Experiences: Employee Experiences

Over the last several years, the way in which we think about our employees has evolved. The phenomenon of the great resignation, our commitment to delivering high-quality user experiences, and a desire for enhanced productivity have all been drivers of this evolution. Think of this as UX 2.0: employee retention and recruitment and achieving user satisfaction through a heightened focus on user experience, security, and productivity are demanding that Information Technology (IT) teams recognize users now have more power than ever before.

At my company, to ensure that our employees would continue being productive throughout the pandemic, we gave notebook computers, Zoom accounts, and other collaboration tools to our newly remote or hybrid workers. Now it’s time to move on to the next step by fully realizing the benefits that hybrid working can bring—among them enhanced employee engagement. Our workforce is ready to move from post-crisis mode to a new way of working that better reflects the fact that flexibility in location and work style are now choices that employees often demand. This reality represents a dramatic shift from pre-COVID days. In all likelihood, your employees have the same needs and are making similar demands. Read More

In the 21st century, work is busy and often distracted. This reality can deprive us of moments to stop, pause, and take the time necessary for reflection and consider the implications and importance of mentoring in leading meaningful cultures.

This situation has been complicated even further by the global pandemic, with the spaces between work and home becoming blurred. People working at home encounter more distractions that can interfere with their ability to focus. Plus, they often lack the time necessary to step away from their work periodically and give their mind and body the rest and recuperation they need.

As UX leaders, we must provide explicit opportunities for mentoring people and prompting conversations that can help people to see, plan, and move forward. We need to help people to share their stories, spot practices, and conduct exercises that enable them to learn how to connect and contextualize their learnings to insert meaning into what they do. We need to provide spaces such as our Sparkle Studio—a learning platform for developing 21st century, transferable soft skills. Read More

With this article, we’ll kick off our new series about the employee experience, exploring the current state of various elements of the employee experience (EX) that people encounter at work, implications for the acquisition and retention of talent by organizations, and our vision for what the future holds for the employee experience.

In this series, we’ll explore some emerging workplace trends within the context of hybrid work arrangements, including both work contexts that are on site, within an office, and remote-work contexts. The impact of the global pandemic on the way we work has made these topics more important than ever. The employee-experience element in focus in this first installment of our series is The Interview. Read More