Living in a world where customer experience is the ultimate goal I sometimes wonder whether organizations lose a bit of internal focus and forget about the employee experience.
Going from good to great to pretty shocking
I’ve been involved in many changes programmes where the directive from on high is to increase cost efficiency, process automation and performance in the name of improving the customer experience but sadly this is normally to the detriment of the employee who is often regarded as just the button pusher to make a manual process happen in the middle. With the mantra of ‘good to great’ being thrown around by many companies and consultancies it seems it’s the exact opposite in the employee experience.
Humanize resource processes
But it’s not just on the customer service side where an organization’s front-end processes can impact and create a negative image if it all goes wrong. Consider the experience of new employees coming onboard for the first time. You would think that HR would want to make a process as slick as possible to create the impression, that ‘this is the company you want to work for‘, ‘here we value your potential and look forward to welcoming you onboard‘. Unfortunately, because HR is not as exciting as all that social media stuff and the customer service world more often than not it’s given a passing thought when it comes to process improvement. A SAP project is not an HR improvement exercise but sadly most deem it so.
I’ve heard of stories of employees being interviewed whilst the interviewer was watching TV, or how important contract negotiations were conducted while the person in HR was feeding their baby in the background on the call. If that’s how they pay care and attention to you, think how they listen to the needs of a customer.
An employee is a customer too
You are about to offer a role to someone who has actively sought you out, who wants to contribute to your success and yet you expose them to perhaps the clunkiest, most inefficient processes of all. Employees are your most important asset and their experience in the company is as important as the customers, from start to finish.
And it’s in those moments that your future employee and how they have experienced their first interactions with your organization gives an insight into how you really treat and value your customers.
