Why we all hate doing expenses – championing the employee experience

Work in a post-pandemic world

For 4 out of every 10 employees post-pandemic, work is now completely different. We’ve seen a shift in how people work and where they work. People are often hybrid or remote working.

The flip side of this is reduced social contact with your employers. This is the only way of working that Generation Z, who are coming into the workforce, will have ever known. So it’s something we need to adapt to and think about rather than resist.

How can we improve the employee experience?

Put ‘customers’ at the heart of everything

Just like external customer experience, employee experience should be at the heart of everything you do. Listen to your employees, and understand their needs and motivators.

Define goals around what you want the experience to be. This should help highlight where problems exist.

Internal EX team with defined goals

Consider creating an internal employee experience team with overarching responsibility for the user experience across the whole business. Their objectives would be to break down the barriers between teams that deliver the service to customers, define the goals for the service, what you want the employee experience to be and how it works, and build that deep empathy and understanding of what your employees need. Ultimately their goal would be to remove the barriers to people doing their job well.

Invest in internal tech

Considering the number of hours that were wasted downloading a payslip in the study we conducted, which was only one of about twenty tasks employees needed to do, the amount of money wasted is staggering.

Before investing in a piece of technology, organisations should consider the user needs. Working with security people and data management people helps to ensure you’re getting the best use of technology. Rather than making blanket decisions across the whole business, the decision-makers need to really understand what employees need from that piece of technology.

The tech you use does reflect who you are as a company.

Entrust and empower

Trust your employees, work with security to unblock some of the barriers, and put more trust in the employees to define what they want to use and how they want to use it.

Measure and create feedback loops

Before making a change, benchmark the experience. This allows you to keep measuring whether your actions have had an impact. People can resist change unless they see clear value, so having those metrics helps get users’ buy-in.

Why do this?

If employees have the appropriate tech, they’re unblocked from doing their job because the processes are smooth and easy to use. If they know how to access information and services and it feels easy, you’re taking away that stress and cognitive load. This allows employees to focus on delivering a great product, a great service, and, most importantly, on delivering a great customer experience for your customers.

EX in action – UK Health Security Agency

Sophie Dennis is a Design Director who has spent the last two years scaling human-centred design at NHS Test & Trace from 0 to 120 people in just 18 months.

Why ‘customer centricity’ is relevant to the public sector

Sophie defined customer-centricity in the public sector as ‘prioritising creating value for the people they serve over other organisational considerations such as reputation, short-term profit, cost reduction, or delivery deadlines’. Improving the user experience of internal tools and systems used by the frontline customer-facing staff greatly impacts all other dimensions of the customer-centricity model.

To have the most impact on the employee experience, firstly, focus on improving the user experience of internal tools and systems used by frontline customer-facing staff. Secondly, focus on reducing friction for your own design and research team through practices like design and research ops, and operational tooling.

Improving internal tools and systems

In the NHS, the user experience of the software systems used by clinicians and support staff is just as important to the patient experience as the patient-facing digital tools. The ‘easy’ bit is putting the consistent front-end veneer on the customer-facing tools. However, eventually, the places where backend systems don’t join up prevent the NHS from offering patients the experience they need.

Not only does the staff experience of the systems they use every day directly impact patient experience, but it also affects patients in other ways, namely staff productivity and clinical quality and safety.

The issue with the NHS is not just that there aren’t enough staff, it’s that they don’t have the infrastructure needed to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. There is chronic underinvestment in IT and digital, from basic equipment to usability of bespoke and custom software. In some departments, small improvements to IT would have a massive leveraging effect.

The impact of usability on clinical quality and safety can be a really serious issue. The quality of clinical decision-making depends on doctors and clinicians being able to access and absorb large quantities of information quickly. They need to be able to see key patient information all in one place. However, patient records are held in multiple locations meaning they have to log into multiple systems separately to access a patient’s information. Sadly when doctors don’t get that information because all the systems they’re using aren’t usable, this has led to tragic incidents where patient safety was seriously compromised through poor usability.