‘Employee experience, engagement to drive corporate competitiveness’
Employee experience and engagement are fast becoming the new competitive edge for corporations. Over the past years, “We have started to see the emergence of the employee experience which is now something that many Human Resource leaders and executives around the world are focusing on. Similar to the customer experience, the employee experience is what happens when an employee interacts with your organisation,” suggested John Morgan, leadership expert and contributor to Forbes magazine.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in a recent report ‘18th Annual CEO Survey’ opined that the digital revolution, like the industrial revolution is reshaping the way we live our lives and the way we work. One of the biggest headaches for Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Human Resource (HR) managers is ensuring the organisation has the right people to deal with what lies ahead. This in turn is a function of employee experience.
Employee experience is the sum of all experiences an employee has with an employer, over the duration of their relationship with that employer. This is a spectrum of employee engagement, which starts from how employees are recruited to how they are engaged, retained and rewarded. Forward looking organisations are rethinking talent management.
Companies are realising that sustainable productivity is a function of talent management, quality of employee engagement and experience. Oludare Shobajo, head Human Resources at Lagos Business School, affirmed, “optimising investment from human capital makes a solid business case for high performing organisations with as great an influence (if not more) as financial capital.”
Gallup, an American research-based, global performance-management consulting company estimates that the United States (US) businesses lose between $450 billion to $550 billion each year due to disengaged employees. Based on stock performance, Wharton professor Alex Edmans determined that companies on the Fortune list of “best companies to work for” outperformed their peers by 2–3 percent per year. You also see firsthand the generational differences in managing work teams.
CEOs and HR need to be sure that the business is fit to react quickly to whatever the future may throw at it and that means filling it with adaptable, creative people, working in a culture where energy fizzes and ideas spark into life. If they cannot be found, they must be created. Whatever technological innovations are ahead, it is the people that will make the difference between eventual success and failure. That is why CEOs need a people strategy for the digital age. The Society for Human Resource Management found that the top priority for those in HR is talent management.
This is because “the war for talent has never been fiercer. People are turning to non-traditional ways of earning a living such as creating products on Etsy, renting out their homes on OLX, DealDey, driving for Uber or Lyft, become freelancers on sites like Upwork (formerly Elance-Odesk), and the like. Technology platforms such as Linkedin have also made it incredibly easy for head hunters to steal talent from their competitors. So in this type of a world what can organizations do to help make sure that employees want to show up? You guessed it, focus on the employee experience” affirmed Morgan.
Experts contend a distinct relationship exists between the culture of an organisation and its ability to produce high performing employee experience. Catered meals, onsite dry cleaning, beautiful office spaces, modern technology, and flexible work programs may all seem like fancy perks. However, outstanding companies leverage these things as strategic business initiatives. They offer these things because employees actually ask for them. Employees at different companies may value and care about different things.
A PwC report opines that the younger generations see work as a “thing” not a “place” they believe productivity should be measured not by hours worked at the office but by productivity output. Like most generations, they want work flexibility, but for different reasons. “Your workforce is changing—but is your company keeping pace? What can you do? (re)Think talent” quipped PwC.
STEPHEN ONYEKWELU