I recently had many exchanges and conversations around how to best approach Experience improvements. And as in these conversations, I am also happy to share here that during my beginnings in the Experience space I made many mistakes and wrong moves. But what is important is to learn, grow and get better with every opportunity, with every project or initiative where you got it wrong. – Experience is an Infinite Game🙂 And what is one of the most important pieces is to stay humble all along, and to listen and to always remember that you are not in it to “win”, not in it to proof everyone that you know it best.
When I started out in that space, I honestly was pretty sure I knew it all and creating a compelling Employee Experience is a simple task. But quickly I learned the hard way that others do not necessarily appreciate or follow everything you do, everything you believe is right. And so, my first steps in that space were pretty devastating as not really Employee Experience focused.
I learned from that and thought with a focus on what employees’ needs and wants are, I cannot go wrong and I will crack the Experience nut. Just needing to address what I believe their main issues and needs are and then success will come by itself – right? … wrong. This is still not how it works unfortunately, but hey – next try.
The secret I believe that is making the difference is to work WITH your employees/ your target group and not FOR them. Your target group knows the best what they need, when they need it and how they need it – whatever “it” is. And my learning is that they are very willing and excited to engage and work with you on prototypes to get to the right, targeted outcome. I find it amazing how much energy you can unlock with such approach and how superior the solutions will be that you can offer and deploy once you went through this process. It is amazing – and it is as amazing to over and over get proven wrong yourself, but also others that believe they “know what the employees/ targeted audience needs and wants”. Never fall for it (again), always go directly to the source and work with them. May it be in focus groups, workshops, design sessions or even later on in testing your solutions. It is amazing what kind of great ideas are generated like this. And it is not only such ideas – this approach is also the very best Change Management approach. With your involved employees you have the best Change Agents already recruited and they will be so excited to communicate, share, show & tell. And as they are part of your target audience anyways, they don’t need to think through how to best access this group or which change tools will work the best. They will intuitively know and use. And in turn you have landed a fabulous product with a fabulous success.
And what you have to do then is to celebrate, close out and repeat. Always remember why you have been so successful. And it was not because you knew it better or because you had the industry leading, best product. No. It is because you went to your target audience, engaged them, listened to them and prepared WITH them the best product they need – in a way that they can use it best. This is the key here. And therefore it is important to stay humble, stay open, be listening and work WITH your target audience to make it happen. – always remember: Not the best or superior product or solution will win, but the one that is focused on the needs of your audience and is also best and most simple utilized by this audience.
And not to forget what my fellow Experience practitioner Yojana said – learning and unlearning are both important to make a difference , every day.
Chief HR Officer 