I recently mentioned the concepts of employee experience et employee service. As a matter of fact, if we think that brand experience is a factor of sense making and value creation, that the needed employee engagement implies a symmetric experience inside the company, we can start thinking of “employee service”.
If in a flexible, resilient and adaptive organization we think about “employee as a service” means to go beyond job descriptions to work as networks, in an adhoc fashion, across silos, we should wonder about what “employee service” may mean. “Company as a service”. If we buy the “Employees first, customer second” idea, we must find absurd to invest a lot in customer service while nothing such exists on the employee side.
So let’s try to clear this idea that could be very inspiring for HR departments stuck into the digital transformation of their organization.
• HR level : drive employee life-cycle instead of a static career management. Don’t forget well-being at work programs too.
• Learning : more individualized paths and learning offers but also a more contextualized learning embedded in the flow of work. “Learn what I need, while I work, when and where I need it”.
• IT : the tools people need to do their work, the user experience that makes work look that something else than a nightmare, and more freedom on the way employees manage their own device and choose their applications. Don’t forget BYOD policies too. Enterprise search will also be improved (global search) and, to prevent employees from drowning themselves in an ocean of information and even find relevant things they don’t know they exist, introduce analytics in the work environment.
• Management : “manager as a service” that help people to improves, facilitates , makes things possible instead of keeping a “command and control” approach.
No need to go further. This list is poorly innovative or surprising (feel free to add your own views in comment).
The idea is to realize that “employee service” means two things :
– make things possible : access and use of any necessary resource, both from an IT and behavior perspective.
– developing oneself over time, learning to adapt to a changing context.
At the end there’s nothing really new here. You can find all these ideas at work or being implemented in many organizations, with more or less success but usually with pretty good results. But it can help us to think further.
Knowing that all these initiatives contribute to employee service and experience, why are they driven in silos, without coordination, while they have the same purpose ? Wouldn’t it be beneficial to bring them all into a single and cross-silos one ? Maybe such a unified program would also be differentiating in terms of employer branding ?
Differentiating while nearly every company is trying to do the same thing ? Yes, because the variable part will be the alignment with the brand experience that will lead to different employee experience, with different codes, prioritizing things that may be relevant in some companies and irrelevant elsewhere or to invent specific things that are impossible to implement elsewhere.
Many businesses try to differentiatethemselves by their signature of service towards their customers. It drives engagement and satisfaction for customers and value for everyone. Why not imagine a service signature for employees and leverage it to drive an unavoidable transformation ?
