Employee Journeys are the Heart of Employee Experience
Mary Davis Kaplan
There’s a common dilemma when it comes to internal communication platforms management, you’ve probably heard it before.
Stakeholders complain, “employees rarely use my platform, I’m struggling to improve adoption!” And employees respond, “This content isn’t relevant to me!” and “We have too many tools, where do I find anything?!”
These conflicting feelings and messages cause a poor employee experience for managers and employees. LumApps’ goal is to address this challenge with a new product, employee journeys.
Employee success is a prerequisite for company success. Leading companies understand that employees more than ever strive to be engaged, enabled and empowered. It’s apparent that employee experience is a key concern for the majority of CEOs. In PwC’s 25th Annual Global CEO Survey, 62% of CEO’s say employee engagement metrics are included in the long-term corporate strategy. Employee engagement metrics are also becoming more common in CEO annual bonus and incentive plans.
Improving employee experience (EX) requires employees be at the center of your company. This goes for digital employee experience, a subpart of EX. But what is digital EX actually composed of?
Digital employee experience is the sum of all the interactions – and the context of those interactions – that employees have across the digital touchpoints in their day-to-day work. This includes all interactions with:
- Other employees (chats, emails, etc.)
- Media and communications they consume
- Knowledge and information they need, including what they search for
- Business applications and tools they use daily
- Communities of interest or practice they belong to
As you can see, that’s a ton of information and data!
Your Employees at Center Stage
Our goal at LumApps is to provide the best-in-class employee experience platform, specifically designed to:
- Understand each employee’s context based on the employee’s profile and interactions (those listed above).
- Determine the best employee journey that fits the employee’s profile and context.
- Deliver a best-in-class experience across all devices and channels (making sure information is provided where the employee is doing their work).
Let’s use an example. Knowing Judith is a Paris-based law counselor in the HR department and Darion is an Atlanta-based engineer in the supply chain department is important; it enables an internal platform to prepare appropriate news feeds according to their respective roles, departments and locations. Their experience is significantly improved when their respective feeds are enriched with AI-based recommendations for content (an article, a news, a video, a document, etc.). These recommendations include communities to join based on the topics they engage with and relevant resources based on recent searches.
Delivered in the Flow of Work
Personalized experiences enable Judith and Darion’s feed to be tailored to specific “moments” at the company. Judith is a new hire and doesn’t have the same needs and expectations as Darion, a 10-year veteran in the company. At the office or remotely, Judith is always in front of her PC, using Teams to coordinate with colleagues. Darion’s occupation requires frequent travels to visit suppliers, he’s a Slack aficionado when it comes to peer interaction or collaborating on a project. Apart from the company’s collaborative suite, Darion and Judith aren’t necessarily using the same business tools every day, Judith logs into Workday daily, while Darion keeps an eye on the company’s ERP system. Their feeds should thus differ, and be surfaced in the respective business tools they use. They need information in the flow of work (at the right time, without switching context) and on their preferred devices.
This tailor-made approach can be scaled and automated, enabling Communications and HR teams to deliver information in context and recommend next steps (what Judith and Darion should do next after reading this piece of content or joining that community), based on the specificities of each employee’s profile. This way, communicators and HR managers address the company’s “top-down” needs (pushing the right information to the right employee at the right time) and employees’ “bottom-up” needs (accessing the information they need when they need it and where they need it, device and application specific, always with a personalized experience).
Employees experience a variety of journeys: top-down communication announcements, onboarding, career growth or mobility, a return-to-work policy, strategic alignment (after a company reorg or merger), a health-and-safety policy introduction, employee enablement on new product offer, etc. Depending on the journey, communicators might address the entire employee population, but often segment the audience based on specific elements:
- Who are the internal audiences we want to address?
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- Regional populations, Managers only, employees who work in Sales, etc.
- What is the goal of this message?
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- With a new sustainability policy for instance, the goal is for each regional employee to adhere to the company policy, and promote sustainable workplace initiatives
- Where does each employee start this journey?
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- Do employees need to see this message on the homepage of their employee experience platform, or in a chat tool like Slack?
- What needs to be done after receiving this message?
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- Content to be pushed and read, receipt of reading to be asked when applicable, communities to be joined, actions to be monitored, etc.
Easy to Create, and Smarter Over Time
In a fast-paced work environment, when adaptive strategies are being implemented on a regular basis, you need to be able to define, orchestrate, and monitor such journeys as rapidly as possible. That’s why LumApps Journeys are easy to create by Internal Comms or HR managers, with a no-code environment to plan, build, monitor, and analyze campaigns (no technical background required). It fits perfectly into the LumApps tools they use daily.
It’s imperative to measure success against your predetermined goals which will show individual and user group progress along each step of the journey, so that ultimately Comms, HR or any department managers can adjust their content strategy and distribution. For example, if the stats show your sales population has the highest rates of acknowledgment of your messages on Slack, you’ll continue to promote this channel for this specific population to maximize the impact of your message, contributing to improved employee engagement, enablement, and empowerment overtime.
“In the face of the increasing volume of communications caused by the multiplication of channels, organizations seem conscious of the need to minimize the amount of content being pushed… and with 35% saying that increasingly tailored, hyper-personalized messages will become the norm in the next few years, the importance of digital has never been clearer when it comes to driving engagement.” Gallagher – State of the Sector 2021: Global Internal Communication and Employee Engagement Trends.
As part of our product vision around LumApps Journeys, LumApps has entered into exclusive discussions to acquire HeyAxel, an employee onboarding and automation solution, and bring their HR-journey expertise to accelerate the delivery of some of the first journeys described in this article. Learn more about HeyAxel and Employee Journeys here: LumApps to modernize employee journeys with the intended acquisition of HeyAxel
