Let’s be honest, when it comes to HR, we’ve always been a little slow to come to the party, any party that is, perhaps because of the compliance-based origins of HR. While adaptation of technology in an HR context is certainly on the rise, with automation and direct access to data and services becoming more commonplace with systems that specifically support human resources business processes, these solutions have not been designed with employees at the center.
Rather, human capital management (HCM) systems have typically been built to capture data and process transactions from an HR perspective, with each part of an employee’s experience as its own separate event, e.g., onboarding and performance assessment, but for the employee, it’s one seamless journey. Think about it: if you built an HR solution to support a manager, it would be different from one that you built to support HR, right?
HCM solutions are also purely focused on operational data (O-data). While it provides mission-critical information to an organization about what is happening (e.g., high turnover), HCM doesn’t tell you why it’s happening. Finally, such systems were built for pushing HR programs and processes from the top down and not typically designed to empower the workforce or listen to their feedback.
In comparison, customer experience has long been at the forefront of the experience economy, but treating employees like customers and understanding the experience from the employee’s perspective is still a work in progress for many companies, despite a prevailing body of research that suggests employee experience is the key to engagement, performance, retention, and, ultimately, business growth.
Human experience management (HXM) reflects the next evolution of HCM solutions, with employee experience at the center of HR processes.
It’s not just about how it looks but how it helps employees at work
Breaking down HR silos to deliver end-to-end experiences or journeys that engage and inspire the workforce go beyond traditional HCM, including IT, travel, procurement, work, and life events. These experiences will allow people, including new hires, recruiters, employees, managers, and HR leaders, to do things more quickly and easily by connecting them to what they need, where, when, and how they need it, so they can be more productive using tools including conversational AI, individualized machine learning-based recommendations and nudges, robotic process automation, and combined collaboration tools.
Powerful listening and feedback capabilities through sentiment (X-data) combined with powerful O-data also help companies understand where there are gaps allowing actions to be taken in very specific ways to improve a person’s experience, either at an individual level or in a way that drives better outcomes at the team or organizational level.
Still not convinced that employee experience is all that? Check out the Business Roundtable’s recent statement on the Purpose of a Corporation signed by 181 CEOs that declared it was time to shift the purpose of a corporation from solely profits and shareholders to a focus on people, specifically on a company’s employees and customers, and Fortune, which reports that HXM seeks to establish a greater understanding of the relationship between employee and company and that healthy work cultures are the products of design, not default, and it all starts with HR.
See how HXM can help to create a truly dynamic, engaging, and employee-centered experience for people. Access the HXM Digital Summit on demand to learn more.