Colleague experience = growth?
When it comes to stakeholder experience there are, broadly speaking, two core areas where companies have looked to invest; customer experience and people & culture; with some looking into developer experience, partner experience and similar.
But not all experience management programmes are created equal and there appears to be significant variance in their performance, specifically when it comes to colleagues. People & culture programmes are, by nature, business-centric, not necessarily people-centric when it comes to the HOW and WHY rather than the WHAT. Not least because experience managers are usually recruited into customer-oriented functions like CX and UX. There may be overlap in their objectives with experiential factors, but they are not always there by design. This means there is inherently less focus on engagement at the emotional level to unlock the benefits associated with that type of activation. So what are the benefits in terms of data points?
Here are a few:
21% increase in profitability for companies who effectively engage employees (Gallup study)
50% reduction in turnover costs (Kenexa High Performance Institute study)
1.4x increase in customer satisfaction for companies with a high quality employee experience (Temkin group study)
3 times more likely to be innovation leaders (IBM study)
Looking pretty good. So why aren’t more companies focusing on this as a key portfolio opportunity? Of course there is a good deal of software and organisational consultancy when it comes to unlocking some of the above benefits, but it seems the barrier isn’t operational or focused on function. Based on experience, I would argue unlocking these benefits needs to be a powerfully engaging strategic shift. A broadcast on the intranet, team re-shuffle and some mandated training are unlikely to receive many cheers from around the firm, when work feels a lot like work, it is just more work. But what if it wasn’t? American Express doesn’t need to have concierge services to run a credit card business, Wise doesn’t need to make their cards fluorescent green or transfer money in less than 3 seconds and The North Face could have continued to sell windproof jackets without creating high budget, powerful documentary content on YouTube. These things engage on a level that isn’t functional - and that’s where (in my view) growth that goes from good or even great to exceptional lies.
This is also where experience design makes its big play on ROI, turning processes into experiences makes them fundamentally more fun, which in turn sparks engagement and influences people to do things which they are unsure of or flat out unwilling to do. When it comes to colleagues this is fundamental and also frequently overlooked because unlike customers, they get paid to be where they are, but showing up doesn’t mean they will engage, which if studies and benchmarks are to be believed, is a solid secret sauce for new levels of growth.
