Employee Experience is more than a new title

Employee Experience is a buzzword and is fairly superficial as long as it just is a new name for the same thing. It's only when this rebranding of HR is combined with a new mindset, attitude and with new skills that you can truly expect different results of employee experience design in your organisation.

Becoming employee-centric asks for a completely different mindset

Putting the employee central in all thinking instead of being lead or limited by internal processes and procedures. This seems logical and intuitive, but it isn't. 

There's a misunderstanding that employee-centric thinking is the opposite of process thinking. It isn't. You need extremely good processes to get your basics right. When you want the newcomer's laptop to be ready on the first work day, you need a well run process. The difference in an employee-centric organisation is that everyone involved in that process understands the importance of the laptop being ready on day 1 and overrules the process when needed. So extreme process management (where process adherence is the only driver) is often the enemy of employee-centric thinking.

Employee Experience needs another mindset from HR and from management. Employee Experience is not a division, but a view on the workforce in general. The question: "How do we want to treat our employees?" is the basis of employee experience thinking. It is bottom-up thinking from the employee's view rather than top down thinking from the organisation's view. It is only then that we can speak of a major shift going on in the HR-field. 

Making the shift towards Employee Experience will create changing views on the role of HR, but also on the HR-processes and practices like hiring, onboarding, talent development, firing and so on. That will take time, focus and new skills and approaches like Design Thinking.

Design thinking can help HR

Design thinking is a creative problem solving approach that will make you look at your organisation through the lens of the employee. 

​Design Thinking has mostly been used to create a customer focused approach to designing products and services.

​HR professionals are realizing they can use this methodology to design better employee experiences and start shifting towards a truly human-centered HR.

Are you an experienced HR freelancer or manager and do you want to learn how to think like a designer to create better employee experiences? 

Check out our Masterclass Employee Experience Design. 

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