Driving EX by Infusing Human Centricity Into The Bloodstream Of The Organization

By Gary Flood, Senior Journalist, The HR Congress

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WHY SHOULD YOU CARE? 

Like the idea of creating an ongoing positive Employee Experience (EX)—which you probably do, given that staffers who report having a positive employee experience have 16 times the engagement level of those with a negative experience, and are also eight times more likely to want to stay at your company?

Well, then be prepared to put some work in—as, in the words of an HR practitioner on the other side of turning nice PowerPoint HR slogans into Employee Experience reality at a 50,000-strong company, “to take away the biggest frustrations and pain points are taken away is something that needs to happen not one time, not two times but throughout the whole employee journey.”

The speaker is Martijn Seijsener, who has taken on the challenge of being the Global Head of Employee Experience at Credit Suisse in Zurich.

Sitting in a 5-person using Agile principles which works in a cross-functional fashion between HR, IT, and the firm’s Employee Engagement and Corporate Communications functions, Seijsener is spear-heading a highly co-operative, data- and metrics-driven approach to making, in his terms, EX at his organization a true “service operation”. 

That level of work on the problem is what it really takes, he has become convinced, to truly “infuse” great EX into the “bloodstream” of an organization.

That starts, he states, with a rigorous collection not of a new sort of HR data you may not be tracking yet—not engagement information (e.g., from employee surveys) but “experience” data.

Working with all the moments that matter

What’s the difference? Engagement data is the commitment that people feel towards your organization,” Martijn told us. EX data, by contrast, is the quality of interactions that your people are having every time they have contact with your organization—which can be physical, digital, or a combination of both.

And so, he is convinced, “You need to use this to start understanding if that is really creating a great experience or not.” To get there, you need to be asking very specific questions, too: “Which interactions are most important and most painful to the employees—and if these experiences are perceived as positive or not.”

Martijn is adamant that this can’t be just at the time of onboarding or leaving, but all the ‘moments that matter’ along the entire employee journey.

But this data is far from being all you’re going to need, this practitioner informs us in a highly practical discussion. Gathering this level of insight is your best way of moving to the next EX step, he tells us—redesigning work to better suit your people. This can be done very helpfully by creating several representative “personas,” for example.

Credit Suisse has a lot of other real-world EX guidance to give us, so we encourage you to go here to see the full version of this discussion—and if you are inspired by what Martijn has to say, why not secure an early place at the upcoming (16-17 May) Employee Experience Forum?

If nothing else, May could be a fantastic opportunity to see what else Martijn and his team have discovered about real-world EX best practices you could learn from.

So: see you there?

To ensure they attract and keep the right talent and future-proof their businesses in our ongoing times of uncertainty and volatility, both HR and business leaders see that a great EX (Employee Experience) is now more crucial than ever.

We certainly agree—and are assembling a fantastic two-day Forum focused just on this. Even better: we’re back to meeting in the real world!

So, please- come and join HR Congress, experts and your peers at the upcoming HR Congress Employee Experience Impact Forum at Amsterdam’s Hotel Movenpick May 16-17.

There, we’ll be hearing from a wide range of leaders, including Martijn Seijsener, the Global head of EX at global financial services leader Credit Suisse. To get a flavor of what Martijn will be updating us on at the HR Congress Employee Experience Impact Forum, maybe watch this interesting presentation from the last (2022) Employee Experience Forum in August?

In any case, don’t forget to lock in your place at the event—and remember the 20% group discount, if you would like to bring some colleagues along too.