EX is a rapidly growing field. The phrase employee experience (management, EEM) was coined by Kaveh Abhari, Ph.D. as an approach to deliver positive experiences to employees that leads to positive customer experience. Over time, we kinda dropped the M and are just going with EX.
It’s time to meet the people behind the movement. Our first interviewee comes from the UK, where they manage EX in the telcom giant – BT.
We’re rapidly moving into times where employees have the luxury to ‘choose’ to come to work rather than ‘need’ to.
Asha Wilde, Employee Experience Manager, BT
Give us a quick intro, who is Asha Wilde?
I’m an Employee Experience Manager working for BT. I’m a relatively new hire, only started in February of this year. My background is in HR, supporting the various HR pillars. I was an HR Business Partner for 8 years in my previous company and supported many functions including Manufacturing plants.
Inadvertently, this is where I was introduced to the world of CI (Continuous Improvement) which led me to my next role as CI, Quality and Projects Manager within HR Services. Here my key objective was to instill a CI mindset within the team, train agents on basic CI tools and improve processes, systems and tools.
Once again this role introduced me to my last role as Employee Experience and Continuous Improvement Manager for HR Services Europe. Here I had a fantastic network of CI and EX enthusiasts in each country where CI and EX activities were implemented.
How does one become an Employee Experience professional?
There are many routes into Employee Experience and it doesn’t have to be via HR. I fell into Employee Experience and immediately I could see how this area in industry was about to take off. I purposely brought Employee Experience to the table in my previous company and feel that all my previous experience put me in a good position to drive this. I guess anyone looking to work in this area should have a passion for improvement, a keen interest in and appreciation of the voice of the customer – the mindset piece. If you have HR background or XD skills then great, but these can be learned too.
There’s still a lot of things to be explained when it comes to differences between EX and HR. Share your views on this.
In my mind this is very clear. Employee Experience is it’s own ‘pillar’ in it’s own right. EX can be and should be incorporated into every function from sales to finance to procurement to manufacturing. Employee’s don’t care if a process is HR owned or not, they just want an amazing end to end experience. A lot of processes involve multiple functions so it makes sense that multiple functions are upskilled in EX in terms of tools and methodologies.
How is EX managed in BT?
The EX team I work within is a small but talented, passionate and creative group. We act as an Internal Consultancy and partner with clients to support them inject EX in whatever project, product, service etc they are working on. We follow a Human Centred Design (HCD) approach to ensure the voice of employees are heard, understood and weaved into the clients end product. It’s so amazing to hear the business use terms like ‘user journeys’ and ‘personas’ and really embrace EX. There is a need from the business to incorporate EX and this is only growing day by day. EX within BT is such an exciting place to be! I’m genuinely excited by each and every day
What are your main KPIs? How are you measuring the success and ROI of EX department?
This is a really good question and we are at the early stages of this – last year was really focussed on laying strong foundations and now we are all about showing the value our work can add. We’re implementing Qualtrics (an Experience Management platform) in 2022 which will empower us to capture, analyse and act on employee insights in one place. We’re also starting to create a dashboard of our employee experience touchpoints across our employee lifecycle and how we can shape our KPIs from this. It’s all very exciting!
What about customer satisfaction rate, do you see a direct impact on that?
Absolutely! In very simple terms, if employees are happy in their physical work environment, have consumer-grade technology and an inclusive culture to work in then employees perform at their best. Employees become promoters and ambassadors of our products and services which filters out to external customers. They get a great experience and so customer satisfaction increases.
Employee’s don’t care if a process is HR owned or not, they just want an amazing end to end experience.
Asha Wilde, Employee Experience Manager, BT
Your message to organisations still considering whether EX is worth the time and investment?
Treat your employees like you do your customers. Understand what matters to your employees. Offer the same amazing experiences to employees as you do your customers. The employee-employer relationship is evolving and companies need to step up to retain their high potentials and attract talent. We’re rapidly moving into times where employees have the luxury to ‘choose’ to come to work rather than ‘need’ to. Organisations need employee experience to bring their EVP to life.
Thank you, Asha, it was a pleasure talking to you.
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