3 Insights for Driving a Holistic, Multi-Dimensional Employee Experience

From onboarding to job promotion, relocation to separation, the employee journey is marked with major moments, and HR leaders have long known that supporting employees through these moments matters—a lot. But in an era marked by “quiet quitting” (aka disengagement) and rising employee expectations, as well as radical shifts in ways of working, “it’s the everyday little moments that count, too,” said Ellie Bernasconi, Workday product marketing manager. “It can be something as simple as finding your first mentor or taking time off if you’re feeling burnt out, or even submitting an expense report and having it be a smooth and easy experience.”

While capital-m moments are easy to spot, it can be far harder for time-strapped HR teams to identify the subtle-yet-significant everyday moments that matter to employees, let alone proactively offer tailored support. To ease that burden, organisations are increasingly leveraging workforce technologies that aggregate wide-ranging employee data, such as demographic data, performance metrics, sentiment surveys, behaviours, interactions, and skills data. And they’re applying sophisticated data analytics to that workforce data, in order to surface insights that spur specific actions. 

More than 4 in 5 business leaders (83%) believe that leveraging worker data to create benefits for both the organisation and its workers is important or very important to their organisations’ success, according to the Deloitte 2023 Global Human Capital Trends report. And fully half of HR leaders are focusing on positive employee experience to accelerate transformation across their business, according to the Workday survey “Closing the Acceleration Gap: Toward Sustainable Digital Transformation.” 

“When it comes to the employee experience, we see that 73% of organisations are rating their ability to create positive digital experiences as either fair or poor,” said Cormac Kelly, product manager, Workday. “So it’s quite clear we’re falling short, even for the most foundational things.” 

As organisations look to unlock the full value of their workforce data and better the employee experience across moments big and small, what should they consider? At Workday Rising Europe, Bernasconi and Kelly shared insights on using a holistic lens and proactive stance for maximum benefit.

Fully Understanding Your People Demands Unified Data

Simple demographic data might do the trick if you’re looking to celebrate employee birthdays or work anniversaries. But it falls short if you’re trying to discern how they feel about a new workplace policy or their current workload, how their productivity or engagement is trending over time, what their ambitions and interests are—and any number of other things. 

“How do you listen to learn what they’re concerned about in the moment?” Kelly asked. “The answer is to look for engagement data and engagement insights from areas that aren’t necessarily transactional.”

That means eschewing the annual employee survey in favour of intelligent listening tools that actively monitor the pulse of employee preferences, perceptions, and sentiment with more multi-dimensional, of-the-moment data collection. With Workday Peakon Employee Voice, for instance, semantic search uses advanced natural language processing to swiftly analyse and surface trends in employee comments. Bernasconi noted that “it gets to the bottom of how employees are feeling in your organisation” without requiring intensive manual review by managers or HR. 

The more workforce data you can unify and analyse, the more comprehensive the employee picture becomes. To gauge whether the current hybrid work policies are working, for instance, employee sentiment and engagement scores add a vital dimension to the analysis. But can you securely ingest badge-swipe data on which employees are coming into the office and when? Can you layer in calendar data to gauge how much time people are spending in online meetings? When those data sets are unified—rather than stuck in data silos—”that holistic view enables people teams to actually ensure their strategy is tailored and personalised to what employees want,” Bernasconi said.

Supporting Managers Matters, Too

Self-service experiences for employees, as well as automated nudges and reminders built right into their flow of work, can bolster the employee experience without placing additional burden on HR. But it’s vital that workforce tools acknowledge and elevate the role that managers play, with “a centralised space to discover information for themselves, increasing their own productivity as well as helping them to support their teams,” Kelly said. 

A centralised dashboard enables managers to see everything they need related to their team, including worker skills and sentiment scores, as well as actionable insights to help them better engage and grow employees. Imagine, for instance, an employee searching for information on parental leave, who receives personalised guidance on how to kick off that process. His manager would also receive personalised content to support the employee and the team in the coming months. 

If, as the parental leave approaches, the team is feeling overworked, a centralised dashboard would both surface that insight and make recommendations on how to address the issue before it becomes acute. Spared from the risk of analysis paralysis, the manager can take swift action, such as opening a case to ask about hiring contingent workers. And, after the parental leave is complete, both the employee and manager receive content that’s personalised to support them in this transition.  

Case Management Can Be a Treasure Trove for Continuous Improvement

Less is often the goal with case management. And, indeed, Workday recently introduced dynamic suggestions in the case-creation process, so that employees are presented with more relevant content that might answer the question that’s driving them to open a case in the first place. But if you’re mainly focused on case volume, you could be overlooking serious workforce insights—and the opportunity to take action.

When Rochester Regional Health brought its case data into a Workday discovery board, for instance, it was able to create a heat map of their top case types by quarter. “This has really helped them spot trends and map their resourcing,” said Kelly. 

Another Workday customer, Nutreco, uses case flags so that any time a case solver spots a potential gap in content, they can easily generate a notification to the content managers. “This is a win-win for everyone,” Kelly noted. “Employees become more self-sufficient, which they prefer, and our HR teams continuously make improvements that reduce the volume of cases and improve the quality of content.”

Organisations can unlock similar insights—and take proactive actions—by analysing their own metrics on types of cases, using case labels to track topics, or using case flags to trigger quality reviews. 

Continuous improvement isn’t limited to the realm of case management, of course. As more organisations implement workforce technologies to keep pace with shifting employee needs and wants, the need for novel use cases and new features will likely evolve. That’s something that Kelly welcomes, as he argued that the future of work will be rooted in co-creation. “So please do get involved—in brainstorms, in focus groups, in discussions,” he said. “And a big shout-out to our early-adopter customers who were absolutely essential, with their advice and insights, in helping us to get to where we are today.”