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Commitment to employee experience is growing. With commitment comes expectation, and EX Leaders find themselves in a crucial performance window.

Commitment to employee experience is growing. In our recent Human Experience of Work study, 90% of employee experience Leaders indicate increased organizational intent around understanding and improving people’s experiences of work. CEO and board attention; defined employee experience roles and responsibilities; and budget allocation have been on the rise.

With commitment comes expectation, and employee experience Leaders find themselves in a crucial performance window. Employees expect consistent activity that delivers improved experience quality.

Executive stakeholders need to see quantified impact against their specific business or functional objectives. CEOs and Boards want evidence of progress quickly as proof that investments are yielding. Moreover, the world of work continues to shift and experience leaders must keep pace.

Working with the business 

One critical element to maintaining momentum in EX is to what extent EX Leaders can fully engage and work with the business. Leaders with EX responsibility will more convincingly engage business stakeholders in EX when they can point to precise improvement opportunities – with evidence. Also, talk about ROI cannot be a generic conversation. It needs to be aligned to business leaders’ specific objectives and value conveyed through their business KPIs.

Yet only 24% of organizations surveyed report having the requisite qualitative and quantitative experience data in place to inform experience decision-making with business partners. Many studies, for example, have explored the ROI of internal customer experience and its link to external customer experience and resulting revenue growth, but the ROI exploration often stops there. 90% of organizations believe calculating the ROI of internal customer experience and its linkage to outcomes for their organization is essential, but they have not yet reached this stage.

Meeting executives where they are

Purposeful dialogue starts with meeting executives “where they are” by showing EX’s relevance to their business objectives. It should be defined by value delivered to people and business in the form of observable, measurable outcomes. The ‘Business Value tree’ pictured, for example, shows how one customer facing organization visualized how experience drives business results. They used this approach to support more effective conversations specifically with senior customer facing leaders.

Essential inputs

It is important to note that one ‘business value story’ does not fit the needs of all leaders, nor fully conveys the potential scope of impact. As with employees, appropriate context is essential to understand needs. For example, a functional executive serving internal customers such as a CIO will work with a partially different set of KPIs from a customer-facing leader referenced above, such as UX, internal customer satisfaction, or cost.

In addition, without access to the right (first-hand, interaction level) data, people’s experience expectations of the business will not be fully understood at scale. EX teams need new, experience-centric data inputs to pinpoint opportunities for meaningful experience improvement that are truly relevant to people and business outcomes.

Through our Experience Intelligence solutions, we continue to support EX Leaders and their teams on the activities and capabilities required to drive EX impact — and connect it back to business objectives. We invite you to join in our latest research efforts by participating in our short survey.

Our latest research aims to identify the activities and capabilities EX teams need to better demonstrate business impact.

This survey will result in a robust understanding of how well EX teams demonstrate business impact today, so that you can compare your team’s approach to leading examples around the world. It will also provide a set of clear recommendations and guidance for demonstrating business impact to business leaders, in order to gain long-term engagement and investment.

Participate in the research and be among the first to view the findings and access detailed recommendations for demonstrating business value to business leaders, in order to gain long-term engagement and investment.

Companies know they need to be better in tune with what people at work want and need – whether triggered from the demands of COVID-19, hybrid working plans or from the ongoing reality of competing on talent in the experience-based economy. We can venture to say that empathy is on the rise at organizations, and that is a good thing.

Companies know they need to be better in tune with what people at work want and need – whether triggered from the demands of COVID-19, hybrid working plans or from the ongoing reality of competing on talent in the experience-based economy. We can venture to say that empathy is on the rise at organizations, and that is a good thing.

A more empathetic stance, of course, comes with higher expectation for action. Employees feel more heard and expect better experiences from it. In turn, Boards, CEOs, and shareholders expect the organization to deliver on employees’ most important needs as a matter of good business strategy.

This growing consensus from all stakeholders is encouraging. At the same time, it puts leaders that own Employee Experience in the spotlight. They are under high performance expectations and tight timelines for making real impact. Without near-term results, attention and investments risk getting diverted. Worse still, valued talent might seek better experiences elsewhere.

This is a crucial moment where budding EX teams will either ascend into the short list of value-creating functions in their organization or be side-lined for a few years.

The Experience Intelligence Breakthrough

The volume of experiences happening and diversity of people having them at organizations are overwhelmingly large, so how can EX leaders quickly converge on where they are most likely to achieve measurable impact?

Organizations need to build better Experience Intelligence. They need better visibility into the actual experiences people are having with the organization. Better experience intelligence starts with shifting to a new experience-based paradigm to capture data that reflects the complexity of human experiences, allowing a rich and insightful analysis on the back end.

This data framework captures a high-fidelity picture of an individual’s experiences at the point of interaction. Notably, it differs from existing employee listening approaches such as engagement or pulse surveys in that it is specifically designed to capture experience data.

While engagement tools are useful to assess an individual’s degree of commitment to the company, they do not fit the purpose of telling the experience story. Surfacing the specific experience highs, lows, and gaps in the context of an individual’s interactions with the organization is a view that all organizations need but most lack.

At TI People, we have applied our proprietary data framework to collect, organize and analyze over +1M experience data points. This unique dataset offers some noteworthy indicators towards more focused and prioritized EX efforts.

The job matters

First, organizations should recognize that the majority of high impact moments happen throughout everyday work. Specifically, the “I Perform My Job” moment carries the greatest overall influence of all interactions a person has with the organization. The everyday beats infrequent moments, no matter how emotional or personal they may be. It also beats L&D, Performance Management and Mobility moments. Notably, these “Macro” HR moments often attract the most EX management attention despite their relatively lower influence.

Better EX Intelligence, Greater Impact

With that in mind, it is crucial that EX Leaders expand their perspective to encompass both realms of experience to deliver meaningful experience improvement for people and the business. Leaders should continue efforts to understand employees’ experiences of “Corporate Services” like HR, IT and Finance to ensure ease and efficiency throughout. Yet they also need perspective focused specifically on key job segments – as individuals do their everyday work. First-hand, job specific experience data reveals what matters most in day-to-day work and what stands in the way. EX and business leaders can then partner to identify and eliminate obstacles that inhibit performance.

Effective prioritization of EX efforts, and lasting commitment from senior executives to those efforts, demand an experience-centric dataset that reflects the gaps between people’s expectations and their experiences of work. By shifting perspective to a new paradigm, organizations will become increasingly more intelligent about the experiences that matter most to people at work. Better experience intelligence lays the groundwork for more impactful improvement efforts where they matter most.

The research represented in this report focuses on how leaders in global companies measure employee experience.

And, when they do, whether it delivers improved business value. Furthermore, our research aims to understand if organizations are placing more importance on employee experience as a result of the global pandemic with the topics of mental wellness, diversity, equality and inclusion and hybrid workplaces occupying the collective minds of the C-Suite.

A New Value Chain for Employee Experience

How do you demonstrate the business value of Employee Experience? New research at TI People, undertaken in partnership with Insight222 finds that 41% of the total business impact of EX is delivered when experiences for customer facing teams improve. Read the study to learn:

1. How to demonstrate the business value of EX using The Employee Experience Value Chain
2. The elements of EX that people analytics and EX leaders find most difficult to measure and which elements are crucial for proving the business impact of EX
3. How People Analytics and EX teams can work together to better understand employee experience

Download the full study on the TI People website.