February 20, 2023

By: Smita Bhat, Director Consulting - Business transformation, LTIMindtree

Introduction

In the last few years, a lot has changed, with an unsettled workforce accelerating changes at an exponential rate. Organizations had to immediately innovate and re-examine how they conducted business to achieve ideal worker dynamics through the development of appropriate technology experiences digitally. More importantly, they needed to improve the corporate culture to ensure that workers felt cared for during a challenging time.

Employee experience (EX) is the sum of multiple components and connections in the employee experience journey. It is about employees’ physical, physiological, and social work environment – their hiring, onboarding, and learning experiences, performance reviews, rewards and recognition, communications across multiple levels in the organization’s hierarchy, team interactions, ease of doing work, and benefits at the workplace, to name a few.

Source: Culture AMP

Four important factors that influence EX:

Employee experience has its foundations in the focus and care of leaders and managers, who drive structural societies that create superior experiences. Eventually, a positive employee experience is associated with expectations on organization culture, the physical and physiological environment at the workplace, diversity and inclusion, and employee engagement solutions, to drive outcomes such as enhanced performance, productivity, customer satisfaction, belongingness, retention, attracting the right talent, etc.

• Culture:

Organizational culture is a set of attitudes, beliefs, and values shared by a close group of people bound by a common purpose. It is the visible behavior on the ground – the way things are done daily. With the use of clear instructions, organizations help their employees understand who and what they serve, as well as how to live up to brand promises. Gallup’s workplace study reveals that with a culture that draws the right talents, organizations could see 33% higher revenue. A great organization’s culture connects people to the corresponding purpose. Ensuring the right organization culture influences various aspects such as attracting the right talent, and ensuring productivity, creativity, profitability, brand value, and growth rates.

• Physical and physiological environment:

These work environments affect how employees in an organization trust, network, execute daily tasks, and are guided. Lack of trust, or the fear of voicing their thoughts that they will be penalized or disgraced for expressing ideas/suggestions, doubts, worries, or inaccuracies can create an impact on the individual and team performance. Similarly, if you have multiple processes in outdated applications, the accrued time and productivity loss can grow exponentially, which could lead to dissatisfied employees.

The accessibility of a frictionless, collective work environment with digital experiences rooted in the flow of work helps reduce the effect on cognitive, emotional, and physical well-being.

• Diversity and inclusion:

Diversity is about variation in depiction, while inclusion is about engagement. Diverse teams innovate, whereas inclusive environments create ‘ease at work,’ regardless of the employee’s personalities and perspectives. Employees who are inspired to contribute feel valued for their contributions. This improves employee productivity, ensures innovation, and enhances business performance.

• Employee engagement:

Gallup defines employee engagement as the ‘involvement and enthusiasm of employees in both their work and workplace.’ Employees’ own perceptions that they do not receive enough respect and recognition for their job are frequently cited as reasons for low engagement. It is all about the employee journey through the hire-to-retire process (attract, hire, onboard, engage, and perform). According to HBR, companies that take an experiential approach to employee engagement solutions are shown to have four times the profit and twice the revenue of other companies. Clearly, engaged employees drive performance and productivity, better customer retention, attract better talent into the organization, and lower employee turnover, and create a safe and healthy environment across the organization. According to a recent survey, Forbes discovered that staff members at organizations who excel at providing a positive client experience are 1.5 times more engaged. These same companies are also more likely to generate higher returns, outperforming their competitors by 147%.

There are multiple interactions and touchpoints, processes, and systems that need to be holistically looked at to create the ‘moments that matter’ to drive a superior employee experience. Business process analysis can be leveraged as one of the tools to identify those ‘moments’ that matter to employees to drive business growth and value for the organization.

Business process analysis helps to understand the employee lifecycle from attract to retire and assist in identifying present redundant processes. It also helps in revealing siloed systems while highlighting potential areas for improvement, spotting bottlenecks and delays’ root causes, cutting operational costs, eliminating manual data entry, boosting productivity, and improving experiences.

Leveraging business process analysis to drive Employee Experience (EX)

Business processes are intricate constructions and workflows that are intertwined with one or more elements at the enterprise level, such as teams, functions, tasks, activities, procedures, systems, etc. Employees are an integral part of this ecosystem. The day-to-day interactions are dependent on one or more established business processes.

Business process analysis is a comprehensive, multi-step assessment of each part of a process to discover what is working well in your current processes, what needs to be enhanced, and how any essential advancements can best be made. There are various methods for analyzing business processes, but they all follow the underlying principle that improved systems and processes result in better overall experiences.

How do we do it?

Let’s look at employee onboarding as a business process in the employee journey and see how business process analysis can help achieve state-of-the-art process architecture to improve the experience for new employees.

1. Identify the process:
First, identify which part of the employee lifecycle do you want to improve. This means understanding the current process, which acts as a yardstick to measure improvements. Identifying the process in the employee lifecycle that has the highest impact and is frequently used. Determine the process’ beginning and ending before selecting it for analysis. If onboarding is the process that is frequently used and generates the greatest value in the employee journey, then understanding how the onboarding process is structured today and what business objectives you would achieve by enhancing the employee onboarding experience will help in simplifying the process.

2. Data is the only true source of information:
Collect information about the steps taken in the process, such as how, when, why, and who, as well as the tools and technology used. Create a process flow to understand what steps are performed. Involve users to better understand their current experience. Data gathering can be done through extensive primary research by talking to diverse groups of people involved in the employee onboarding experience (users and stakeholders) within the organization to identify the current pain points and opportunities.

In addition, capture the process handbook, system orientations or onboarding experience survey inputs, current KPIs the organization is tracking, and any other document that already exists in the organization as part of secondary research.

3. Process mapping – A visual memory:
It is easier to visualize how systems and people interact with one another, how different departments collaborate at each step, what their pain points are, and what opportunities there are for improvements when the research has been synthesized to visually represent the data and map the entire end-to-end process.

By understanding the end-to-end employee onboarding process, we can chart the steps and tasks each party performs during the process and create a collaboration matrix between different departments during the onboarding process to determine how they collaborate.

4. Analyze – Ask the right questions:
Many analysis techniques can use to achieve a distinct purpose. Depending on your requirements, you may use root cause analysis, value analysis, or gap analysis to determine what is missing in the process. The right set of questions would assist in moving things forward. Here are a few examples to look for answers while improving the employee onboarding experience.

• What steps are taking more time and causing delays in the onboarding process?
• Is there an activity in the onboarding process that can be eliminated with no impact on the overall process?
• Is there any scope for automation?
• What are the users’ pain points that we are solving?
• How can we standardize and provide a uniform onboarding experience to users across the organization?
• How can we make it more intuitive and guided?

Define: ‘Desired to be state’:

Depending on your research and analysis outcomes, you can decide whether to make minor, modest changes, or completely reengineer the process.

Experience Improvements may mean re-mapping the entire onboarding process, expanding resources, altering communication approaches and channels, automating processes, or introducing new technologies.

We can use a design thinking approach to ideate and create a future state process flow to make the onboarding experience more human-centric. Once the future state process flow is defined, carry out a gap analysis to identify the business capabilities required for the ideal onboarding process. From the technology perspective, use tool evaluation frameworks to carry out build or buy analysis. Also, define the KPIs for the new process.

Some KPIs are stated below for the onboarding process:

• Employee Engagement Rate
• Satisfaction rate
• Turnover rate
• Retention rate
• Training completion rate
• Return on Investment (ROI)

5. Continuous improvement:
Business process analysis is not a one-time activity; it must be revisited on a regular basis to remain relevant. Once stakeholders’ alignment is in place, implement and test with a small group of users to seek feedback to improvise and re-evaluate the processes to be relevant.
Once the onboarding process is implemented, run a pilot with a small group of users to understand their experience by talking to them or running an employee onboarding survey, then use those early feedback to implement the onboarding process across the organization. Periodically reevaluate the process to be relevant.

Conclusion:

Reinventing and continuously evolving processes and systems are important to meet growing employee expectations. Improving physical, physiological, and social experiences for employees will create more engaged employees who would function as your brand ambassadors to help attract the right talent into the organization and mitigate employee turnover risks, prove productivity, and help revenue growth.

‘One-size-fits-all’ approach to employee experience will not help to create committed employees. Obsolete, redundant business processes and systems could lead to frustrated employees, productivity loss, and increased turnover, which would negatively influence organizational growth and customer experience.

Re-inventing and reevaluating business processes in the employee journey would help organizations to stay relevant to changing business dynamics.

Leveraging business process analysis as a tool:

• To identify bottlenecks and process gaps.
• Create transparency and enhance redundant, obsolete processes.