Employee experience design

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Employee experience design (EED or EXD) is the application of experience design in order to intentionally design HR products, services, events, and organizational environments with a focus on the quality of the employee experience whilst providing relevant solutions for an organization.

Contents

Overview

EED can be described as the "intentional design of the active or passive use of HR products or services", [1] and employee experiences in general, that affect employees' emotional reaction and therefore their particular behaviors and loyalty. [2]

The underlying assumption is that best (customer/employee) relationships are emotional in nature and achieved when companies succeed in not only satisfying certain needs (e.g. compensation), but also making interactions pleasurable. [2] [3]

The goal is to yield better customer experience through increased employee engagement and employee empowerment. [4] Following Krippendorf, EED focuses on creating meaningful and sense-making opportunities for engagement, [5] and addressing aspirational [4] and fundamental psychological needs of an employee, such as autonomy, competence and relatedness. [6]

Methods

Related to design strategy, EED is a participatory systems approach to workplace improvements that applies methods and principles of experience design, such as design thinking, co-creation and empathic design [1] and new digital tools and technologies. It also uses tools and techniques that are typical to customer experience management and service design, e.g. employee experience journey mapping [7] or touchpoint analysis.

Primary design object is the employee experience, which – when successful – an employee finds unique, memorable and sustainable over time, would want to repeat and build upon, and enthusiastically promotes via word of mouth. [3] It is suspected to encourage loyalty by creating an emotional connection through engaging, compelling, and consistent context. [2] The categories for employee experience design context are products, processes, artefacts, content, space and interactions. [1]

While employee experience design is beneficial to create positive customer experiences, it is also beneficial for non-customer-facing roles.

Many elements can make up a successful employee experience, including office environment, reward and benefits, flexible working and casual dress policies.

Stakeholders

Human resource management, operating across hierarchies and departments, plays a central role in design, distribution and delivery of EED. As co-creation is an important design principle, it is a shared task and joint responsibility of leadership, HR professionals and employees. [1] Following the logic of the service-profit chain, beneficiaries are also customers, as the recipients of improved service quality and the organization itself through increased profits. [8]

Related Research Articles

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marketing</span> Study and process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to customers

Marketing is the process of identifying customers and "creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging" goods and services for the satisfaction and retention of those customers. It is one of the primary components of business management and commerce.

In business, a competitive advantage is an attribute that allows an organization to outperform its competitors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Services marketing</span> Branch of marketing specialised in services

Services marketing is a specialized branch of marketing which emerged as a separate field of study in the early 1980s, following the recognition that the unique characteristics of services required different strategies compared with the marketing of physical goods.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Customer service</span> Provision of service to customers

Customer service is the assistance and advice provided by a company to those people who buy or use its products or services. Each industry requires different levels of customer service, but towards the end, the idea of a well-performed service is that of increasing revenues. The perception of success of the customer service interactions is dependent on employees "who can adjust themselves to the personality of the customer". Customer service is often practiced in a way that reflects the strategies and values of a firm. Good quality customer service is usually measured through customer retention. Customer service for some firms is part of the firm’s intangible assets and can differentiate it from others in the industry. One good customer service experience can change the entire perception a customer holds towards the organization.

Relationship marketing is a form of marketing developed from direct response marketing campaigns that emphasizes customer retention and satisfaction rather than sales transactions. It differentiates from other forms of marketing in that it recognises the long-term value of customer relationships and extends communication beyond intrusive advertising and sales promotional messages. With the growth of the Internet and mobile platforms, relationship marketing has continued to evolve as technology opens more collaborative and social communication channels such as tools for managing relationships with customers that go beyond demographics and customer service data collection. Relationship marketing extends to include inbound marketing, a combination of search optimization and strategic content, public relations, social media and application development.

The loyalty business model is a business model used in strategic management in which company resources are employed so as to increase the loyalty of customers and other stakeholders in the expectation that corporate objectives will be met or surpassed. A typical example of this type of model is: quality of product or service leads to customer satisfaction, which leads to customer loyalty, which leads to profitability.

<i>Emotional Design</i> Book by American writer Donald Norman

Emotional Design is both the title of a book by Donald Norman and of the concept it represents.

Service design is the activity of planning and arranging people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality, and the interaction between the service provider and its users. Service design may function as a way to inform changes to an existing service or create a new service entirely.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brand loyalty</span> Marketing term for a consumers emotional attachment to a given brand

In marketing, brand loyalty describes a consumer's positive feelings towards a brand and their dedication to purchasing the brand's products and/or services repeatedly regardless of deficiencies, a competitor's actions, or changes in the environment. It can also be demonstrated with other behaviors such as positive word-of-mouth advocacy. Corporate brand loyalty is where an individual buys products from the same manufacturer repeatedly and without wavering, rather than from other suppliers. Loyalty implies dedication and should not be confused with habit, its less-than-emotional engagement and commitment. Businesses whose financial and ethical values rest in large part on their brand loyalty are said to use the loyalty business model.

Co-creation, in the context of a business, refers to a product or service design process in which input from consumers plays a central role from beginning to end. Less specifically, the term is also used for any way in which a business allows consumers to submit ideas, designs or content. This way, the firm will not run out of ideas regarding the design to be created and at the same time, it will further strengthen the business relationship between the firm and its customers. Another meaning is the creation of value by ordinary people, whether for a company or not. The first person to use the "Co-" in "co-creation" as a marketing prefix was Koichi Shimizu, professor of Josai University, in 1979. In 1979, "co-marketing" was introduced at the Japan Society of Commerce's national conference. Everything with "Co" comes from here.

In marketing, a customer value proposition (CVP) consists of the sum total of benefits which a vendor promises a customer will receive in return for the customer's associated payment.

A touchpoint can be defined as any way consumers can interact with a business organization, whether it be person-to-person, through a website, an app or any form of communication. When consumers come in contact with these touchpoints it gives them the opportunity to compare their prior perceptions of the business and form an opinion.

Customer engagement is an interaction between an external consumer/customer and an organization through various online or offline channels. According to Hollebeek, Srivastava and Chen S-D logic-Definition of customer engagement is "a customer’s motivationally driven, volitional investment of operant resources, and operand resources into brand interactions," which applies to online and offline engagement.

In marketing, a company’s value proposition is the full mix of benefits or economic value which it promises to deliver to the current and future customers who will buy their products and/or services. It is part of a company's overall marketing strategy which differentiates its brand and fully positions it in the market. A value proposition can apply to an entire organization, parts thereof, customer accounts, or products and services.

Customer retention refers to the ability of a company or product to retain its customers over some specified period. High customer retention means customers of the product or business tend to return to, continue to buy or in some other way not defect to another product or business, or to non-use entirely. Selling organizations generally attempt to reduce customer defections. Customer retention starts with the first contact an organization has with a customer and continues throughout the entire lifetime of a relationship and successful retention efforts take this entire lifecycle into account. A company's ability to attract and retain new customers is related not only to its product or services, but also to the way it services its existing customers, the value the customers actually perceive as a result of utilizing the solutions, and the reputation it creates within and across the marketplace.


Customer experience is the totality of cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioral customer responses during all stages of the consumption process including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase stages.

Fan loyalty is the loyalty felt and expressed by a fan towards the object of his/her fanaticism. Fan Loyalty is often used in the context of sports and the support of a specific team or institution. Fan loyalties can range from a passive support to radical allegiance and expressions of loyalty can take shape in many forms and be displayed across varying platforms. Fan loyalty can be threatened by team actions. The loyalties of sports fans in particular have been studied by psychologists, who have determined several factors that help to create such loyalties.

Operations management for services has the functional responsibility for producing the services of an organization and providing them directly to its customers. It specifically deals with decisions required by operations managers for simultaneous production and consumption of an intangible product. These decisions concern the process, people, information and the system that produces and delivers the service. It differs from operations management in general, since the processes of service organizations differ from those of manufacturing organizations.

Consumer value is used to describe a consumer's strong relative preference for certain subjectively evaluated product or service attributes.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Menzel-Black, C. & Völkl, C. (2014). "Nach Bedarf designt". Personalmagazin. doi:10.13140/2.1.3054.4001.
  2. 1 2 3 Pullman, M. E. & Gross, M. A. (2014). "Ability of Experience Design Elements to Elicit Emotions and Loyalty Behaviors". Decision Sciences. 35 (3): 551–578. doi:10.1111/j.0011-7315.2004.02611.x.
  3. 1 2 Pine, J. & Gilmore, J. (1998). "The Experience Economy". Harvard Business Review. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
  4. 1 2 Ramaswamy, V. (2009). "Leading the transformation to co-creation of value". Strategy & Leadership. 37 (2): 32–37. doi:10.1108/10878570910941208.
  5. ↑ Krippendorff, K. (1989). "On the essential contexts of artifacts or on the proposition that" design is making sense (of things)". Design Issues. 5 (2): 9–39. doi:10.2307/1511512. JSTOR   1511512.
  6. ↑ Sheldon, K. M.; Elliot, A. J.; Kim, Y. & Kasser, T. (2001). "What is satisfying about satisfying events? Testing 10 candidate psychological needs". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 80 (2): 325–39. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.455.2278 . doi:10.1037/0022-3514.80.2.325. PMID   11220449.
  7. ↑ Oracle Human Capital Management (2014). "An Employee Centric Approach To HR – Employee Experience Journey Mapping (EXJM)" (PDF).
  8. ↑ Heskett, J. L. & Schlesinger, L. A. (1994). "Putting the service-profit chain to work" (PDF). Harvard Business Review. 72 (2): 164–174. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-01-22. Retrieved 2014-11-03.
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