E to ME: Personalizing workforce experience

The world of work

With experts predicting up to 44% of workers are planning to change jobs, there’s no room for error in making the right HR technology investments. Not only is the employee experience at stake, progressive employers are looking to their technology partners to be agile, responsive, and innovative business partners.

There's a new wave of HR technology innovation upon us, and it's bigger than anything we've seen before. The big shift in HR tech is that the solutions are no longer about HR — they’re about work, life, humans — how we function and thrive. HR is learning how to better leverage technology to not only manage the workforce, mitigate risk, and operationalize compliance but to deliver learning, skills, holistic wellbeing, collaboration, communication, and leadership. In other words, HR tech is becoming LIFE TECH IN THE FLOW OF WORK. And the investments are only getting bigger.

Whatever we’re calling The Great Reassessment, it’s clear 2022 is the year of human-centered recovery strategies. This is truly The Year of the Human when it comes to work and workforce experience. We need to better understand the power of data for design and insights, technology as fuel for experience, and a whole person approach to sustain and nurture people. This whole person approach includes empowering human performance, and it also includes understanding what humans should perform and what is best left to machine learning, automation, and intelligence-assisted workflows. I often discuss the notion of “automate to humanate” for this very reason; automation, with the right intention, augments your workforce and fosters collaboration by adding and extending value, generating insights, making recommendations, and providing guidance.

We also need to remember we will soon be a world of digital natives. Yet many are still designing and using technology like digital immigrants – then wondering why we can’t “drive adoption” from our “end users.” Simply put, work needs to be digital. It needs to be human. And it needs to be personalized. Any solution delivering and supporting a holistic experience needs to be contextual, both individual and personalized, and focused on delivering individual performance outcomes. When people win, customers win. When customers win, business wins.

People-centered workforce experience and talent strategies

Let’s agree to have a fresh conversation around workforce experience. For some years now, we’ve touted employee experience as the Holy Grail of Human Capital Management, wondering how we could create efficiency of workforce services, talent management, and employee satisfaction. Unfortunately, we put graphical user interfaces (fancy name for a “skin”) over a back office HR system and called it “experience.” We did this without thinking about the new audience we were hoping to meet where they were; the employee.  We did worse by measuring user adoption of technology and tools, and we wondered why we didn’t see intended improvements or outputs.

A fundamental shift in our understanding of workforce experience — measuring how work gets done, how the act of getting work done makes people feel, and designing with humans at the center of data, technology, and business strategies — will get us to a place of measuring and delivering workforce experience design for human performance. And we mustn’t forget this experience is owed to and well-deserved by every part of your worker population: candidate, full- and part-time employee, gig worker, contingent labor, all. Obsess over the workforce experience as you would customer experience.

Well-designed workforce experience is personal

Well-designed human experience is personal, and by that, I mean personalized. Personalization of workforce experience recognizes who our employees are, uses data and other inputs to provide information or recommendations relevant to me, and continues to provide contextual information on my journey. When you design a personalized experience, it makes things more useful and easy, produces the right outcome quickly, and drives appreciation and engagement as a result.

Personalization means:

• Understanding and acting on what matters most to each individual
• Delivering targeted, relevant, tailored communication
• Providing contextual guidance in the flow of work

Personalization requires:

• Direct access to a comprehensive stream of employee data to deeply understand each individual and truly personalize the content, knowledge, journeys, and overall workforce experience based on what matters to them
• Proactive listening to augment the data you should or likely already have
• Breaking silos and shifting to a new HR operating model positioned to deliver seamless, holistic employee journeys

The new age of experience is here, and it is much more than just a skin or even a piece of technology.  A personalized approach to workforce experience design is an integrated, holistic way of ensuring each employee feels supported, empowered, and like they belong. It is an integrated, holistic way of realizing that humans are looking for connection to where they work and what they do. Finally, it is a world that brings together content, communications, transactions and information to allow people to be their best possible selves. The new age of experience is here— let’s bring it to life in a truly experiential, lovable way. 

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To learn more about personalizing your workforce experience, discover Oracle's employee experience perspective.

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