Will employee experience solve the ‘Great Reshuffle’?

As more and more businesses relax their in-person working policies, the popularity of remote working is continuing its upward trajectory even as we emerge out of the pandemic.

However, despite up to 80% of global employees no longer sitting at a conventional office desk every day, just 1% of the $300 billion spent annually on enterprise software currently goes towards solutions that support and improve the remote workforce.

Shining a light on this staggering statistic should serve as a major wake-up call to businesses out there today.

With a new post-COVID-19 world of work beginning to take shape, leadership teams have a responsibility to ensure they don’t fall victim to the ‘Great Reshuffle’ as a result of outdated remote working policies and processes.

Business process intelligence technology can automatically find the link between your operational processes and overall employee engagement by identifying problem areas. Simplifying mundane tasks such as expense reimbursement, procurement, or leave requests signal to your workforce that you care about their time and energy.

It is important to recognize that the ‘Great Reshuffle’ is more than the ‘Great Resignation‘ – it is not just about the battle for talent.

Rather, this employee migration is a powerful signal to leadership that it is time to assess whether their internal systems and processes reflect the business strategy, and whether they empower or undermine their employees.

A huge part of success will be making the necessary investments in optimizing company connectivity (both literally and figuratively). Business process intelligence solutions can collect, map out, and analyze employee touchpoints and correlate that with qualitative employee experience data.

Leaders are then able to focus on optimizing operations in a way that enhances, rather than diminishes employee experience, irrespective of where and how they are working.

The pandemic has shifted the balance of power

With many businesses making the digital pivot as a response to the pandemic, the corresponding rise in flexible working has caused a surge in people re-assessing their relationship with work, putting the importance of employee sentiment into overdrive.

One thing is clear – employees that have benefitted from an improved work-life balance over the last two years are keen to protect their new status quo. What’s more, they aren’t afraid to move jobs to do so, particularly if their current employer is insensitive to their needs.

The quicker the C-Suite comes to terms with this fact, the better, as they aim to stay ahead of the curve and prevent costly staff churn.

Savvy executives also recognize that the employee experience, and all that goes with it, is not just a human resources-led effort.

It starts from the top-down, with a commitment to optimizing the processes and systems that support your workforce as they complete their daily business.

Creating a culture that actively supports employee experience is the new value proposition and should be at the top of leaders’ agendas when re-configuring working strategies post-pandemic.

Applying the customer-centric approach to employee experience

Many companies invest heavily in understanding their customers, but not their employees. The good news, however, is that these learnings from customer experience mapping are applicable.

To become more customer-centric, many companies use Digital Twin of the Organization (DTO) software in conjunction with benchmarking.

Benchmarking allows businesses to better understand the performance of their internal processes against that of industry competitors.

When paired with benchmarking data, a digital twin allows you to model changes to your business processes, providing a comparison element that is crucial to gaining a competitive advantage from digital transformation programs.

To make the most of transformation efforts, organizations should link benchmarking data to customer journey models and the associated key performance indicators (KPIs).

The key message enterprises need to engage with is that benchmarking is not boring anymore – conversely, it is bold and exciting because it can help them to understand and respond to their customers better.

This same level of analysis can and should be applied to understanding employees within an organization.

This deeper level of understanding can help avoid an overemphasis on cost and efficiency-focused process changes, and the resulting impacts on employees. This is one of the main HR issues today.

Better process and data resolve fundamental business disconnects

To become more employee-centric, businesses must adopt a more outside-in perspective on their operational execution. How can this be achieved? By being both process-centric and data-led.

Believe it or not, crunching the numbers on the impact of your business processes is one of the most effective ways to ensure employers are staying happy – increasing both engagement and retention levels over time.

Becoming process-centric requires the right tools, which is why we partnered with Qualtrics to offer an experience-driven journey to process analytics tool that reveals how an organization’s underlying operations impact employee sentiment.

It does this by automatically finding the intersection points between employee experience and operations, enabling organizations to explore their overall impact on business KPIs much more effectively.

This level of process intelligence helps to increase employee engagement and retention by analyzing experience data alongside underlying talent acquisition, onboarding, and development activity, meaning issues can be pinpointed and resolved quickly.

The days when process intelligence was a theoretical exercise or ‘nice to have’ are long gone. The pandemic has shown that business process transformation initiatives, with analytics at their core, can not only act as growth drivers and industry differentiators but also provide a high level of internal protection and resilience against ‘the unknown’.

A better understanding of employee satisfaction gives HR and process improvement teams a much broader set of facts that they can use to align and optimize processes in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be considered.

Forward-thinking organizations are already leveraging technology like this to ensure the human impact of business operations is brought to the forefront of leadership’s minds and tackled accordingly.

By taking process insights discovered through these tools and predicting the operational challenges their employees may be facing day-to-day, the C-Suite can catch pinch points faster, work on internal improvements, and prevent their staff from setting eyes elsewhere.

The correlation of operational processes with employee sentiment, engagement insight, and data is a ground-breaking step towards creating a culture that truly values employees as whole human beings and making it easier for them to get their work done.

This effort requires management, careful attention to process, and leadership practices to evolve hand-in-hand with key data. It is only by understanding this crucial topic properly that leaders can target pain points and create truly connected companies that empower employees to succeed, regardless of when, where, or how they choose to work.