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TCS Consulting Services to Achieve Success in the Digital Era
Highlights
- Investments in employee experience are no longer seen as just a cost item. For many organizations, taking a humanistic approach to attracting, developing, and retaining talent is a key priority that has a direct impact on their top line and bottom line.
- An effective employee experience strategy needs to factor in trends such as remote or hybrid work and changing employee demographics, as well as the transformative potential of technologies such as generative AI, digital twins, and the metaverse.
- Along with the required people, process, policy, and cultural changes needed, enterprises need to leverage technology as a key differentiating enabler to deliver reimagined people experiences.
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The need for people experience
As talent wars intensify, companies no longer see investments in employee experience as just a cost item.
Many look at employee experience as a top priority that directly impacts their top line and bottom line. Strategic people experience initiatives by the world’s leading companies point to this shift in mindset.
In a post-pandemic world where people’s needs and priorities have changed, every company needs to realize that flexibility, purpose, the power to exercise choice, and the personalization of work to accommodate personal and professional goals matter to today’s workforce. Making these part of their work culture is critical for organizations to deliver seamless employee experiences and support employees in the moments that matter to them. It is also critical for organizations to strengthen their brand value and position themselves as ‘irresistible organizations’—or what a study published by TCS, in collaboration with the Josh Bersin Academy, describes as places that employees want to join and that rivals want to emulate. In people experience-driven organizations, we are seeing a trend of HR-led mass policies being replaced by a personalized approach centered around employee personas—one that empowers people to exercise their choices in career and life, roles, locations, work schedules, learning, and well-being.
There is no doubt that investing in the holistic platforms and solutions that help deliver great employee experiences makes good business sense. Several studies have indicated that happy employees lead to superior customer experiences, increased productivity, better talent attraction, and employee retention. In the long run, it leads to higher brand value, higher revenues, and greater growth. So, how can organizations create the right people experience?
Framework for change
We recommend a framework for a technology-led people experience transformation that cuts across all dimensions of work and workplace, and helps organizations become future-ready enterprises.
Our framework focuses on personalization, authenticity, responsiveness, transparency, and simplicity—value propositions that every HR function and organization needs to attract and retain employees.
The framework also identifies seven key areas that people-centric enterprises need to focus on to deliver on these value propositions and address the needs and aspirations of employees. These are: accessibility, connections, growth and development, simplified windows of engagement and collaboration, communications, intuitive intelligence, and well-being. As shown in figure 1, each key area is mapped to a corresponding subset of functions and capabilities that are needed to enable a sustainable people experience for the current and future needs of employees and organizations.
Essentials of people experience transformation
The framework aligns well with both current and emerging trends in reimagining people experience. While the framework shows the path organizations can take, we believe focusing on two sets of levers—people and technology-driven change—can accelerate this journey and ensure a successful transformation.
People-led journey
A reimagination of the people experience needs to be people-led as well as technology-driven.
A people-led reimagination requires the following:
- Treating employees as ambassadors: It is important for organizations to treat their employees as ambassadors, whether they’re working remotely or in a hybrid situation. Employees should be engaged enough to be the ambassadors for the organization and promote its reputation wherever they go. This can happen when employees are empowered in their choices and they get a sense that their aspirations and feelings are understood by their organizations. That's why organizations need to adopt a hyper-personalized work model driven by emotions, desires, and the needs of employees. This model should go beyond work and have social elements injected into it.
- Reimagining employee journeys: Reimagine employee journeys and workflows to deliver the right experiences in the moments that matter for relevant employee personas. To begin with, enterprises need to identify, define, and consider different employee segments and personas with varying needs, aspirations, and pain points. Enterprises need to look at all touchpoints of an employee's journey—from the time they first interact with a company as a candidate, then as an employee, contractor, or gig-worker, to the alumni stage. By analyzing these touchpoints, enterprises can better understand the needs of their employees and provide them with the right tools and resources to accomplish their goals and those of the organization.
- Garnering feedback: While it is important to design employee experience processes factoring in the voice of the employee (VoE), it is equally important to communicate to the employees that the reimagined processes are addressing suggestions captured in the feedback life cycle. Conducting periodic focus group surveys is one way to drive continuous improvement in the employee experience journey.
Tech-driven change
Technology must assist employees throughout their work and be available when needed.
Technology plays a major role in a people experience transformation. A connected tech architecture can provide employees with the necessary tools, resources, and support they need to accomplish their goals. Depending on their needs, priorities, and appetite for change, organizations can choose from and leverage a variety of tools and technologies to elevate people experience. We believe enterprises embarking on a tech-driven people experience transformation need to focus on the following:
- Deliver futuristic people experiences with technology innovation: Gamified, metaverse-enabled micro-learning platforms allow people across locations to come together in one interactive, simulated space. Organizations can use these and other virtual learning solutions, and non-fungible token (NFT)-based learning certificates. They can also use the metaverse, along with social channels and social listening platforms, to enhance the people experience with virtual personas/avatars, phygital workplace buddies, and digital personas or avatars for confidentiality during diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) sessions.
- Elevate employee experience with GenAI and digital workplace tools: Digital workplace tools are the backbone of remote, hybrid, or flexible working models and are key to driving collaboration among teams that may be far apart. Add in generative AI-powered workplace copilots, and we are looking at a workplace revolution unfolding. There are already several enterprise GenAI workplace solutions in the market. Organizations can elevate the people experience with enterprise GenAI solutions that can help employees with content generation, search, recommendations for learning, growth paths, project choices, and more.
- Plug the talent gap with data-driven talent intelligence: Data, analytics, ontology-based skills graphs, AI and machine learning, and generative AI can help identify talent gaps and automatically match and provide recommendations from internal and external talent pools (talent marketplaces) to fill gaps. With their ability to offer 360-degree views of employee personas, or listen to employee sentiments, the use cases can be many—performance management; hyper-personalization and targeting of the right talent; digital employee twins to model and predict employee behaviours and provide scenario-based outcomes; and more.
- Leverage automation for self-service to create a unified experience: Automation and self-service form another key transformative lever, enabling low-touch employee journey management, experience management, choice, and self-service management. End-to-end choice and self-service management can be delivered through chatbots, generative AI, and other self-service tools that can seamlessly integrate all the key systems and processes in the people experience landscape.
- Create seamless multi-channel experiences with a holistic people experience platform: Visualize and enable holistic experience platforms (or a platform of platforms) that span the breadth and depth of employee journeys for seamless end-to-end experiences. Such platforms must be able to support and integrate multiple capabilities and technologies or systems. Unlike siloed solutions that address just part of the employee journey, they should be able to integrate multiple systems such as talent intelligence, learning experience platforms, collaboration platforms and tools, performance management systems, and systems delivering cross-functional cognitive experiences.
- Enable hyper-personalization for key employee personas and customer-like choices for employees: This can be done at critical touchpoints using the right combination of technology, systems, data intelligence, and integrations. And just as they offer choices to customers, organizations must empower employees to make choices. This will require a human-centric design and personalization of solutions based on each employee persona. This represents a radical shift from HR-defined policies and packages to employee-chosen options in every area.
Organizations must evaluate solution options, technologies, and architecture for the functional and technical capabilities needed. Also, the focus should be on using technology to reduce friction but not at the cost of losing the human touch where it makes a difference. Technology should be used only where it makes sense to use it, maximizing digital dexterity while minimizing technology friction in consumer grade solutions.
No one size fits all
There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach for a people experience transformation.
With the extent and nature of how a transformation can vary between organizations—some taking a big-bang approach while others opt for a more incremental approach—each transformation requires a unique strategy. However, by treating employees as ambassadors and empowering them with hyper-personalized policies, and tools and resources for flexible, purposeful work-life management, organizations can create meaningful employee experiences. This would deliver value for all—not just for employees, but for the organization, customers, and shareholders as well.
People experience transformation starts with a strategic leadership vision and involves a reimagination of the employee journey from human-centric perspectives. It entails defining blueprints encompassing the people, policy, process, functional and technology capabilities; identifying technologies and solutions to build the required capabilities or address gaps; and implementing a road map of initiatives. It calls for consulting and problem-solving to define and execute a people experience strategy; a design thinking-led reimagination and personalization of employee journeys; defining the technology architecture; solution mapping and implementation; and agile transformation management. An ecosystem of alliance partners is required as well, including providers of the best-in-class digital workplace and collaboration tools, talent intelligence, metaverse solutions, and next-gen learning platforms. Enterprises should factor in these things before embarking on their people experience transformation and choose trusted partners with relevant experience to accelerate the journey.
