Employee experience management

Along with the notion of experience economy, employee experience is defined as what an employee received during their interaction with careers’ elements (e.g. firms, supervisors, coworkers, customer, environment, etc.) that affect their cognition and attitudes and leads to their particular behaviors.^[1][2]

Employee Experience Management (EEM) was conceptualized by Kaveh Abhari as an approach to deliver positive experience to employees, which leads to positive customer experience by emphasizing their experiential needs - like experiential marketing for external customers.^[3][4] Harris hinted, “It [customer experience] begins at the heart of an organization. It begins with employees who are being the strategy and living the brand”. EEM, same as Internal marketing, is an internal approach by focusing on employees (internal customer) prior to external customers.^[5] The notion of EEM comes from the question of how firms make sure that employees create the desirable customer experience, whenever they interact with customers or provide the information and services to them (Schmitt, 2003, p. 219).^[6] Alternatively, utilizing employees in delivering brand value promise is remarkable concern in EEM. EEM also goes beyond standard Human Resource Management by rewarding more employee-experience in form of both professional and personal development (Schmitt, 2003, p. 207).^[6]

A Global Human Capital Trends survey, based on more than 7,000 responses in over 130 countries, framed the shifting paradigm with “After three years of struggling to drive employee engagement… Executives see a need to redesign the organization.”^[7]

Whilst traditional Human Resources management has largely focused on building and maintaining company policies and procedures, there has been a continuing shift towards Employee Experience Management in recent years, resulting in structural changes in the human resources departments of several companies:^{[8] [9]}

• Edmunds.com wrapped the traditional Facilities and Human Resources functions into a combined WEE Team which represents Workplace and Employment Experience and engaged in a campaign to rid the company of the term "Human Resources"
• Airbnb has a dedicated team to "drive the company’s health and happiness”
• Nitro has “turned old-school HR on its head and instead created Employee Experience (EX)”^[10]
• Harrods is a brand whose customers have high expectations. They have focused on "aligning employee and customer experiences" to ensure there is no disconnect between what employees experience themselves and what is required of them to deliver to their customers. ^[11]
• Adobe Systems has established a team called Customer and Employee Experience that “combines our customer experience organization – the people who are on the front lines of helping our customers utilize our products – with our human resources”

There are various ways that businesses can engender a culture of regular, open communication. These range from regular (weekly or monthly) departmental team meetings to monthly or quarterly meetings of the entire business. Where having actual meetings is not always possible, due to the nature of the business, shift work or having multiple locations an intranet can allow companywide dialogue. Enclosed corporate social networks^[12] allow more interaction between team members who do not physically interact on a regular basis such as telecommuters or teams based in different offices.

References

External links

• EEM through 'Employee Engagement Program'
• Enhancing Service Experience Through EEM
• Employee Engagement for Customer Experience
• 6 Elements of a winning employee experience

Employee Experience Design