A conversation with Benjamin Granger Sr. Principal | XM Catalyst at the Qualtrics XM Institute
Listen on this blog, Apple Podcast, Spotify, Anchor and other platforms.
Topics covered:
Definition and clarifications on Employee Experience (EX) and Experience Management (XM)
How can HR leaders embrace XM in HR and avoid the “ad-hoc employee surveying or disjointed EX efforts”
What is instrumental to manage the Working-From-Home Employee Experience
How to adjust your EX program in times of crisis
How employee expectations will change post-COVID
How can organizations prepare for these changes
The future of EX and XM programs
Insights
Employee Experience (EX) is the collection of interactions and experiences that an employee has with his or her organization
The XM Institute define experience management or XM as the discipline of using operational data and experiential data, to measure and improve the core experiences of a business, and those core experiences include customer experiences, employee experiences, product experiences, and brand experiences
There is surprisingly a lack of support and enablement for people leaders in this new environment; the online content is mostly about get ting work done as an individual contributor, less on how you enable a leader who's used to managing a team in a face to face environment - we typically would look for slightly different skill sets.
We can't control a crisis, but we can control what we're learning from employees as they move into different environments. We can control how we get the insights and how we respond to that. It really emphasizes the importance of listening to employees and acting on their feedback among many other things.
In times of crisis, adjust your EX program by adjusting the communication strategy, reducing the focus on long-term metrics (if mental wellbeing and physical safety are more important, be flexible, and put the engagement metric on hold), letting the employees drive the conversation (more open-ended questions), focusing on immediate response, change the listening mechanism (from planned to always-on survey for example- those are different ways of listening that are not nearly as onerous as running a big survey)
Employees want and expect their company to ask them for feedback during times of change.
Bringing your whole self to work is an expectation that employees are going to bring to the workplace in the future, and they will expect more workplace flexibility.
Links
Qualtrics XM institute: https://www.qualtrics.com/xm-institute/
Ben's publications: https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/author/benjaming/
XM Professionals Network (XMPN) Online Forum https://www.qualtrics.com/community/categories/XMPN
Photo by Marten Bjork on Unsplash