Human experience vs Employee Experience: Bridging the two

Would you like to exceed your business targets? Wont you like to create or work in an organization where everything gets done with the least amount of friction? A symphony more than a cacophony? What’s the difference between human experience vs employee experience, what is the purpose of human experience at work and how can you leverage the two to create a high performance organization?

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What is Human experience and why is it important?

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Humans are imperfect, inconsistent, and most importantly emotional. Highly engaged, passionate and driven people can take your organization to new heights and business results beyond targets. Elevating the human experience at work component in your organization will reap productivity benefits that go beyond metrics measures and measures and spur innovation and leadership cycles that will propel your organization higher and further.

Human Experience management can be defined as emotions experienced by humans like connectedness, success, grief, joy, sympathy and others. 

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How is Human experience relevant for an organization? 

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Human Experience management focuses on enabling individuals to consistently contribute to the organization and society in the most positive and meaningful way possible. Humans are social animals and therefore, constantly feel the need to interact, feel accepted, and engage with others. 

Human experiences persist for a lifetime in the feelings and memories that we carry. We spend our entire lives trying to gather exciting and insightful experiences that we immortalize. We also spend about a third of our lives at work. Therefore, it is crucial that we spend this time working in the environment, wholeheartedly and mindfully.

Employees are tired of being a part of the homogeneous employee experience and expect their leaders and co-workers to understand them as humans first during their employee lifecycle. Personalization is the new normal of human experience. 

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What Employee Experience really means..

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Employee Experience is much more than pizza and games on a work-day or a piece of cake on a co-worker’s birthday. It comprises the connection that employees share with their co-workers, the technology that they use, the teams that they work with, their leaders, their work environment. and so much more. It is about the joy, success, and fulfilment that their work brings them. 

It is similar to what you feel while checking into a luxury hotel. Is it warm welcoming? It is efficient and clean? Are people courteous and working towards your quiet comfort? It defines the experience of people for when they pay for a premium service class at a luxury establishment. Similar to building an employee experience while working in an organization - do employees feel stressed, frayed, burned out, do they want to participate or rather stay away, are they doing it for circumstance or do they really belong?

Employee experience is about employees being able to achieve the organizational goals, being able to fulfill their personal goals, and being able to access their maximum employee potential. According to the Deloitte 2019 Global Human Capital Trends Report, as little as 8% showed employee satisfaction in their overall work design (inclusive of the workflow and technologies used).

Positive experience of people are entrenched in a sense of belonging, recognition, trust, relationships, and meaningful work. Benefits and perks are terrific, but job fit, job design, and support are of greater significance. 

With persistent and futuristic changes in the economy, society, and the workplace, enhanced employee experience is no more just a trend but a necessity. New roles have emerged in organizations that are solely dedicated to employee experience. 

Organizations that invest in Employee Experience are more innovative and more in demand with respect to applicants. Positive employee Experience can boost productivity as well as directly influence company success and customer satisfaction. It also increases employee engagement and reduces employee turnover.

“Employees should be treated as assets and not resources.” 

It is therefore imperative to recognize the importance of Employee experience and thus prioritize it.

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Incorporating a Human experience into Employee experience

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It is necessary to provide your employees with an experience that is as human as possible. In other words, you need to provide your employees with opportunities to learn, grow, and develop themselves so that they are happier, double productive, and more passionate about their work which ultimately leads to the success of the organization.

1. Respect your employees. Let them know that they’re free to share their views, employee feedback, suggestions, and ideas with you and your team and make them feel heard. Encourage questions and comments from your employees.
2. Something as minor as learning your employees’ names can actually create a significant impact on their performance. It is also important to provide your employees with positive feedback. Enlighten them about any errors they have made and provide them with assistance on how they could avoid those errors in the future. This makes them feel recognized, appreciated and mentored and therefore, they find it essential to enhance their performance in the organization.
3. Pay attention to your employees’ strengths and make sure they are able to work in a relevant domain which will allow them to exercise their talents and strengths. This will encourage them to perform better and boost a positive human experience
4. Always motivate your employees. Make them believe that they can achieve their targets. Help them envision the stunning result of their hard work. This will simply help employees to put in more efforts and make them more passionate about their work.
5. Give your employees clear, concise, and achieve-able goals and targets. Enlighten them about the company’s goals and where they play a part in achieving it. Tell them how their work influences and contributes to the achievement of the organizational targets.
6. Be completely honest with your employees and encourage honesty on their end as well. It is important to have all your employees on the same page that you are on in order to avoid any kind of miscommunication, misunderstandings, or misinterpretations. Encourage your employees to ask for help from you as well as their fellow employees and give them a positive people experience.
7. Refrain from nepotism or any kind of discrimination based on gender, caste religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. 
8. Encourage positive mental health in the organization. Be supportive of your employees who are suffering from any mental disorders. Conduct sessions on mental health awareness in your organization. Conduct one-on-one sessions with your employees to make sure they’re doing okay. You can also appoint an individual who can talk to your employees with regard to any problems they are facing at work or in their personal lives.
9. Invest in employee wellness and development. Encourage your employees to enrol for skill development and training programs to help them enhance their skill set. You can also conduct these pieces of training at your workplace so that it lays an impact on a larger set of people who want to learn something new or want to upgrade their skills. Encourage cultural activities in the workplace.
10. Make your organization more accessible. Think about designing facilities that provide ease of access and use to employees suffering from any visual, physical, or hearing impairment and disorders. 
11. Conduct 360-degree reviews and one-on-one sessions with their respective leaders on a quarterly basis. This will help employees acknowledge their shortcomings and help them work more effectively on themselves and well as on the organizational goals.
12. Ensure safety in the workplace. This includes a zero-tolerance policy against any kind of violence, drug or alcohol abuse, and harassment. Other factors like unsafe working conditions of employement and environmental hazards should also be monitored. Providing transportation services to your employees (especially female workers) during the late hours of the day also contributes to a healthy and positive human experience

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How does Technology play a role in Human Experience?

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Technology is critical to create the connection, collect the information and provide insights into decision support as organizations craft their people experience journeys. 

Moreover, humans are at the core of an organization and it is essential that they have a precise set of tools to help them work in an easier and more efficient manner. Having the right HRIS technology in the organization not only helps you innovate your workplace but also modernize your design and business practices.

It helps you effortlessly connect with customers globally, optimize your marketing strategies, manage your HR functions and analytics, and supervise your teams more effectively which will create a positive human experience. Even trivial inaccuracies can cost your company millions, thus, it is crucial for organizations to have all the required tools in their hands to minimize any errors or miscalculations on their end.

Technology also enables us to enhance our communication with the team as well as people around the globe. This gives organizations greater opportunities to collaborate with talent across the nation as well as the globe. It gives people the opportunity to speak more freely to their co-workers and their leaders.

It helps you stay up to date with the market as well as the latest employee engagement trends. It helps you create higher quality content in a more structured and organized way. 

Scheduling meetings, assigning goals, and duties to your team members, conducting reviews, analyzing reports and resumes, attendance management etcetera can now be integrated into a single software. Make use of these kinds of accommodating softwares to enhance your employee experience, comfort, and efficiency. 

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Organizational benefits from enhanced Human Experience

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Employees who are motivated, enthusiastic, and passionate help elevate the company growth by contributing to greater profits, lower turnover rates, higher retention, lesser absenteeism, and increased customer satisfaction.

These employees boost the revenue of the company. The company experiences a surge in sales and higher rates of creative thinking and engagement from the employees. They deliver a faster and better quality of work. 

Happy employees also result in happy customers. Engaged employees are often more engaged, experience better moods, are more attentive and dedicated, take lesser leaves, and focus more on their jobs. This makes them more reliable to the customer and enhances customer services which helps the customers get their doubts or problems solved quickly. 

Organizations also gain loyal employees as well as customers. A promising organization attracts greater talent and retains that talent resulting in excellent results and content customers. 

Human experience isn’t just another box on a checklist. It is important, necessary, and a fundamental part of employees and thus organizations should ensure a human experience vs employee experience be prevalent in the workplace, which would not only create an excellent environment for employees, but also build a successful and impacting organization.