What are the skills needed for Employee Experience?

There are several skills that support the development of Employee Experience. Skills that can be developed inside but also can be searched for outside the HR-organization.

These are the skills that help transform an organization from a process-centric to an employee-centric culture and service model. 

Digital Thinking

This is also called 'Digital Literacy' and refers to the paradigm shift we need from more traditional ways of  working to agile and technology based ways of working. It's more than technology and knowing which tech is available on the market and how it works (though that's also important), but starts with the fundamental insight that the way we work is completely changing and that this creates new wants and needs in the workplace. 

Change Design

Once you know how the world of work is changing and how digitalization impacts work in every possible way, you can start building a vision on work for your organization. What do you want to stand for, what are the challenges, what are the building blocks of your (employee experience) vision and how are you going to bring this into reality? Last but not least, change design means thinking about human behavior and how you can help people make the changes in their work. 

EX-Design

New technology and new media are causing new wants and needs. That's the reason why i's crucial to put human needs central to any new solution you're designing in your organization. That's where Employee Experience Design comes in. It provides an iterative approach and tools to design in a human-centered way. That's why people like Josh Bersin say that HR should use design thinking to start thinking beyond process automation. He claims (just like us) that Design thinking is crucial in the employee experience. 

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This popular 2-day workshop on Employee Experience Design consists of 5 modules. Each module starts with the theoretical framework, followed by tools and application to very realistic HR cases. The workshops are highly interactive and high-paced. It is in fact more 'design-doing' than 'design-thinking'.

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Applying Behavioral Science

Knowing how people behave and what drives people is very important when you work in the field of Employee Experience. Applying empathic thinking and learning about key drivers like purpose, autonomy, mastery and relatedness is essential if you want to design solutions that people will adopt. Apart from understanding and applying research on human behavior to your circumstances, you will also need to understand how to run and learn from experiments you conduct yourself within your organization.  

Agile Collaboration

Experimenting means that you prototype possible solutions and quickly test them to see if they work and how they can be improved. It also means that you will need many possible solutions to design and test, which takes time. You simply will not have the time to test everything through in intervals of 6 months, so you need to design, develop, test and implement in short sprints. That's why agile working skills are also crucial for developing and executing your employee experience strategy.

People Analytics

For understanding human behavior deeply, you need people analytics. We don't mean measuring kpi's like absenteïsm, but discovering patterns that cause absenteeism and developing predictive measures that help you prevent absenteeism in the first place and to give proactive advise to your management. This proactive form of measuring has the potential to create high value for your organization. We had an interview with Bruce Feycher-Lippes from Solvay on this in 'The human side of digital HR'.

Facilitation

Also crucial in times of transformation is having great facilitation skills. You will need talents in workshop design and facilitation who can quickly go from a complex problem to solutions. Visioning workshops, storytelling workshops, strategy workshops, service design workshops and short brainstorms are everyday reality in an agile organization. But remember that facilitating is a skill and not to be taken lightly. The facilitator has a bigger impact on your outcome than you might think, mainly when he or she is able to ask great questions and to focus on the real problem.

Asking Great Questions

Asking great questions might be the one characteristic that is a common part of all the skills mentioned above. It allows you to focus on what matters and to make a distinction between problem and symptom. It's the difference between turning the complex into clarity in a quick way or staying in the dark for a long time.

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​These new skills go hand in hand with new roles that start appearing in HR-organizations, as we wrote about in 8 new HR-roles for a digital age. 

​At Triggs, we are constantly inspired by the new ways of working and thinking in organizations. What happened with customer experience is now happening with employee experience. This means new skills need to be developed. In our Triggs HR Academy, you can get up to speed with the new needs of the HR-market these days. Find out more.

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