Workplace Romances – Jared Woods

Designing The Employee Experience

// February 18th, 2010 // Employment Branding, Internal Communications

Recently, I’ve been reading up on user experience design. Largely, it’s been driven by the part of my role which includes redesigning our corporate intranet to deliver better information to our staff. So like a good little boffin, I read about web design, and SharePoint design, and building for user value, and creating meaningful interfaces. And something funny happened. I tried to apply it to being an employee instead of just using the intranet.

Your EVP and your employer brand are ideally connected to the employee experience. Not just as the result of it (which you gained through research and focus groups and surveys and such) but a continual cause-and-effect. Your brand is at its most effective when it is used to influence how employees feel about working for you, and how they connect with you. For many companies, this is about internal reinforcement – you told us you work here for X, so we’re going to provide more of X. X is great! Hooray for X, which we provide!

However, I think there’s a more active way to do this. Every interaction your employees have with your business (and particularly your HR department) is an interaction with the experience they’ve chosen to invest in as employees. When you’re doing performance reviews, when you’re communicating changes to the corporate structure, when you’re getting employees to fill out timesheets – all of these are aspects of the product that is the employment experience. It’s the product that you as a company deliver to your employees. It’s what they get because they’ve choosing to work for you.

So why not make these interactions more meaningful? Why not apply the principles of better user experience to employment? Look at whether processes add value. Look at whether interactions (via technology or otherwise) sit alongside the brand principles you have. Talk to staff and ask “How could we make doing this task a better experience for you?” Build processes and product experiences that are meaningful – that empower employees, and that tie in with their emotional connection to the business.

I’ll give you an example. There’s a company that does an internal survey every two years, asking employees a range of questions about the business; where it’s heading, what they need to do more of, manager behaviour – it’s a comprehensive survey. And moreover, it can precipitate real change in the business as a result of the feedback. In preparation for the next survey, it’s previously been their tradition to put out a simple list of the things which have changed as a result of the last survey, in an all-staff email, to be read (or ignored) by staff, before the next survey comes along.

This year, said company chose to do something different. They built a game, a game of Spot The Difference, between two images. Image one was the office two years ago. Image two was the same image, with all the improvements made as a result of the last survey. More desks. More training. Environmental awareness measures. When you clicked on the difference in the second shot, a little blurb came up detailing the change, and the effect it had on the company as a whole. As an incentive, they held a competition for three iPhones. All you had to do to enter was find the ten differences they’d included in the game, and register your email address on the internal server, and you‘re were in the draw.

The response was brilliant. Not just from a numbers perspective, but also from qualitative feedback. Everyone who entered the competition said that they enjoyed this – because it made the changes recognisable, and because it gave them a challenge: to see what had changed in their time as an employee. The team who built the game designed the experience so that, when it came time to do the survey, those who had played the game had thought about what changes would come from their answers. And the percentage of completed surveys jumped about 15% as a result.

When you’re looking at communicating to employees, or implementing a new process, or engaging new hires on induction – think beyond what the company wants to say, and focus on how it makes your audience interact with the company and feel about the brand. Every positive experience, every meaningful experience, contributes to a stronger emotional investment. And that leads to better retention of the right people, and more discretionary effort. And those are never bad things.