Ready, set…EX! Blog series part 1
Know your business
We know a thing or two about designing and measuring a great Employee Experience (EX). In this blog series, we pull together top tips to help you overcome common hurdles encountered by HR teams starting out in EX. First up: the strategic grounding to get you off to the best (practice) start.
Before you start designing your employee experience, you need to think about the commercial value you want to enhance. That is, the business changes you want to make in order to drive better performance. There are a whole host of things these could be – everything from speed of decision making to appetite for risk to balancing innovation with business as usual. The list is as unique as your company and its strategic ambitions.
Know WHY you need to invest in EX
What is the business reason for investing in your employee experience? What elements of your strategy are you looking to support? You need a reason to engage in an EX program, beyond driving HR metrics, and you need to start with strategy.
Look at what your business wants to achieve in the next one, three, five years, and what it needs to get there. Whether the overall goal is growing market share, increasing profit, driving efficiency or something entirely different, your EX recommendations need to support and enable it.
Know WHAT you want to achieve
Now you know why you need to invest in designing your EX, you need to look to the performance you need from your people to unlock strategic goals. Do your teams need to embrace change faster? Innovate more? Become more customer centric?
Whatever outcomes you want to drive, you need to be very clear about what success looks like. How do you measure increased innovation outside your NPD or R&D teams, for example? In fact, how do you define innovation – in your business and as it links to the strategy?
Know the approach you need to take
Think about your wider business. Are you transforming or transitioning? Are you rebuilding or tweaking? Do you need to justify new investment or are you re-engineering existing operational expenditure?
Being aware of the macro state of your business sounds obvious. Yet time and again we hear from HR functions who can’t secure investment because the timing (or the business case) is wrong. We think there’s never a bad time to repair a fragmented culture or drive commerciality. There is a bad time to ask for extra budget, especially when you can’t link it to ROI. So before you pull together your business plan, know the context of your business – what’s now, what’s next and what’s driving your stakeholders.
Luckily, that’s exactly what our next blog covers. Can’t wait that long? Get in touch to talk defining, diagnosing, designing and measuring the right employee experience for your business.
