How can the Employee Experience be used to get better organizational results for SME businesses in Australia?
Survey Time!
The experience
Within leadership and human resources areas there has been a growing trend to reverse engineer the previously defined areas of customer experience (CX) used widely by predominantly service industries, and user experience (UX) from the information technology worlds and applying these towards the employee lifecycle.
Employee Experience (EX) has been embraced as a measurement towards its positive effect on employee engagement and company performance is a growing area of research that Human Resource Development (HRD) is investing significant effort and promoting its gains.
Rather than focusing only on employee engagement and culture at a single point in time, EX involves expanding to a holistic view to the total employee lifespan, from pre-hire activities to post-employment, and all in between. It concerns the interactions and relationships that bring people together in the workplace, leadership, human resources and management practices and gaining further insight in to how this impacts people on the job.
While initially progressive, it seems that EX is now still stuck in a one-size-fits-all thought process and the HR community is not evolving as quickly to meet the needs of their “customers” and “users” like the CX and UX industries. The question is raised by this author that why are we maintaining a status quo regarding EX, when there has been radical shifts to adopt different generational approaches by the CX (Javelin, 2017)and UX industries (The Centre for Generational Kinetics LLC, 2018)?
What’s your generation?
Globally we are seeing that there are now four generations in the workforce. Generation Z’s or the iGen (born 1996 and later) are now competing for work with Generation Y or Millennials (born 1977 to 1995), Generation X (born 1965 to 1976) and Baby Boomers (born 1946 to 1964) and are all sharing the same workplaces. This can be expanded to five generations when the legacy of the Traditionalist born before 1946 are included (The Center for Generational Kinetics, 2016).
Given this chasm of generational differences and each having their own preferences and nuances, it would be hard to think that a one-size-fits-all employee experience would suffice. For example, the desire for career advancement or continuous learning may be completely different between Millennials and Baby Boomers, or similarly the readiness to adopt new technologies or computer savviness of iGen to Generation X.
Why isn’t EX evolving?
This is a complex question and one we need data on. Can we use elements of EX to prioritize our efforts across the generational mix to better service our “customers” and “users” and drive better business performance?
One of the HR Strategists at wattsnext, Matthew Stent wishes to seek your opinion on these matters so that we can advise on HR for the Modern World.
Thank you
To make it worth your while in completing the survey, all survey participants will be rewarded with the sharing of the summarised research data collected, as well as going in to the draw to become one of the wattsnext focus companies as we explore this further, winning a valuable HR Analysis of their company*.
Complete the survey by accessing this link: https://tinyurl.com/EXSurvey2019-B
*For Australian Businesses only
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