Steve Niesman is North America’s President and CEO for NTT DATA Business Solutions, directing operations for the mid-market SAP provider.
Throughout this series, I have shared “P.R.I.C.E.,” a framework for digital transformation and growing your business that focuses on five areas: people, revenue, innovation, cost and experience.
This final installment focuses on experience—specifically, employee experience. Businesses have largely been incredibly focused on customer experience for good reasons, but employees are the path to creating customer loyalty as well as innovation and overall growth. This is especially true as we continue to compete for talent despite some high-profile layoffs and a cooling economy.
Adding to that, McKinsey noted that many employees are changing jobs more frequently, and outdated retention tactics such as one-time bonuses aren’t enough. In its research on attrition, McKinsey also found that employees identified the following as the top three reasons for leaving their roles: uncaring leaders (35%), unsustainable performance expectations (35%) and lack of career development and advancement potential (35%).
Becoming an empathetic and caring leader is something we all strive for. But in order to be a more empathetic and caring leader, you must consider the latter two reasons employees cited in the attrition study: unsustainable performance expectations and not enough advancement potential. If leaders are continually trying to do more with less, especially as the competition for talent has intensified, there is a risk of being perceived as uncaring. And, your employees could end up feeling upset by increasing workloads and lack of development or advancement.
As a leader, your job is to figure out how to give your employees the flexibility and opportunities they want, while also increasing productivity and profitability. To do that, you need to use all of the tools you have available, including technology. Other business processes and policies that support the needs of your employees are only possible if they all have enough time to focus on delivering them, and giving you more time is something technology can help with.
People and technology must work together.
To be clear, the point of technology is not to replace your people—including the generative artificial intelligence solutions we’re hearing so much about. The point is to increase employee output while also improving their experience by making their jobs easier and helping them be more proficient.
In the first installment of this series, I referenced Elvin Turner’s book, Be Less Zombie. As I wrote previously, “Turner says that sustainable innovation requires a framework of leadership, process, capabilities, resourcing and culture. Ongoing success in any organization takes all of these things working together.”
That’s why I believe technology will always require a human element to interpret results and create the final output. Each person who interacts with technology has the opportunity to make the results unique based on what they contribute. Think of it more like having an automated assistant doing as much as 80% of the grunt work, while the remaining 20% is the more fulfilling work that your employees are good at and adds more value to your business. As a result, they create the things that differentiate the company and make it easy to do business with you as they serve your customers.
In essence, you need to view your employees as internal customers and apply the same “easy to do business with” mindset that you give to external customers.
Things like automation, computer-based AI, machine learning and other tools can help you focus on delivering more value to both employees and customers. For example, if you use a chatbot, you can allow it to answer basic customer service questions while employees focus on customers looking at bigger ticket items or those who are really struggling.
From my perspective, the employee experience is the culmination of your technology, business processes, the way you transact and the way you work. One question to continually ask yourself is: Do you have the right culture for experimenting with new technology and processes? There will be failures and mistakes. Some people will move too slowly, and some will move too fast. If you have a culture where you’re not willing to experiment with technology until it’s absolutely perfect, then you will lose. It’s important to encourage mistakes so you can learn from them and adapt, as well as have a mindset that it’s OK to fail fast.
Technology can influence employee development and growth.
Over time, technology will change what jobs people do in the workplace, and it is your obligation to equip, train and prepare your teams for that. The way you develop your talent in order to enhance that technology will allow new experiences, new jobs and new satisfaction to evolve. I can’t predict what those new jobs or technologies will be. However, I do believe organizations will need to simultaneously develop their people to take advantage of the tools available.
To do this, you will need both executive alignment and buy-in from all levels, which are accomplished by providing training and communicating your vision. It’s important that people understand where they fit into the mix. For example, if your people use automation tools to do some of the more mundane, repetitive tasks, explain to them that the goal is to give them a greater ability to shape their workflow and overall contribution to your organization. I believe that the more their purpose delivers value they can see firsthand, the more motivation and excitement they will have. Beyond being easier to do business with, creating an environment that fosters that excitement can help you make them feel more valued and continue to grow them into the future.
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