The coronavirus pandemic has redrawn our established norms of work and it is clear we are in the midst of transitioning to whatever the next normal will be. By continuously listening to, and acting on, employee needs and sentiment, organisations will be able to build robust, data-driven pathways to faster transformation, improved performance and greater productivity post-COVID-19.

Listen up

For all the burgeoning market dialogue about the growing importance of the employee experience (EX), any HR professional will tell you the matter is highly complex. The word “employees” covers a diverse spectrum of individuals, whose situations and needs differ greatly even within a single organisation, and not everyone is an employee these days. Creating a positive, seamless journey for a diverse workforce is not a one-size-fits-all proposition and herein lies the biggest challenge. 

Both the chief executive and the chief HR officer need to understand now, more than ever, that the ability to effectively differentiate between shared and unique experiences among the different types of people in the workforce is a business imperative. On a micro level, this means listening to the needs of the individual, including those of self-preservation – “If I feel sick, will I be able to take leave to prevent infecting others?” – to those of self-development – “Will I be able to build relationships that advance my career virtually?”.

On a macro level, business leaders must also acknowledge larger, shared concerns that the workforce may hold. As with individual needs, this will require listening to concerns around the ability of the business to ensure employee wellbeing (e.g. “will my employer be able to provide adequate personal protective equipment to keep me safe?”) through to economic concerns that could have a serious financial impact on employees (e.g. “what happens to my job if my factory closes due to new infections?”) and operations alike (e.g. “will my team be able to deliver as expected in a 100 per cent remote environment?”).

Without access to the rich, immediate information transmitted in face-to-face communication, and conceding that it is both unfeasible and intrusive to aggregate these qualitative insights, what should an enterprise listening capability look like?  

Traditional methods of measuring EX, such as an annual, point-in-time survey or feedback form, are out of date and largely irrelevant in a more virtual, dynamic and socially distant world, where listening to the “white space” of EX – the day-to-day elements and interactions that according to Oracle make up 80 per cent of an employee’s experience outside HR transactions – is as important as tracking online behaviour. 

Market-leading organisations understand EX needs a regular, ongoing pulse check, not an annual review

Market analyst Gartner has reported a year-on-year rise in the use of non-traditional employee monitoring and listening techniques such as sentiment gathering and analysis. Half of large corporations were leveraging such tools in 2019, according to Gartner, with this figure expected to exceed 80 per cent in 2020. Market-leading organisations understand EX needs a regular, ongoing pulse check, not an annual review.

Individual, relational and environmental experience

Experience is a multifaceted concept, requiring a multifaceted approach in its design. A sophisticated listening architecture is one side of the experience coin, demonstrating you have listened is the other and doing something about what you know is essential.

At EY we believe listening exists on three fundamental levels and planning to execute against these is the most effective way to demonstrate you are listening and responding:

1. Individual: what people think, feel, and need

2. Relational: how much can we “lean in” to each other, both colleagues and clients

3. Environmental: covering the physical working environment and the way in which the workforce is able to relate to both personal and targeted business outcomes

The disruption caused by COVID-19 has made it harder for organisations to control employee experience across these three dynamics. 

Pre-COVID, it was the environment that was the greatest focus for most businesses, yet this is no longer viable because control over it is largely gone, replaced by more autonomous, disparate virtual working or restricted workplaces. Organisations have subsequently relinquished control over employee connectivity on a relational level too, discovering the organic, proximate interactions between people now require technology and planning to sustain.

Despite best efforts, virtual catch-ups are no replacement for informal workplace check-ins, conversations and socialising, which are all hallmarks of physical work environments. Social distancing and “mask-on” policies have made it harder for those who are on-site to talk face to face, removing vital social cues from the equation. 

On a relational level, leaning in will enable firms to track EX actively. Rather than connecting divergent experiential dots, it is much more effective to collect ongoing insights and align these to emerging employee needs and painpoints. Such insights can then be connected to operational data to determine correlations or used to unearth more valuable investments. Connecting EX data (X data) with operational data (O data) is how organisations ought to drive business change and improve the experiences of employees and customers going forward. 

Meanwhile, on an individual level, we’ve seen additional stresses further inhibit the ability to communicate effectively. Lockdowns and health concerns have both exacerbated social isolation and the negative mental impacts this can have. Less serious, but just as significant, is the fact employees are now essentially resourcing themselves. With no access to workplace supplies, whether pens and paper or more specialised items, many will find their ability to work limited and subsequently their engagement and responsiveness waning.

Alongside this, employees have also seen their responsibilities outside work grow. Millions are contending with issues of child or relative care, self-care, mental and physical wellbeing, navigating stress, the list goes on. It’s no surprise downloads of wellness apps have surged. 

Combined, such factors significantly curtail the ability of leadership to either gather EX insights or apply a framework to course correct, much less demonstrate that they are in tune with their workforce. 

Do you trust me?

Another nuance organisations must contend with as they leverage technology to monitor and shape EX remotely is the increasing suspicion with which such “behavioural economy” technologies are viewed. 

Numerous high-profile data breaches, privacy concerns and missteps by consumer-facing technology companies have eroded the trust consumers place in technology. This has implications for employers who seek to deploy sophisticated, consumer-grade technology designed to gather X data and shape EX. After all, employees are also consumers and are increasingly sceptical about handing over personal data. 

Organisations must keep their people’s best interests front and centre to ensure trust is maintained and strengthened

Findings from the EY Megatrends report show employees are more likely to trust information from their organisation than they are from tech giants or even their government - and this has been compounded by the pandemic. Organisations must keep their people’s best interests front and centre to ensure trust is maintained and strengthened as they deploy increasing amounts of EX technology. 

What does intervention look like?

Armed with a robust listening ability, organisations can shape a positive EX by responding to changing employee needs and wants with agility. Whether through the adjustment of existing employee engagement programmes, creation of new benefits and resource libraries, leadership messaging or the identification of emerging trends, which could impact productivity and morale, listening enables data-driven, timely, targeted and impactful action. 

For all that the ability to create a customisable response must be an integral part of an experience strategy, there does exist a universal core set of “experience" factors that people want at work. Employees want to matter, to have their voice heard and to be able to shape their own work experiences.

The pandemic has presented organisations with an opportunity and an obligation to improve how they listen to their employees and better understand how to deliver their desired outcomes. The needs of the workforce are diverse and without putting people top of mind, EX will forever be compromised. In turn, this will ripple outwards, impacting customer experiences, results and, ultimately, the balance sheet. 

When organisations understand the questions and issues shaping EX, they will be able to make decisions that best support their people. Doing so will build and nurture trust with the workforce; trust that will pay dividends in a post-COVID world.

Maya Smallwood is EY Global PAS Employee Experience Leader, EY Americas Change & Learning Solutions Leader.

Maya Smallwood is a Global Employee Experience Leader at EY. She helps clients to design and curate extraordinary experiences that unleash the power of human potential through transformation. Maya's work shifts the “lens” of business transformation from intangible results to measurable value achieved through investments in people-centricity and workforce development.

In this episode of HR@Home by The Hive, Raconteur's Managing Editor, Gren Manuel asks Maya how organisations can embrace a new normal and re-imagine work with people at its hearts.

Although organisations have been dealing with change and the importance of successful transformation for many years, the coronavirus crisis and its aftermath have elevated both the challenge and its critical nature to a whole new level.

That’s because companies, and their competitors, partners and customers, have neither control over the virus and how it will behave nor over the governmental or scientific responses to it. To make matters worse, further waves of change are likely to hit in the coming months as second-wave flare-ups occur, making it even more unclear what the future holds. 

So how should organisations equip themselves to deal with the current environment?

When the pandemic first struck, the focus was on stabilising the business and protecting its people. This involved keeping employees safe and getting them home where possible while trying to ensure the financial and operational stability of the company at the same time. 

But now that the stabilisation stage is mostly complete and the economy is inching back to life, organisations must think and work in two gears - or approaches.

Gear one involves getting ready for employees to return to the workplace in a physical sense, going back to offices and factories that have been sitting idle for many weeks and restarting work in a new way. Doing so entails dealing with a host of challenges ranging from deep cleaning to introducing social-distancing measures and conducting daily temperature checks.

But progressive organisations are also working in a so-called second gear. This means they are not just working out how to survive until a global vaccine becomes available or herd immunity takes place, allowing us to get back to some semblance of the world before COVID-19. 

progressive organisations are rethinking how they might need to operate at a fundamental level

Instead these progressive organisations are rethinking how they might need to operate at a fundamental level, including how employees should work and where, how decisions are taken or what the priorities are, and a host of other things designed to position the company for success post-COVID. The goal is to emerge from the current environment as a fundamentally stronger organisation able to compete successfully in the economy.  

Change ad infinitum 

Gears one and two have one thing in common, which is the importance of leaders building an organisation that excels at handling and using continual change not only to ensure the business remains competitive, but also over time transforms for the better. 

Many organisations are starting from a challenging position. The problem is that, even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, it was clear most transformation programmes failed to achieve their goals. But there are several ways to improve your chances of success.

Firstly, set up a command centre to help you understand what is happening both financially and operationally within the organisation and what needs to happen next. Such command centres may consist of a new and more formalised body, or former executive operations committees or task forces that have simply shifted focus to deal with the new agenda. Its role is to make the conscious choices and decisions required to deal with the new reality and lead the company from one interim norm to the next.

A second important consideration when trying to effect fruitful change revolves around listening to, and gathering data from and about, employees. The pandemic has put employees at the centre of operational and strategic decisions in a way that is fundamentally different than before. 

It has always been true that change initiatives invariably succeed or fail due to the thoughts, feelings and experiences of those being asked to change. So not only do leaders need to understand their employees, but they must also use this information to respond to employees in a way that resonates with them, inspires trust and leads to the concrete actions and changes the company needs. 

It has always been true that change initiatives invariably succeed or fail due to the thoughts, feelings and experiences of those being asked to change

In other words, it is vital that leaders, and their business operating models, put people at the centre of their change initiatives. This means designing, creating and implementing an ongoing, inclusive experience that is personalised, meaningful and purposeful in terms of employees’ roles and the employee experience. 

Ultimately, the sweet spot for success lies at the intersection between keeping people safe and ensuring the business stays healthy. Change rarely occurs as a single instance and organisations must be capable of continually responding to the exogenous shocks that force them to move from one temporary normal to another. It is this reality that is now the new normal for us all.

Carl Rhodes is EY Global People Advisory Services Managing Director & EY Global Change Insights Leader

Carl Rhodes is the Global Lead for Change Insights at EY and helps clients solve problems of culture and change with technology and data-enabled solutions. He possesses 15 years of experience in enabling large-scale organisational change through both an empathetic and data-driven lens.

In this episode of HR@Home by The Hive, Raconteur's Managing Editor, Gren Manuel, discusses with Carl how organisations can enact effective change management during periods of disruption to ensure long-term success.

There is a wealth of things employers need to consider when planning employee experience in a post-lockdown era. 

One consideration, for example, is trying to figure out which roles will be able to work remotely and remain productive, the aspects of a given role that will make it difficult to do so and why. 

Such information, in turn, makes it easier to assess which positions simply have to return to the office to function properly, which can operate effectively from home and which would benefit from a mixture of both approaches. It also helps business leaders understand the best way of handling a safe return or any additional support that may be required to enable continued remote working for extended periods. 

These kinds of insights put organisations in a good position to continue meeting customer expectations without disruption as they help in drawing up contingency plans.

The employee experience, meanwhile, is another important factor in ensuring a positive customer experience as the correlation between the two is strong. Put another way, if staff feel safe, secure, valued and cared for, they will feel engaged and motivated enough to go the extra mile in ensuring customers are happy. Therefore, listening to and measuring the employee experience in a consistent way is only going to become more important. 

The problem is, however, that these things inevitably take time and effort in a world in which many employers are still simply trying to keep the lights on. But this is where technology solutions, such as EY’s People Experience 360 (PX360), come in. 

The solution, which is based on a combination of business rules, data science and machine-learning models, makes it possible for business leaders to take data-driven decisions on how best to enhance the employee experience by basing any action on insights into what this experience really looks like and the outcomes they can help drive 

Data-driven engagement

PX360 works by collecting experience data, such as employee sentiment and wellbeing, and evaluates the impact of various employee touchpoints or “moments that matter”, which include performance evaluations and promotions, on individual personas or worker profiles. 

The resultant information is then mapped with operational data to create meaningful insights. For example, EY utilised the PX360 solution to evaluate what impact its onboarding experience had on how new hires perceived the company. 

The firm had traditionally measured the scheme’s effectiveness based on how quickly these new hires acquired knowledge about the organisation and, ultimately, become productive on client engagements. But the analysis powered by PX360 revealed that the speed at which university hires were expected to ramp up, as well as choose which area they wished to work in, left some feeling overwhelmed.

This realisation led to new processes being introduced to give new recruits more time to assimilate such knowledge, which is expected to have a bearing on retention levels. There is likewise expected to be a positive impact on the firm’s wider recruitment activity as past alumni’s advocacy inevitably plays an important role in future new graduates’ choice of employer. 

In other words, combining employee experience and operational data in the way described made it possible to evaluate the impact of moments that matter on short-term engagement levels and, as time goes on, the medium to long-term performance and retention prospects of the new hires.

Such insights are invaluable because they can be employed to take more effective policy decisions and design better experiences from which the entire workforce can benefit. This means that over time it becomes possible to transform how the organisation works in an evolutionary way by addressing business leaders’ questions head on with data, with the ultimate aim of creating a more positive experience for everyone.

Vijay Nudomolu is Managing Director, Customer Experience and Digital Transformation at EY