Imagine you could build the employer of your dreams: What would it look like? And what kind of conditions would it offer? A healthy work-life balance, exciting tasks, good pay and nice colleagues – sure. But what else and what does that mean in the daily work routine?
The green field
Building a startup offers the opportunity to implement exactly that. Simply develop something on a greenfield site. Existing companies and corporations often only have to adapt the established and often encrusted status quo. Startups can therefore be seen as a kind of use case for the developments and trends of the present.
New Work is currently on everyone’s lips. The increasing shortage of skilled workers and digitalization present companies with a huge challenge in terms of HR. HR – until now often a purely administrative unit – is thus taking on a central strategic task. Satisfied employees are becoming the key to future corporate success. As an overarching control variable for employee satisfaction, a term has therefore become established in recent years: Employee Experience.
Employee Experience
Employee Experience is the user experience of the employee. How does he or she feel about the workplace, the team, the responsibilities, the general conditions? What feelings and emotions does the employee associate with the work? How does he perceive them?
According to a 2018 study by Deloitte, nearly 80% of managers rated Employee Experience as very important. It leads to motivation, productivity and identification with the employer. In addition, to the reduction of terminations. However, the same study also identified that only 22% of executives rated their Employee Experience as excellent and differentiated.
The “employee” persona
Viewing employees as customers is a recommended concept for defining employee needs. Just like customers, employees can be analyzed in terms of their characteristics and desires and thus categorized into personas. Subsequently, concrete fields of action and starting points can be derived according to these persona profiles.
The challenge here is, in particular, to categorize on the one hand and on the other hand to really cover the sometimes very diverse profiles of people in a company. A product can be developed without taking into account customer benefits, while an employee experience can be developed without taking into account the needs of the employees.
Employee Experience in times of Corona
Corona has put a spanner in the works of these developments in recent years. Because suddenly everything is different. What is the Employee Experience in times of Corona? It depends not only on the industry and the field of employment, but also on the personal preferences and needs of the respective persona: lack of trust, immense uncertainties and alienation from the employer. But also, completely new opportunities due to the acceleration of the digitalization of the working day and the better compatibility of family and career. Corona is therefore radically changing the Employee Experience and thus splitting employee perceptions.
Employee Experience the Second
Existing companies often face the problem of no longer being able to look at issues from a distance and start from scratch. Conditions and circumstances are often taken for granted and simply accepted. The current situation – as bad as it is in many ways – offers the situation for a reset, a new start, a green field.
Encrusted patterns are forcibly broken up, creating fertile ground for fundamental innovations. It is advisable to use this phase to design the everyday working life of tomorrow – with Employee Experience as one of the most important elements. In the current situation, every employee will inevitably have to come to terms with how they would like their working environment to be. This is exactly the time to ask your employees, plan for the future, and implement! The green field suddenly exists for everyone, now you have to sit on it.
Angelika Vits | Co-Founder & CEO at GREWP