Wednesday 28th February 2018 saw our first Tap’d Solutions HR Forum of 2018. The theme of the Forum was “The Employee Experience and its impact on Business Culture”. However, we also experienced “Storm Emma” and the “Beast of the East” with blizzards and sub-zero temperatures!

Undaunted, we had some great HR professionals attend to hear from our line-up of interesting speakers around how HR leaders can have a direct impact on the employee experience. As usual, we introduced a variety of topics to broaden thinking. These included:

  • Insight from a global FMCG/Retail organisation about what worked and didn’t work for them
  • A marketing director who gave great ideas on what HR can take from Marketing to improve the employee experience
  • Learning from an Ethanographer about how to ask the most powerful questions to get the best feedback from your people

I opened the Forum with a summary of the growing pace of change in the workplace and how this is affecting the employee experience and how the expectations of your workforce are increasing in new ways.

6 out of 10 current occupations have more than 30% of activities that are technically automatable

Our first speaker was Paul Gilliam, HRD UKI of L’Oréal. Paul presented his roadmap for HR at L’Oreal and dismissed some myths about current HR focus and best practice:

  • Success is not reliant on spending lots of money and resources
  • Technology is an enabler rather than the solution
  • It’s very situational, what works for us might not work in your environment
  • It’s not just an HR issue…..become friends with IT, Physical Environment owner…..and Marketing

Paul went on to explain how L’Oreal try to understand the different types of employees and their differing needs and how differing types of dialogue with employees can either succeed or fail with surprising results! Listening intently to your people and acting on this feedback led L’Oreal to deliver some great results on their KPIs in their first year.

The story of understanding your people as the key to raising the employee experience was then expanded on by Jamie MacKenzie, Director of Marketing at Sodexo Engage. Jamie’s engaging style of delivery was compelling. Jamie showed us how HR can quickly use simple Marketing techniques and process stages to understand our people better.

Jamie expanded on the idea of the “persona” as a way of segmenting your employee audience to deliver tailored messaging. Jamie deepened our marketing knowledge, taking ideas initiated by Paul at L’Oreal and expanding on them.

Our third speaker was Dr. Kathryn Crowcroft from Qlearsite. Kathryn is an Ethanographer who’s work involves listening to teams and employees to understand the underlying reasons for behaviour. Kathryn’s insightful presentation helped the delegates understand how you can quickly increase the power of the questions you can ask your employees to get maximum insight. Kathryn demonstrated that open questions were the most powerful of all; as you can discover the “unknown unknowns” and be precise with your people plans. Linking the data gathered to a powerful NLP analytics tool is the future of understanding your employees.

Subsequent open discussion allowed delegates to share learnings from the day and what had worked for them in the area of the employee experience and engagement. All the delegates left with summary notes taken by the Tap’d team.

I closed the Forum with a look at the future and how technology for employees can be broken down into sub-areas that each enable our people to be more productive, collaborative, maximise insight and have a better employee experience.

To find out more about the Tap’d HR Forums and insight from this and previous events please contact us at info@tapdsolutions.com.

Regards,

Anthony