The 7 Ingredients of a World-Class Employee Experience Platform

Just a few years ago, the term “Employee Experience Platform,” or EXP, didn’t even exist. Now you can’t escape it. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of workers to self-isolate and do their jobs from home, it brought a new sense of urgency and clarity to a topic that hadn’t received much attention: while many companies had made significant investments to create a frictionless user experience for their customers, they hadn’t done the same for their employees.

The result? Employees were spending inordinate amounts of time doing things that ought to be fast and easy for them: accessing information, sharing ideas and expertise, taking advantage of skill development opportunities, and gaining insights to help them work more effectively. If CX was strategically important to revenue growth, then EX was certainly equally vital to productivity, team cohesiveness, and job satisfaction. Enter the Employee Experience Platform.

While the term Employee Experience Platform has gained currency thanks to people like noted HR industry analyst and author Josh Bersin, its definition depends on who you’re talking to. Different vendors seem to have different ideas of how they define an EXP and what it should include. Some EXPs focus primarily on communications. Others emphasize providing a single user interface for different systems.

At Neudesic, we believe in a more expansive and ambitious definition of EXP. For us, an EXP is a solution that empowers people and teams to be their best and achieve their full potential.

What that means – in terms of features and capabilities – is open to debate. So here’s our take on the subject. Here are the qualities and capabilities we believe a world-class EXP should offer:

• A world-class EXP is people-centric. The whole point of an EXP is to remove obstacles. Accordingly, it should make it easy and intuitive for co-workers to share knowledge, expertise, resources, and connections. It should support training and career development. And it should even proactively bring useful information to each employee without them having to ask for it.
• A world-class EXP is integrated with the tools employees already use. Your goal is to make your team more productive and less frustrated – so you certainly don’t want to force them to give up the applications they’ve been using every day. Your EXP should either be integrated with those solutions out of the box – or enable connections with minimal time and effort.
• A world-class EXP delivers personalized, actionable insights and recommendations. We use BI to score data and pick out nuggets for customer-supporting applications; why not for employee-focused activities? BI in an EXP is a major boon for productivity and fostering innovation.
• A world-class EXP aligns everyone’s work to the organization’s business goals. A lack of alignment among teams is both a major obstacle to strategic progress and a common source of individuals’ job dissatisfaction. When employees don’t feel that everyone in the organization is pulling in the same direction, it can sap their enthusiasm and energy – and give them the sense that their work doesn’t contribute to business success. An EXP needs to keep all teams in sync and reinforce strategic priorities.
• A world-class EXP protects individual’s private data. That means supporting strict data security practices and meeting or exceeding the requirements and recommendations of GDPR, EDPB, and other privacy regulations.
• A world-class EXP can be grown and enhanced. Not every organization wants every capability that a full EXP suite offers. Over time, their needs can evolve and grow. Ancillary capabilities may increase the value of the EXP. The best EXPs support all these scenarios, giving organizations the flexibility to implement and expand the platform on their own timetable and according to their own needs.
• A world-class EXP deserves a comprehensive, competent, fully integrated deployment. Any new solution that requires employee acceptance, adoption, and continued use cannot afford a bungled deployment. If employees initially find it inadequate, resistance may set in, and you may not get a do-over.

Microsoft Viva delivers all these capabilities – and Neudesic’s Viva Deployment Accelerator can ensure the successful planning, deployment, and adoption of it. Click here to learn more.