Recently, I have been working on a research and marketing project for an upcoming summit, Lean People Development. It was formally known as Lean HR. As a result, I have been brushing the dust off a few of my exploits into Talent Acquisition, Training, Onboarding and other HR practices. It is quite amazing the areas HR now covers and the variability of the definition of HR between companies.
One of the areas I was drawing upon was the user research and some of the Service Design techniques, I practice. I thought it would be quite interesting to blog about creating great employee experience and the use of Service Design and Training within Industry (TWI) that I have used in Onboarding customers, most specifically with SaaS products.
I started looking at past ventures and how I had formulated information about the customer and was surprised, how much data had played in the role structuring the customer experience. Having a process background the use of other both qualitative and quantitative tools are not foreign to me and do use them both. Also with the different online tools that are so easy to include the basic ones like heat maps, Google Analytics, data mining and whatever that has popped up next. If anything, and I think Service Design has taught me this, I use a very qualitative approach, more so than most companies prefer. I always want to interview or meet with customers as I was developing personas, stakeholder maps, customer journey maps and the other related tools.
My point to all this is that we know a lot about our customers these days. But what about our employees? And from an ethical standpoint should I or can I (legally) use the same tools to design a better employee experience. If I view heat maps or the search characteristics of employees on their individual computers to improve their working habits, is that OK? I assume it is, but maybe the questions should be, how do employees view it? Is it too big brother like? And if your company does it what are the opinions and have you accomplished the ultimate goal, creating a better employee experience?
P.S. I have always been an advocate that the customer experience mimics the employee experience. In that vein, if our employees don’t like it, do our customers?