ING’s head of EX: Improving the total employee experience for business benefits

Sander de Bruijn, head of employee experience, global HR and global people services at ING, is well-placed to share a roadmap that can showcase how to create a world-class and personalized employee experience that delivers despite the challenges to working structures that COVID-19 has caused.

In his first day session, at Unleash World’s Total EX stage, Brujin explained to attendees how the Amsterdam-headquartered multinational banking giant HR is improving its approach to delivering a total employee experience using a globally scalable approach — that is also sensitive to local conditions — which utilizes human-centric design and data in order to create a better customer experience (CX).

We believe a good employee experience is the enabler of a good customer experience.

With 57,000 employees across the globe and 40million customers, ING has no small challenge when it comes to ensuring that both the employee experience and customer experience both align and are good.

Not to mention, as employee experience encompasses everything which happens at work — including the experience of how employees interact with HR services, how they perceive their job, what they think of their digital or physical workplace, and how the organizational culture impacts them — getting it right can be difficult.

However, de Bruijn explained that when ING started on its journey to improve they overcome these incumbent challenges by splitting the improvement process into two main parts: how it can make the design of all experiences more human-centric and where data can play its part.

Employee experience is the most used and misused term out there.

Starting off from solid foundations — at ING, HR has a seat at the table for all strategic discussions, HR services are usually scaled globally at the bank (rather than having myriad local provisions) and the company has done previous work to break down siloes — the employee experience team were able to get the backing to start identifying any problems knowing they would then be able to build and iterate solutions.

ING’s HR strategy

Firstly, this involved measuring the quality of the interactions employees had with the company across the lifecycle in core areas (their HR provision, their job, their candidate experience) which they could then use to get an overall NPS for each country they have employees in.

By doing this, de Bruijn explained that ING was then able to build a dashboard which shows where problem areas, or moments, were, which then helped in creating priority areas for improvement. This, he noted, was crucial.

It also allowed target setting. For ING, this meant they were able to highlight that they wanted to improve the candidate experience, internal talent mobility, career development and key areas of policy and process and create an aim of where they wanted to be.

As part of this, they wanted to focus on something they call ‘moments that matter’ — such as when entering the workplace or returning to work after maternity or illness — as these have an outsized impact on satisfaction. This was all guided, de Bruijn added, by an over-arching purpose — again, something he said was crucial — which was to ensure that improvements to the employee experience resulted in a better customer experience.

Wow moments have a disproportionate impact on engagement — so you need to make them a differentiating experience.

What this looked like in terms of changes for employees was the implementation of a digital adoption platform over their Workday applications, in order to guide employees through changes and implementing new technology. In this way, de Bruijn said that employees get a simple experience of the digital workplace ensuring that satisfaction levels are improved.

Yet, ING is not solely focussed on individual moments and the digital aspects of work. de Brujin explained that ING’s human-centric approach has led them to focus on making all processes leaner, in order to take the frustration out of work, and on integrating tools to make them easier for users,

They have also analyzed their comms approach: something that de Brujin explained is crucial in managing expectations as even if a business is not able to provide the best experience they can help employees understand what to expect, which can circumvent unnecessary disappointment.

In fact, by focusing on all services, ING is making sure employees get a single unifying experience of work — meaning everything from printer issues to finding parking at an office to expenses to booking a holiday — can be done simply, cleanly and often via one application.

This, concluded ING’s experience lead, means the bank is not only raising the experience bar for employees but for customers too by keeping everything as digital, personal and simple as possible. Invaluable insight for UNLEASH World attendees.