In our recent webinar, I spoke with Luke Fisher, Co-Founder and CEO of ThanksBox, the HR technology platform that helps employees recognise each other across the organisation and share ideas, based around your organisation’s values. ThanksBox can readily offer feedback and complete surveys in one digital platform that connects to other platforms you may have.
What Luke and ThanksBox have learnt most around organisational culture is that, when deploying technologies, creating the technology experience around the person and not the organisation can heavily impact on positive engagement.
Listen to the whole discussion here
During our conversation Luke gave examples of the transformation he was part of at Worldpay (his previous employer), his experience of consumer insights and how building a consumer’s emotional commitment and loyalty to a brand can be translated into the world of HR. And importantly, how digital technology allows us to do this.
In essence he realised marketing skills can be transferred into HR to create a great employee experience.
Luke clarified the difference between engagement and the employee experience. The talked about the evolution of emotional commitment with the size of the organisation and how this is connected to the brand, beliefs and values of the organisation. Experience management enables a positive commitment which translates employee engagement and productivity.
We discussed the evolution of the employee survey and how engagement tends to be measured by metrics and, as we start asking for feedback more frequently, how we need to evolve this thinking and what we do with this data. Again, using the marketing analogy, Luke compares how we are evolving the way we listen to our employees to the evolution of the customer survey has moved to understanding the behaviours of customers as the customer moves around a website or experiences the sales process. This makes the knowledge gained much more granular, rather than answering around specific events that a survey usually asks you to reflect upon.
We also discussed which areas of the employee lifecycle were the most critical to the overall positive experience with the dependence on where the organisation is in its own maturity and the expectation of the worker being the critical factors.
Your thinking around employee experience planning should be “What do you want people to do and how do you want them to feel?”
Luke explained that engagement expectation factors and the employee experience overlap each other. Take the Gallup 12 questions. The weighting for each factor will be different dependant on where the employee is in their employee lifecycle. For example, think about a new employee. Career pathways will not be as important as the onboarding process – but the average employee survey weights them as the same importance. If we pull again from marketing, marketeers would create “personas” for different types of engagement “style” within the population – e.g. the “high flyer career ladder employee” climber versus the “employee who works for the work-life balance benefits” – a very interesting angle for HR engagement specialists.
Luke finished by emphasising that people are individuals and we need to take the time to get feedback from our organisations and that the answers to our questions are probably already within the minds of our people. Establish open feedback loops.
Listen to the whole discussion here
I hope you enjoy the discussion. Check out www.tapdsolutions.com/forums for our next HR Forum event in London on Wednesday 28th February 2018 where through guest speakers, including Paul Gilliam, HR Director, UK & Ireland at L’Oreal and Jamie Mackenzie, Director of Marketing at Sodexo, whose role focuses on employee and consumer engagement, we’ll be discussing:
- The differences between engagement and the employee experience, and the connection with a positive business culture;
- What other organisations are doing to create better employee experiences;
- The key areas where you can tangibly affect the employee experience.
It’d be great for you to join us.
Regards,
Anthony.
