Are you struggling with employee attraction & retention in 2022?

Today, most companies are already aware that good User Experience design is crucial for obtaining and keeping customers. With the vast number of apps and IT products available to consumers, people are simply no longer willing to put up with complicated processes, bugs and bad user interfaces.

But how often are you really considering the day-to-day user experiences of your employees? Are they still being forced to fill out countless of Excel sheets to register their worktime? And are they struggling to find a specific folder, e-mail address or SharePoint site, whenever they are reporting errors or ordering a service? Then you might be in trouble.

Because fact is that younger generations entering the workforce are bringing with them new knowledge and expectations on what employers should be offering them. For this reason, Employee Experience (EX) is gaining popularity amongst the companies that have understood how happy employees are the key to success for them and their business.

Denmark’s biggest news agency, Ritzau, is one of the Danish companies that have already begun their Employee Experience journey.

Why Employee Experience is important?

As the CHRO at Ritzau, Christine Skovgaard sees EX as an increasing challenge to get sorted as more uncertainty is shaking industries all over the world. To Christine EX as a concept is important to drive innovation and raise customer satisfaction.

The crucial part is of course the capability to attract and retain the best talent as new generations are taking over and the market opportunities are in the favor of the employee. This gives HR the challenge to make the job more engaging and improve performance across the company:

To us, EX started as a compliance- and digitalization project in HR, but we quickly realized, that it is much bigger than that

Ritzau soon began to discover the importance of giving the employee the best and easiest journey throughout the company and ensure that this reflects the company values.

One thing the younger generations want, is a clear set of expectations from their employer. Therefore, Ritzau has implemented very clear guidelines for who does what and when, so everyone is aware of their responsibility.

Ritzau has also recognized the importance in letting their employees know, what they can expect from their workplace in 1, 2 or 5 years. Based on this, they have introduced a 5-year strategy, ensuring new development needs are being recognized and what might be offered going forward.

We had to take a good look to recognize, who the new generations are and which requirements they have for a workplace. The younger people are likely to expect different things than what we used to offer our employees.

The goal for Ritzau is transparency and a smooth onboarding process

For Ritzau it’s important that the company values are visible from the first meeting with the company and all the way through; what workplace is this, what do they stand for? This is very important in the fight for the good employees – both externally, when you are aiming to attract the right candidates – and internally, when trying to retain them.

In relation to this, being able to create a smooth process for the onboarding is key. In the best scenario, you should be able to set up a system that automatically creates and assigns each activity required during the onboarding process, from ordering flowers, workstations and access cards to creating the IT access needed and providing the right software. This way, HR and the line managers are not spending an unreasonable amount of time as project managers in the onboarding of each new hires, and you can ensure that they are receiving regular notifications with status updates when each assignment is fulfilled.

So, the key message here is to use the digital opportunities to create overview, transparency and coordination of activities between your support functions responsible for your EX products and services. A great User Interface is important but if your operating model behind the scenes is not working you won’t be able to deliver value.

An agile approach to EX Journey

EX is about designing and delivering frictionless experiences to the employees, and this requires strong initiatives in leadership as well as digital development. For Ritzau, being able to participate in design sprints has become a part of every employee’s competence development.

This way, projects are carried out in short sprints with representatives from all job functions, and this ensures projects are delivered quickly and are highly adaptive to change, rather than top-down managed and following a set plan.

The key to securing your EX for the future is Digital

Great EX is about more than surroundings and benefits; it must be a complete experience.

Digital EX is becoming more and more unavoidable in a job market where the competition is global, and the newer generations are taking over the workforce.

For companies, this means that it’s crucial to ensure you have a digital platform that can be integrated with existing systems and is easy to build on. Because great EX is not a onetime product; it is a constant development. To get started a EX product mindset and operating model is required to ensure a continuous delivery and improvement of your EX-product and services.

Thank you to Christine Skovgaard for a good chat giving great insight to EX