Understand your employee’s experience
If you want to improve your companies efficiency and create happier customers you need happy engaged employees. According to Qualtrics “Highly engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their companies than their less engaged counterparts.” To do that, you’ll want to find ways to improve the employee experience.
Understanding the employee’s journey and motivations and how they work in the day-to-day in your business is just as important if not more in some cases than your customers’ journey. I wondered if examining the company’s services, could I find activities and situations that exist during and in between interaction points (touchpoints) that would give me better insights into what the employees experiences are?
“Customers do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers. – Richard Branson
What does a service touchpoint map tell me?
Currently, the practical service design method covers touchpoints or places where the customer or staff interact so I can discover breakdowns in a companies workflow. For example, the ordering counter is a touchpoint, and not knowing what you want to order because you can’t see the menu until you are at the ordering counter is a breakdown. Normally, only focusing on just the touchpoints would leave out the employee’s experiences to what is actually happening.
The breakdowns and observations made along with opportunities given by the employees are all apart of their experiences. If I take a closer look I should be able to see what activities or situations caused the pain or gain in the employee’s experience. Knowing this does not let me know if the employee experience is good or bad but it may let me know where I need to dig deeper to find out if the employee is having a problem.
However, since I didn’t question them initially about why they are experiencing the pain or gain I won’t know how they feel about it until they confirm my observations.
What is the team telling me?
Since the service design map records only touchpoints and goals I’m concerned that maybe I’m not capturing the actions between each point. However, my map is informed by the employees directly involved with the particular scenario being investigated. It goes deep into observations, systems, and breakdown and opportunities all given by the staff. So was I able to capture some in-between moments? Yes, I think so.
I was also able to capture customer and employee interactions from the team’s point of view. This will help in improving customer engagement. I’ll have to do some customer interviews to get both sides of the interaction but that’s for a later post.
What I know now
I need to know if the situation is a good or bad experience. This will require talking to the employee and taking them through the journey map so they can tell me if they are enjoying the experience at a particular touchpoint or situation. I only have breakdowns but I don’t know the details that brought about those breakdowns and how that affects the employee.
Using a standard journey map restricts the number of situations you can capture for and in between touchpoints. However, grouping all of the situations could lead to an overall theme you could use to represent a situation. In that way, the journey map will help in the ability to isolate and address issues that will improve the employee experience.
A practical service design map can help capture more observations, breakdowns in the workflow, and paint a more holistic picture of the overall journey.
How will this help with employee experience?
Companies that have happy employees have 3 times the revenue growth compared to companies that don’t.
Ted Talk
Your team’s motivation and commitment require ownership. One good way to give them that engagement is by letting them create solutions to their own pain points that the journey map has discovered. A unique way to do that is by having a decision jam workshop. It’s a quick workshop that creates actionable results in about 2 hours. Your team will have a valuable action plan that benefits your team and the business. They will also benefit by learning leadership and critical thinking skills.
Taking a deeper look into your employees day to day experiences and understanding that there are activities and situations in their journey that exist during and in between interactions with the business will help you improve their work-life, find their areas for motivation, and improve customer engagement.
