization with voluntary adoption of higher ethical standards to future-proof your posture in line with the organization’s values. While this can feel daunting, remember that companies are at different points in this journey, and it can be helpful to work together to define common standards in new and emerging areas.
Employee journey transformations are a significant opportunity for employee experience and business outcomes. Being intentional about the right stepping stones can maximize the chances of success.
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