Johannesburg, 12 Apr 2019
Where we used to trade in commodities and goods, as an economy, we are now moving towards creating great experiences - whether you are an end-user, a customer, an employee or all of the above. You only need to look at what companies like Amazon, Uber or Starbucks are doing to see this in action.
While I like to talk about user experience (a person's emotions and attitude towards a product, system or service), and customer experience (the interaction between the organisation and the customer), employee experience is also a topic that is high on my team's agenda.
There are clear parallels between a superior customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX). An Accenture report, Employee Experience Reimagined, shares that while an optimised CX generates loyalty and additional sales, a stellar EX attracts talent, boosts workforce engagement, productivity and retention.
In the current war for talent we're experiencing, focusing on creating a place where people want to work each day is essential and will give companies an edge. In addition, research from Jacob Morgan showed that, compared with other companies, those who invest heavily in the three aspects of employee experience (culture, physical space and technology) had more than four times the average profit and more than two times the average revenue.
One of the shared attributes when looking across the experience of users, customers or employees is empathy, and understanding their point of view. Looking for pain points or friction in an employee's day is very similar to looking for pain points or frictions when looking at someone's product experience. There are a lot of lessons I believe we can take from UX and CX to apply in the workplace and improve the day to day life of employees universally.
I sat down with Aaron Stewart and Jon Yu, my user experience (UX) colleagues at Lenovo, to talk about employee experience (EX), why it's so important to have conversations with employees about their work pain points, and how we can use technology to assist and improve their experience.
DILIP BHATIA: Hi Aaron and Jon, thanks for your time! Let's start by talking about what you do at Lenovo.
Aaron Stewart: I'm a director of Next UX & UX Research. As a team, our mission is to look ahead of current product portfolios and anticipate new features or completely new solutions for Lenovo's Intelligent Devices Group (IDG).
Jon Yu: I'm a member of the Next UX team too, focused on the design and concept side. While I wear a bunch of different hats, right now I'm helping to drive our new smart office solutions and explore what the potential of smart tech in the workplace will be moving forward.
Dilip: You've both been directly involved in projects that look at developing solutions to address pain points for employees, so what does EX mean from your perspective?
Aaron: If an employee is truly engaged working at a company, it's fair to think that they're going to be productive and delivering as fully as possible for the organisation and its customers. That's why having a great employee experience is so important. It's a cycle of addressing needs to make employees proud in what they're doing and more focused on what matters.
Jon: For employees to have a great experience, you need to meet the needs of your workforce and enable them to do their best work. It's not just facilities, HR or IT; it's the people, it's the space, it's the technology in that space and the tools that you have to enable and encourage them for success.
Dilip: You both mentioned addressing employees' needs as crucial to EX. How do organisations go about this?
Aaron: Organisations need to have a genuine and cyclic focus on having conversations with employees about what their pain points and delights are throughout the day, followed by concrete actions to remove those top pain points and continually remedy them. We often hear about things like crappy wireless connections, or inability to find a desk when they need it, or the computer they've received is too old. Those are all solvable problems.
At Lenovo, we did a lot of research which included creating journey maps of what an employee's typical day looks like, what are their pain points, what are their delights, the tools they use for work, and the spaces they inhabit. In that research we asked them what improvements would have the greatest impact on their experience in a positive way, and that gave us focus for our efforts.
Dilip: These are solvable, but it does require effort and support. What was your biggest takeaway from the research?
Aaron: You need to have a genuine conversation and discovery phase to find out what's working and what's not working and put it on repeat. It can't be a one and done conversation. The C-Suite is going to have to support the need to do it though. It can't just be the discovery of what's good and what's bad, it needs to be a legitimate enabling to go solve the problems.
Dilip: You mentioned earlier delivering for customers - do you think there is a correlation between a great employee experience and a great customer experience?
Jon: The prouder you are to work for a company and the more authentically you believe in that company, the more likely you are to become a positive ambassador for the brand. I think there is a direct relationship between people who feel like they're truly valued within a company and how they represent outwardly to the public. There's also a fair amount of data to suggest companies who have a keen focus on employee experience end up doing better with their customer experience initiatives.
Dilip: As you know, at Lenovo employee experience has been front of mind for us and at the heart of many of our recent discussions. What are we hearing from our customers? Is this high on their agenda?
Aaron: At recent advisory councils in North America, I polled the attendees in the room, all IT decision-makers, as to whether they have a formal focus on employee experience. Of the 59 attendees across the three councils, only six of them said they aren't really focusing on it. 32 said they definitely do, while 21 said they did somewhat. While they were all in IT and that's only part of the puzzle, the vast majority of them are formally speaking the language. It's a tell of how much this seems to be rising in importance. That wasn't the case two years ago.
Dilip: Given that many organisations are just starting out formally in this space, what are some of the first things they must address when they're trying to craft a positive employee experience?
Aaron: What we are hearing across the board is that for a company to execute on a formal employee experience programme, they need multiple functions involved, it can't be just IT, it can't just be HR, or the facilities team. Getting those three functions together from a strategic, structural and budget perspective is not a trivial exercise for most companies, as the three groups are not necessarily driven by the same metrics. This organisational shift is probably the first thing that has to begin.
Jon: As we've mentioned, to create a great experience, you need to listen to employees, and provide them with the spaces, the technology, and the support they need. What we're constantly seeing is a battle for collaborative spaces and a battle for technology that just works; day to day frictions that make it hard for people to do their job. You must address these before you introduce anything new.
Dilip: We believe that technology is one of the three pillars of employee experience. How can we use tech to improve employee experience and address those day to day frictions?
Jon: Once you understand the pain points, you can then look at whether there is a tech solution to address that, and there usually is.
Depending on what those points are, to create a seamless experience it can sometimes be as easy as having a choice of what PC your people can use so they can work on a machine they're familiar and comfortable with, it can be making sure the device you provide boots up quickly and is fast and responsive so that any lag time is taken out and everyone can get straight on to what they need to do, or even offering great displays so your people have a great view of what they're working on.
A great example of a pain point that we hear from a lot of organisations is that it takes too long to set up and join an online meeting. If every meeting takes 10 minutes to set up, just think of how much time, money and frustration you can save by addressing this.
That's why we've worked so hard on the ThinkSmart Hub, which I've coined as a collaboration computer. We've really tried to build smart technology into the device, consolidate experiences and streamline it to make it simpler. The device, while helping you to join a meeting with just one button, removes the friction - and time - of having to connect your computer and log in, and click a link. We're able to start a meeting with one click. You walk in the room, this device wakes up, shows you the calendar, shows you the meeting, you press a button and you're in the online meeting.
Dilip: When we looked at the design, were we only focused on reducing time or is there more to it?
Jon: We also looked at team dynamics, and how people are collaborating in the room. We've designed the ThinkSmart Hub so multiple people can be connected to the device, they're able to show all their content and take turns sharing that content without having to wait for the cable. We've also removed that friction of having to wait for someone to finish until you can start sharing.
We're very much focused on what we can do to support democratised meetings or collaborative meetings, where it's not just one person in front of the room showing information to everybody, but it's people having a conversation with content in the room and also online.
Dilip: Let's talk about physical space. I was recently in New York at the Fast Company Innovation Festival and I had a chance to go visit RGA to check out what brand marketing agencies like them are actually doing in their office space and different types of environments. Why do you think this is important for EX?
Jon: As part of employee experience, you have to look at all of the different places people work in and see how we can make that easier for everyone. When we were going and talking to customers, we're asking about what type of spaces their employees need and what spaces they are planning, as that is an integral part of the employee experience.
Some of them are planning on cutting up larger conference rooms and turning them into smaller huddle spaces. Beyond the huddle spaces, it's the same sort of philosophy, streamlining the experience once you land in an area that you want to work. This could be at a desk, this could be in a conference room, this could be in a 'phone booth'. You have to provide a different range of spaces to suit the needs of employees today; not everyone wants to sit at a standard hot desk, and it actually doesn't work for every job role. We're really interested in how these philosophies can influence all spaces, the desk, open seating arrangements, communal spaces, and even private offices.
Aaron: There's a lot of debate in the industry about the efficacy of the agile workplace where people are using unassigned seating or a hot desk. We have seen it executed well, and we've seen it executed poorly. That's why we need to look at employee needs to understand what spaces they actually require to collaborate and do their work. We need to make it easy for employees to find spaces that work for their particular needs.
Dilip: Obviously, from what you are both saying, looking at your pain points and figuring out how to address these is the key to a great employee experience. From your perspective, if a company was looking for 'low-hanging fruit' or getting more bang for their buck in employee experience, where would you encourage them to focus?
Aaron: I believe the very first step any company needs to take is to, if they haven't already, begin to have a dedicated focus on employee experience and start the conversation. Share this with your employees in your communications and find ways to form the cross-disciplinary team that you need for success - make sure you get the HR, IT, real estate, CX/UX teams, brand and your leaders together and have them talk about what you collectively need to do to improve the experience of your employees. That will give the most bang for buck, as it's the foundation you need to make a real impact.
Jon: Following that, I would say telepresence. The more you can speak face to face, in person or online, means there's more communication, less is lost in translation and there's a lot of benefit to seeing your co-workers, no matter where you are in the world.
Aaron: I think that's a great one. I've repeatedly seen when a company's culture endorses 'turning the camera on', once they get used to it, they don't want to go back. They appreciate the engagement they have with each other as employees. Those tools are already released, while there may be some back-end cost in enabling them, it's an easy thing to do. The hard part is the cultural shift.
Jon: From the research we're doing, we're seeing data come back that more employers are encouraging or requiring people to use videos, and then employees, the people who work for those companies are saying they want to use video telepresence more, so I think there's a positive trajectory. I think there's a lot of positive things to be gained from using video - or turning the camera on as Aaron said.
Dilip: Thanks to you both for your time today and for sharing these insights.
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