Various factors have put the spotlight on employee experience (EX) today. But what is the state of EX? Where do companies stand in their efforts to improve EX, and what challenges do they face? FOUNT and TI People recently conducted a study to gain some answers.
As companies demand better productivity from their employees, many of them are calling their employees back to the office. Further, many companies are fighting talent shortages, and many countries face a potential recession. On the employees’ side, many face high levels of stress and burnout due to various factors, and many are finding ways of quiet quitting. All these factors have put more spotlight on employee experience (EX).Â
But what exactly is the state of EX this year? Where are companies in their efforts to improve EX? What are the long-term outlook and the challenges companies face in this regard? FOUNT and TI People recently conducted a study to gain answers to these questions. The following are the key findings.
Small Teams, Small Budgets, but Huge Potential
According to the study, most EX teams are small or in their infancy. About 74% of respondents belong to teams smaller than seven people. Many teams also have very small budgets. About 39% of EX teams don’t have any budget.
However, most respondents are optimistic about their organizations transitioning into a new way of working. About 94% say that improving EX is more than a short-term project. About 51% see it as a permanent change in their companies’ operations. Many respondents also think the present conditions are right for better EX investments.
That said, respondents see barriers to improving EX, usually in the form of competing priorities. While 51% say improving EX is a permanent change in how they operate, many say EX is not a company-wide priority. Further, 40% say it is of equal importance compared to other organizational priorities, while 44% say it is of lesser importance.Â
See more: Workforce Experience: Why Companies Need to Rethink Their Strategies
Measuring Business/Financial Impact Is the Top Challenge
What is preventing EX professionals from wowing their leadership? The answer is two-fold: measurement and cross-functional collaboration.
Measuring EX improvements’ business and financial impact is a top challenge, with 85% citing it. For 65%, measuring the impact on employees is a challenge. Sandwiched between these two are two collaboration challenges: coordinating EX work across the company and cultivating a common understanding of EX across the company.
Below these challenges are four impact-makers:
- Identify experiences to improve
- Prioritize improvement opportunities
- Redesign experiences
- Implement improved experiences
Barriers to achieving EX goals
Source: The Big, Bad State of EXOpens a new window
While some respondents feel they have handled the first impact-maker, 51% still feel it is challenging.
Huge Silos Impede EX Improvement
Although 70% of respondents report to HR, most respondents agree that business leaders and managers have the biggest impact on EX. Naturally, EX teams feel their most important partners are business leaders. But their most helpful and frequent partners are people analytics, HRBPs, and HR COEs. Business leaders ranked fourth. Interestingly, HRBPs are viewed as the lowest in importance. Since EX teams cannot directly collaborate with business leaders, they use HRBPs as in-house substitutes.Â
To understand whether EX work is viewed as HR’s job, the study created a 4-point, 4-item scale. It was found that EX work is treated as HR’s job in an overwhelming majority of the respondents’ companies. This may again explain why EX teams struggle to partner with business leaders and why they find it challenging to get senior leaders to give EX improvement equal importance.
Bad Data Is a Major Barrier to EX Goals
For most respondents, data is a major barrier to achieving EX goals. About 58% of respondents struggle to collect/manage EX data; more may be struggling with managing it than collecting it.Â
Above 92% of HR leaders run employee surveys, and over 90% of them run them at least once a year. And many collect employee feedback. With such massive data available, why do EX teams find it challenging to harness it to achieve their goals? This may be because even HR doesn’t believe they are the top influencer of EX; rather, business leaders and managers are.Â
Further, despite all the employee input through various means, respondents don’t seem to feel their EX data is helpful. How helpful is the data exactly? On the chart below, averages in the high 2’s may look good; yet they are not very helpful.
Un/Helpfulness of EX Data
Source: The Big, Bad State of EXOpens a new window
But why isn’t EX data that helpful? The study created another scale, according to which a few things may be wrong. For example, more than two-thirds of respondents feel their companies care more about HR outcomes than financial ones. Then, over half believe that their most valuable data comes from enterprise-wide listening. But this data is challenging to translate into specific actions. Further, there are indications that business leaders view employee data differently than HR and EX professionals. Business leaders are even less satisfied with EX data because they prioritize financial outcomes and targeted listening more.
Building a Roadmap Is the Top Priority for EX Teams for the Next Year
There are 12 action items belonging to three major clusters — infrastructure, team building, and impact-makers, which could be a priority to EX teams. When we look at their priorities for the different action items, the top priority for 2023 is building an EX roadmap for the organization. This is followed by getting more and better data and broader buy-in for EX work across the company. Over the longer term (2025), the top priorities are implementing redesigned experience at scale, prioritizing experience backlog, and proving the business value of the EX team.
The priorities should cause concern. In an environment where only 40% of senior leaders value EX equally with other priorities, EX professionals are waiting for years to prioritize impact. Postponing impact is risky, inefficient, and leads to a waste of resources.Â
It was further found that only 11% of respondents have a 3-year EX improvement strategy. And most of them may be guessing their 2025 priorities. About 22% have a 1-year strategy, and 13% have a two-year strategy. Finally, it is also seen that experience redesign, the team’s most important work and the most sensible way to prove business value, ranks as a moderate priority all three years.
Recruiting and Onboarding Are the HR Investments Helping EX
Looking at a broader picture, towards the HR department that is EX’s second-biggest influencer, which is the investment having the greatest impact, and which of those are helping or hurting EX the most? Almost all the HR investments shown below seem to have roughly equal influence on EX.Â
Perceived influence of HR investments on EX
Source: The Big, Bad State of EXOpens a new window
The investments helping EX the most are recruitment and onboarding. Talent, career mobility, and skill development are also helping EX to some good extent. The investments hurting EX the most are HR transactions and operations, as well as performance management.Â
It can be seen from the study that HR’s investment is quite difficult to differentiate in terms of EX impact, which makes it difficult for HR to prioritize its investments. This problem is probably rooted again in the kind of EX data available in most companies.
See more: Troubleshooting the Digital Workspace to Improve Employee Experience
Conclusion
EX work is not yet inherent in many companies but is visibly advancing. EX professionals are optimistic about their future. That said, most of them believe companies themselves are getting in the way of seizing the opportunity that “the turn to EX†offers. They are trying to connect silos, but some parties don’t want to support them. They are also using the old people data to do new things but finding it unfit. And they are trying to lay a strong foundation for future work but haven’t done enough work to know what the future requires.
The aspiration to connect silos, build relationships, and perform EX work is the right move. But the dispersal of EX work is a challenge because of bad data and bias. Companies need customizable, experience-level data collected from meaningful segments of employees — a targeted, deeper data set than they currently have.Â
Further, EX teams have to do the work of experience redesign first on a small scale repeatedly and learn and build the foundation as they go.
There is a legacy top-down mindset beneath the legacy people data and ways of working. Flipping this mindset on its head unleashes EX work’s potential to transform companies from the bottom up.
What barriers are you witnessing to EX improvement in your organization? Share with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .
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