HOW to OPTIMISE your EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

STRATEGY

AS A COMPANY you NEED TO GET TO THE FUTURE FIRST ahead OF YOUR CUSTOMERS and BE READY TO GREET THEM WHEN THEY arrive Marc Benioff, Co-CEO, Salesforce

CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION – REALITY BITES: NOT ALL TRANSFORMATIONS ARE EQUAL

2. RENOVATE3. EVOLVE4. TRANSCEND5. HOW DO YOU ACTUALLY

TRANSFORM

HOW TO GUIDE 4

Years down the line and we are in the grips of that change. Digital tools, machine learning and increased automation are prevalent technologies and yet, while many enterprises and organisations are sold on the idea of change, the success of employee engagement and digital transformation projects to date, have been mixed.

A McKinsey poll showed last year, only 14 percent of 1,733 execs surveyed, said their transformation projects have sustained performance improvements, with only three percent reporting complete success at sustaining change. It’s a shocking return from a process that is intended to deliver lasting benefits to businesses and employees.

As Brian Solis, principal analyst at Altimeter says in his State of Digital Transformation Report 2019, “it’s clear that digital transformation is maturing into an enterprise-wide movement,” and “what’s also evident is that there is still much work to do as companies are, by and large, prioritising technology over grasping the disruptive trends that are influencing markets and, more specifically, customer and employee behaviours and expectations.”

To understand this, organisations really need to grasp the fundamentals of what makes employee engagement successful. As we stride forward into this fourth industrial revolution, picking our way through leading-edge technologies and trying to work out where they fit, it’s important to remember first and foremost, what do employees really want?

REALITY BITES: NOT ALL TRANSFORMATIONS ARE EQUAL“We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work and relate to one another,” wrote Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the World Economic Forum in 2015.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION REQUIRES MIXING PEOPLE, MACHINES AND BUSINESS PROCESSES, WITH ALL THE MESSINESS THAT ENTAILS. Harvard Business Review

Should businesses focus on employees, customers or technology? Or, perhaps, all three? What drives decision making and how can organisations really thrive in the fourth industrial revolution?

In this ‘How To’ guide we want to help identify common types of change. There are characteristics, states of mind, that determine the path to change, and whether or not it is successful. Understanding where an organisation

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Changing your perspective on employees

The first step to take is to reposition your approach to your employees. Just as all good businesses put the customer at the centre of all of their work, a good employer must consider their employees as their customers too.

In the same way that you empathise with your customer, understand their specific needs and engender loyalty, it makes sense to take the same approach with your employees. Understanding their needs, recognising where improvements can be made and listening to both their issues and ideas are just some of the ways you can change the way your business thinks about your most prized asset.

This simple shift in perspective will help reposition your approach. This will then influence those around you and begin to develop a culture that will prove to be a powerful catalyst in your transformational development. Encouraging the creation of intrepreneurs will allow for the entrepreneur mindset and culture to grow within your organisation and ensure that employees are open and responsive to new ideas and concepts.

Embracing new technology and the ways of working that come with this will provide staff with the platform to fulfill their potential. By listening to employee requests and fulfilling technological upgrades and optimisations, you can unlock previously untapped capabilities within your workforce. This can also open your business up to explore new employment opportunities and help you to bridge societal gaps.

In essence, you’re looking to drive engagement with your employees. The more engaged they are, then the more productive, invested and loyal they become. It won’t, however, work in isolation. Engagement is delivered through the combination of culture, data and tech.

Culture + Data + Tech = Engagement As we progress through this guide, we’ll see how each element can drive your employee engagement transformation and meet staff demands for an advanced working environment. We’ll discover how it can run alongside your digital transformation and, ultimately, through treating your employees as customers, we’ll see how it positively impacts on your relationships with your customers.

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How do organisations achieve employee engagement transformation? How do they digitally transform? With employee expectations changing, the basics remain the same – job security and satisfaction, remuneration and career path – and other factors are coming into play that must be considered. Culture, technology, diversity and inclusion. Employees are clearly looking for a more holistic experience from their working environment.

Clearly, technology is pivotal for organisations to transform employee experience. What we have found notable is that this question conceals a variety of different mindsets about what transformation means and how it can be implemented.

This becomes particularly pertinent as employees start to grasp new ways of working, in particular digital and mobile working.

We have bracketed these mindsets into three phases, to create a clearer understanding of the challenges each approach faces. We have called these phases, Renovate, Evolve and Transcend.

Renovate + Evolve = Transcend

Below we explore these ideas in greater depth.

Mind games: Three schools of transformational thought

It is now apparent that the future of work is rapidly changing and as employees demand increasingly flexible and digital working environments, employers need to be able to provide them.

This represents a challenge for employers to adapt to, but if done correctly and smoothly can engender renewed trust and engagement from staff.

YOU can SELF-TEST USING the QUESTIONS in THE PANEL at the START OF each SECTION TO DETERMINE what IS your TRANSFORMATIONAL phase.

Self test section

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RENOVATE

The Renovate phase is characterised by the question, how do we optimise our existing way of doing things? If your relationship with your employees is a transactional relationship and you’re focussing on an incremental improvement in existing business practices, then this phase will never achieve successful transformation that impacts and scales across an entire organisation.

Companies often invest in the latest digital systems in the hopes of forcing through scale and success, without realising that optimising their existing technology can achieve the same if not greater results at a fraction of the price. This incremental rather than transformational change can achieve strong results but also maintain employee engagement and focus as they are not having to grasp new systems or processes.

Even if you’re looking to achieve these improvements through the use of more up-to-date digital tools. It is a defensive, conservative strategy, where organisations believe they can use digital technologies to drive efficiencies hoping that ‘normal’ business resumes.

Is this your phase?

1. Are you focused on implementing the latest technology innovations?

3. Is your aim to optimise existing business ideas

and processes, to reduce costs and drive

productivity?

4. Is your relationship with your employees

transactional?

2. Do you see the fourth industrial revolution as the latest wave in technology innovation, an upgrade?

HOW TO GUIDE 9

To really get to grips with digital transformation, organisations need to not only embrace the idea that the customer needs to be at the centre of everything they do, but also that they are beginning to engage their employees like a customer. Most, if not all businesses would probably argue they are already customer-centric. But are they? Do they offer exceptional customer experience by providing amazing service before and after a transaction? Are they offering greater personalisation and more highly valued, connected experiences across channels? Are they feeding back and analysing the customer data to continually improve those experiences? Equally, most companies would say they are engaging their employees, but at what level? Are they trying to understand them in the same way that they would work hard to understand your customer? Are they looking beyond engagement around process and asking their employees what they need to achieve their goals?

Are they moving away from focussing on the process, shifting their emphasis to their customer while meeting the customer needs by motivating and inspiring the employees?

It’s no longer enough to have a great product at a great price. Eight out of 10 customers say that the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services, so, every organisation needs to refocus on customer requirements and customer experience. The people in the business are the ones who will sell the product, look after the customer and deliver customer experience, so why not improve your engagement with them too. By putting the customer at the centre and treating your employees as a customer, organisations can start to rethink their structures and better understand their priorities.

To make this all possible, there are four key muscle groups that need to be followed:

• Sense and respond

• Ensuring that you have one team working in response to the customer

• Enabling customers with the right business processes

• Utilising the leanest possible technology stack Ideally, their EX begins before they even join the business and continues as they progress through hiring, introductions, evaluations, training and promotion. How they experience these various touch points with the business at both key stages, and everyday, is a measure of the Employee Experience.

Employee Engagement is the business proactively involving the employees in processes, development and evolution of the business. This may be to improve the EX, to drive innovation or to establish new employee-driven processes.

WE VIEW THE EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE (EX) AS THE EXPERIENCE THEY HAVE THROUGH THE CAREER JOURNEY WITH A COMPANY.

How to migrate from Renovate to Evolve?

“Customer experience is the key competitive differentiator in the Digital Age.” Wall Street Journal.

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The key to sense and respond is real-time data. To truly understand the employee and customer needs and react quickly, organisations need a slick data infrastructure.

For most organisations this will also mean a cultural shift, from big bang roll-outs of the past to continuous release of data-driven customer insights of the present. This will create a working culture of transparency, sharing, collaboration and empowerment.

With a single view of customers, all departments can work within strategy to drive customer experience and value. And as customer needs change, as they will do, often rapidly, the organisation has the ability to react quickly and efficiently. From an employee perspective, discovering the insights required used to be an annual exercise, but that’s no longer going to improve your employee engagement. A key question to ask is, are businesses getting actionable insights about employee pain points across the organisation without waiting for annual survey results?

In the absence of in-depth organisational assessments, the quickest way to understand what’s working and what’s not is a pulse survey. It’s a fast and frequent process done every few weeks with employees to gather immediate insights into the health of a team, business unit, or company.

To stay in touch and be able to react with speed, businesses need to keep employees connected from anywhere with mobile-first experiences. It’s not only important for employees to access vital information wherever they go, the same way they do in their personal lives, but also so they can respond to queries and pulse surveys with ease.

Sense and respond

A mobile-first workspaces provide a great way to put everything they need at their fingertips. This also helps connect every employee to the company’s mission. The employee alignment initiative is using EX to align employers with what employees need and want. And this rethinking of convention will inspire employees to bring their A-game to work every day, and ultimately surpass expectations.

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Organisations need to abandon the silo structures inherited from the early 20th century – with rigid divisions between sales, marketing, service and production – and instead adopt a more flexible and flatter team structure.

This means moving towards collaboration and shared success metrics. It makes sense for this modern data economy. If organisations need to focus on customers, they need their employees to be engaged, collaborating, innovating and all pulling in the same direction.

Employees need to be empowered with digital tools to enable them to work within a flatter structure. The socialisation of the workplace has been having an impact for some years now and although some businesses have resisted the idea, social tools are key.

So using employee experience to bolster cross-functional enablement can be transformative in preventing lapses in communication and support. The result? A seamless experience that translates into greater customer satisfaction and increased referrals.

As a McKinsey report shows, communications tools, for example, are changing internal working practices. They are enabling increased collaboration, motivating employees to deliver innovations and be empathetic with customers through shared ideas and experiences.

This builds loyalty and trust within the company, as well as job satisfaction.

It means the focus is on delivering for the customer and not the shareholder. While traditionally shareholder interests have dominated company direction, today shareholders should be just one of many stakeholders.

Ensuring that you have one team working in response to the customer

The reality is that no matter what the employee does, sales, marketing, product, or customer success, they overlap to various degrees for every customer.

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How do companies build trust with customers? If expectation and execution are not aligned, trust will be undermined. Interestingly, 86 percent of brands think they’re ‘on par’ or ahead of competitors in execution but just seven percent of customers think brands are exceeding their expectations.

Businesses need to pivot, from being product-centric to being customer-centric and employee-engaged. This means less focus on processes such as supply optimisation, scaling through standardisation, transactions and transaction volumes. More focus instead should be placed on demand sensing and aggregation, personalisation and connected experiences for both customers and employees.

It’s a major shift in approach delivering transformation in tandem by using data analytics to inform decision making across the business and the business leveraging human capital to achieve new levels of growth and innovation. By understanding your employees and your customers, their habits and desires, businesses can gear their planning so that the ultimate customer expectations are met.

It’s about using the latest digital tools to create a data rich organisation that can then analyse patterns and predict demand, enhance productivity and develop cross-business communication and engagement. This will not only inform, for example, product strategy, it will also determine work throughout the entire organisation.

Developing the businesses engagement with employees begins long-before day one. This is when potential employees are exposed to your stories, culture and innovation. They’ll know and understand from these early touch-points how much the business focuses on the customer. They’ll also be aware of how much the business trusts their employees to achieve it. This is where the employee experience (EX) begins. Through this engagement, businesses will be able to identify intrapreneurs and change agents who can help you do more to nurture and influence new thinking around your customer-centric processes.

That EX extends to their training too. If the business is focusing on customer-centric business processes, learning and discovering more about the customer can be turned into a more engaging and impactful exercise by gamifying the training process. To be customer-centric, every employee in the organisation will require different skills and information to fill current and future performance gaps. That means getting employees the information they need to do their jobs, providing scalable online training programmes, and keeping everyone abreast of, for example, important regulatory and compliance issues.

Enabling customers with the right business process

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How do you become an intelligent enterprise, sensing, connecting and responding in real-time to customer and employee needs? This is what businesses need to aim for, to ensure they remain focussed and do not drift back into old habits.

The tech stack is key here. Where businesses were once ERP-centric, they should now be CRM-centric. The focus should be on cross system integration through APIs, with business analyst tools driving customer intelligence throughout the organisation. It’s about reducing complexity while enabling innovation for your employees.

This is a shift from traditional IT department control. We are already starting to see IT spend across business units, as employees determine which tools are most suited to their needs. Organisations need infrastructures to enable this to happen without undermining the overall goal of providing a single view of the customer.

Integrating different parts of the stack is therefore crucial but it should be through APIs and low code tech, not developer-led projects that demand bespoke expertise.

Utilising the leanest possible technology stack

This should shift the overall focus of IT within an organisation, increasing transparency and scalability. The net result should be that procurement plans are able to be aligned with real-time customer data, informing decision making and ensuring customer focus – ultimately improving the employee experience.

These low-code solutions should empower and inform the employee to make decisions. They need to enable employees to get the support they need quickly without waiting for a response from IT or HR help desk specialists.

COMMERCIALE

EXCELLENCE DU SERVICE CLIENT

ENGAGEMENT PARTENAIRES

OBJETSCONNECTÉS

Vision 360° client

Stratégie de compte

Campagne marketing personnalisée

Gestion des opportunités et des leads

Prévisions des ventes et pilotage

Configuration /Tarification (*)

Devis / Approbation Réponse RFP collaborative

Service client Omnicanal

Gestion des retours

Ventes des contrats de services : SLA, maintenance prédictive, “pay as you use”, etc

Interventions terrain

Evaluation, recrutement et animation de l’écosystème

Contenu personnalisé : formation, lead, opportunités, gestion de projets

Commerce et Intégration des partenaires, distributeurs, points de ventes devis, accès commandes ERP, facturation, etc.

Récompenses, commissions, fidélité, opérations spéciales (*)

Analyse données clients, marchés et données externes

App Factory : développer des applications pour les métiers, les clients et l’Industrie du futur

Moteur de règles et déclenchement d’actions, fortes volumétries (*)

Nouveaux modèles et nouveaux services pour les consommateurs finaux

Integrating employee self-service tools will provide an immediate, conversational interface for automating routine queries. From recruitment and HR service delivery, to routine help desk support, these should all be a part of the self-service mix.

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EVOLVEImagining customer-centric and employee-focused innovations is easy but transforming the organisation to deliver that sort of change is really difficult. While a disruptor in the Transcend phase can build an organisation fit for that purpose, an incumbent business has a different challenge. It’s already established, with departments, processes and legacy technology.

This demands an Evolve mindset, one that can find a way to connect business models, new products and services and make both customer experience and employee experience improvements. In this phase companies can work towards aligning and executing change by transforming existing business culture and organisational capabilities. By understanding the need to implement change throughout the entire operation, using new technologies where they are most applicable, this phase understands digital transformation is not a sprint.

Listening and collaborating with employees who the business views as key customers is also important. Analysing all the data from employees and customers to pull the customer to the centre of your business is a huge step in the Evolve phase. Being more proactive and agile in approach and responses to both employees and customers can make a significant impact to how deep and quickly a business transforms.

Is this your phase?

1. Are you focused on implementing the latest technology innovations?

2. Do you see the fourth industrial revolution as the latest wave in technology innovation, an upgrade?

3. Is your aim to optimise existing business ideas

and processes, to reduce costs and drive

productivity?

HOW TO GUIDE 15

What does evolve look like when you get there

You’ve decided to transform and migrate towards an Evolve mindset but how do you know what it actually looks like?

If you have truly evolved, you should be able to:

• Use customer experience as a brand differentiator

• Understand what both your employees need and customers want

• React with relevant experiences

• Listen to the internal and external customer across the organisation, regardless of role

• Make customer service and employee experience part of your onboarding process

• Integrate data into your creation of a 360 view of your customer

• Bring all parts of your business around a single customer

• Communicate customer insights back to your employees and listen to responses

• Reward and recognise both your customer and your employee

• Connect your employees around your customers and inspire innovation

WHEN COMPANIES ENGAGE AND RESPOND TO CUSTOMER SERVICE REQUESTS OVER SOCIAL MEDIA, THOSE CUSTOMERS END UP SPENDING 20% TO 40% MORE MONEY WITH THE COMPANY. Bain & Company

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Is this your phase?TRANSCEND

The Transcend phase is one that most successful entrepreneurs have today. It demands new ways of thinking, considers all employees as collaborators and solution finders, creates new opportunities and re-envisages customer and employee experience as well as value. These leaders and their companies are re-defining their markets, focusing on employees, customers and leveraging the latest technologies and tools to make it possible.

The approach to transformation is simple. Be bold with new technologies, such as machine learning and IoT, to generate new opportunities. Of course, any leader that wants to be a successful, market-leading business 10 years from now, must sooner rather than later aggressively embrace this ambitious phase.

1. Are you focused on implementing the latest technology innovations?

2. Do you see the fourth industrial revolution as the latest wave in technology innovation, an upgrade?

3. Is your aim to optimise existing business ideas

and processes, to reduce costs and drive

productivity?

HOW TO GUIDE 17

Transcend the focus on customers and employees

Businesses that reach an Evolve state may want to embrace Transcend to drive creativity and disruption but how do you do this and what does it look like?

The question any business needs to ask itself is, “How do we create customer value and employee experience in new ways?”

Understanding customers and how they interact with products and services should inform product and service development. Every customer believes they are transcendent but it depends entirely on what they are trying to do as to how much they are able to create success from it.

This means that maximising your employees experience, insight and innovations to deliver improved product and service is increasingly important.

With customer intelligence, organisations can build better products and innovative services that feed into the current customer narrative. They are more likely to sell and more likely to improve customer experience and loyalty. That, combined with the inputs from engaged employees, can prove to be invaluable. The common approach to customer value is this – Perceived Value = Perceived Benefits / Cost – but you need to shift the dynamic by adding the customer experience and supporting it all with the engaged employee. It should actually read:

Perceived Value =

Perceived Benefits / Cost x

Customer Experience

__________________

Engaged

Employees

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A recent report from Gallup found that 85 percent of U.S. employees self-report as being disengaged, while a LinkedIn report found that 90 percent of employees are open to new job opportunities. Businesses need to evolve quickly, understand the pressures but more importantly recognise and execute the opportunities.

In this document we have outlined key differences in mindset but also identified one core principle; customer centricity underpinned by engaged employees is the key to potential success.

As organisations enter into digital transformation projects it is worth bearing this in mind. If your transformation is not geared towards improving customer experience and employee experience, is it actually worth doing it at all?

To digitally transform effectively organisations should:

• Build custom apps to drive employee experience easily and quickly through cloud services

• Utilise employees knowledge and experience to develop the customer experience

• Breakdown the barriers of collaboration and communication to build a fully engaged employee base

• Train staff through an online learning platform, such as Trailhead, which provides in demand skills and empowers staff to be ready to thrive in the fourth industrial revolution as well as offering invaluable experience based learning

• Provide sales teams the power to close deals, increase productivity, fill pipeline with solid leads, and score more wins without software, hardware, or speed limits

• Enable you to enhance your customer support from call-centre software to self- service portals – get more responsive, intuitive, and flexible service solutions that help you anticipate your customers’ needs

HOW DO YOU ACTUALLY TRANSFORM

• Build and deliver 1-to-1 [or personalised] customer journeys powered by an intelligent marketing platform for email, mobile, social, digital advertising and data management

• Connect any app, data, or device, whether in the cloud or on-premises, in one place. And bring data from any system, like SAP, Oracle, Workday, and more, directly into your core management system

• Make more intelligent, data-driven decisions that guide your business forward

To learn more about how you can deliver a superior employee experience, visit: www.salesforce.com/products/platform/solutions/employee-experience/