At least, that’s the conclusion of Parlons RH’s 2024 employee experience barometer, which you can download here: the employee experience is a transformation that helps to cope with transformations.
It’s taken a long time to get to this point, to say the least, and to adopt an approach to employee experience that I’m beginning to find lucid, pragmatic and business-oriented.
But before going any further in my analysis of this document, which I will logically do through the prism of my own vision and therefore of the subjects that seem most important to me, it is important to understand how we got here.
The evolution of the employee experience since 2021
It’s been almost 7 years, if I’m not mistaken, since Parlons RH began to take an interest in the subject and produce this annual barometer based on listening to professionals and adding comments from experts and practitioners on the subject.
In the 2021 edition, I was concerned that the employee experience as described by HR practitioners covered just about every dimension of the employee’s life , provided…that he wasn’t working (4th barometer of the employee experience: a major subject in search of impact). So about 5% of the time.
I persisted in 2022, worrying that for want of a shared definition and a lack of real impact on performance and work, employee experience was in danger of ending up in the dustbin and joining the well-populated graveyard of good ideas that are poorly understood and applied (5th Employee Experience Barometer: last stop before the end of the line?). With HR having sole control over QWL, employee experience became QWL on steroids, but we can’t blame HR for taking such an approach.
It’s a bit like the story of the person who, at night, looks for his keys at the foot of a lamppost without finding them, and who, when asked “is that where you lost them?” replies “ah no it’s not there, but it’s the only place where there’s light”.
I had often broached this subject in my discussions with the Parlons RH teams, who decided toinclude the notion of improving work organization in the list of subjects proposed to respondents as an essential component of the employee experience in 2023. And then, to everyone’s surprise, nearly 60% of respondents chose this item, almost ex-aequo with improving the HR service offering (2023 Employee Experience Barometer: the employee experience confronted with its contradictions).
To everyone’s surprise… perhaps, but not to mine, as it was through work organization that I had taken up the subject of the employee experience when I was in charge of it, and the least we can say is that it had borne fruit, with a double benefit for the company and the employee. But it’s obvious that since this item hadn’t been proposed in the past, respondents weren’t likely to choose it, and by asking the question Parlons RH had somehow turned the light back on.
A discovery which meant that HR understood the scope of the subject, even if it meant putting itself in an uncomfortable situation, because it meant recognizing that a large part of the employee experience did not belong to them, but to managers and operations. Not just People Ops, but Business Ops too.
So I was curious to see whether this was a flash in the pan or a lasting trend, and if so, how HR was stepping out of its comfort zone to address the issue.
Transformations at the heart of concerns
To understand the importance given to the employee experience, we need to start with the concerns of companies, employees and HR.
And the big issue on everyone’s mind is transformation. Nothing could be more logical in today’s world, even if this is nothing new: the world, the economy and society have always been in a state of permanent transformation, except that it has been accelerating for the past 20 years. But it’s good to be aware of it.
Transformation means discomfort, and it’s no surprise that QWL tops the list of demands. But, more interestingly, it is accompanied by the organization of work.
A finding that is anything but surprising. To quote one of my favorite phrases, “QWL and the employee experience are not about building a Spa next to the torture room, but about dismantling the torture room”.
Employees have understood: the subject is not on the periphery of work, where it has long been confined, but at the heart of work! And it’s not just a question of drudgery, it’s also a question of performance, by adopting organizations that support employees rather than hinder them, and against which they don’t have to fight to do their job.
But it also means recognizing that we can’t watch professions, technologies and skills evolve and change without realizing that at some point this must radically change the way we work. In 2024, we’re still locked in a kind of post-taylorism, and it’s about time for that to change.
The employee experience of companies that anticipate and embrace change
The first finding of this barometer is that companies that are “practising” in terms of employee experience are better prepared and adapted to change than others.
Of course, many companies have made progress in recent years towards a meaningful culture, individualized career management or forward-looking management of jobs and skills, but it has been shown that the “practitioners” have done so in far greater proportions than the others and, what’s more, have anticipated these changes.
Is this a benefit of the employee experience? I don’t think so, and I’m not going to give it the credit it deserves either. There’s a difference between correlation and causation , and I think we’re more in the realm of correlation here.
Companies that anticipate and put their employees at the heart of their project are quicker to evolve their culture, have individualized career management and… employee experience. I put all this on the same level, without thinking that one caused the other.
And these companies are logically more proactive in the face of turbulence.
In fact, 35% of the so-called “refractory” companies have not implemented any measures to deal with the difficulties encountered by their employees in the field, compared with only 4% of the “practicing” companies.
I draw the same conclusion as before: it’s the corporate culture and certainly a certain vision on the part of management that drives the rest, with employee experience being more a consequence than a cause.
I’d even take the subject in the other direction: the clear-sighted companies that anticipate the employee experience, the others do little or nothing, and wallow in immobility.
It would also be interesting to see the differences in performance between these companies in terms of business.
The employee experience is a continuous improvement process
In my experience, the employee experience is first and foremost a message, but at its core, it’s a more traditional and well-known subject, that of continuous improvement.
Identify dysfunctions, what’s preventing employees from doing their job well, being efficient, what’s weighing on them, and then spend your time improving little by little as the context changes.
Creating an employee experience department is above all a way of sending a message to everyone, and especially to managers, that this is a subject that counts, that will be the focus of specific actions, and that we expect them to get involved.
Once the dynamic is in place, it can be managed as a continuous improvement process that needs to exist alongside day-to-day work (Improving a team’ s work: a story of continuous improvement). In any case, you need to bear in mind that transformative approaches are not a temporary moment between two periods of stability, but are the norm, whether you like it or not (Transformation is not a temporary state of the business, and your employees know it, so don’t lie.).
And that’s what practicing companies do: they listen, identify problems and areas for improvement, and take action.
Result: “75% of practitioners have deployed either a continuous improvement process for HR services, or an improvement process for the operational organization of work, or both, in line with employee feedback”.
Those who have tackled work organization improvement are 29%, which is very good for a subject initially seen as exclusively HR…but I hope to see it increase in the years to come.
It should be noted, however, that some companies find it difficult to go all the way, as 11% have set up a collaborative management process without continuous improvement, and 14% are content to listen without any real mechanism for taking action.
But, on the other hand, I’m not surprised to see companies making employee experience without saying so. There’s so much in common between employee experience and subjects like continuous improvement or operational excellence that companies with a real culture and initiatives in the latter two areas are bound to be doing a bit of employee experience without realizing it.
The reality, as I’ve experienced it, is that the boundary between “people ops” and “business ops” is so thin that I’ve ended up being entrusted with both, and honesty compels me to say that I don’t think I’ve ever had as much impact on employees’ day-to-day lives as with my “business ops” hat on(You don’t have to be HR to have an impact on the employee experience).
In any case, for a true employee experience approach, HR and Ops need to talk to each other and collaborate, otherwise we’ll remain in an above-ground approach with no operational impact, and therefore difficult to justify over time once companies start paying attention to their costs again.
Feedback at the heart of the employee experience
As I often say, the employee experience is neither complicated nor requires any kind of inspiration or vision on the part of those who drive it. All you have to do is listen and act, and practicing companies have understood this.
On the other hand, I’m still surprised by the channels used, which are feedback from managers, HR and annual appraisals.
Firstly, because it’s not digital and therefore not real-time, and it’s difficult to scale.
Secondly, there’s a stage missing from the rocket.
Not everything can be centralized at the top of the company. There isn’t enough bandwidth, and at this level we lack the relevance to solve the most operational day-to-day problems, which need to be handled locally with managers.
Personally, what I had set up was
1°) a global feedback platform for global issues. It also had the particularity of being used to collect good practices observed in the field and which could potentially be generalized. In a second phase, it can be coupled with an employee helpdesk approach (Employee helpdesk and enterprise ticketization: instructions for use).
2°) At team level, for a pragmatic and operational approach, a participative and agile mechanism dedicated to improving organization and work practices, as I mentioned above.
But generally speaking, digital or not, it’s a good idea to draw inspiration from the principles that have proved their worth in quality management in industry in the past and today, such as Kaizen or quality circles. In fact, the notions of experience and quality are very similar (Let’s talk about the quality of work and Experience is the new name for quality and is the fruit of operational excellence).
In any case, if we say that the organization of work counts when it comes to employee experience, we’re clearly lacking the tools to address the subject.
The same goes for the way employee experience is monitored. Surveys, barometers, HR indicators, but nothing that measures the operational work organization dimension.
These indicators do exist, however, as they are often those used to steer business and operations, but employee experience clearly doesn’t look at them, even though it claims to be interested in the subject.
The CHRO as chief transformation officer?
That’s the conclusion of this barometer. While the employee experience drives and supports the transformations made necessary by external changes, the HR department is in fact the chief architect of internal transformations.
In 81% of companies practicing employee experience, it is now the HR department that drives the process (versus 71% before).
I’d like to know who’s doing it in the remaining 19%, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing for the reasons explained above. In my opinion, it requires a very ops-oriented approach, and I don’t know many CHROs who spend a lot of time with their COO…
That’s the only way they’ll be able to fully support transformation projects, but despite the positivism of the study, I still see them, if not marginalized, at least on the periphery when it comes to these issues.
I note the desire to have a greater impact on work organization, but this still lacks a little consistency and tools, in my opinion.
One last essential point, both in terms of QWL and work organization, which the employee experience should, in my opinion, take into account and which is not mentioned in the barometer: the unbearable increase in cognitive and mental workload due to the misuse of communication and collaboration tools (Collaborative tools in the workplace: a real waste?).
Perhaps the 2025 barometer will address these two issues.
In the meantime, I can only advise you to download the 2024 barometer and read it carefully.
