For years, organisations have been placing an emphasis on Customer Experience (CX) to differentiate themselves and drive business success. At Purple Shirt we have had the privilege to help leading brands like Foodstuffs, ASB and Milford Asset Management to develop CX strategies and frameworks that align customer needs with business objectives, providing a comprehensive roadmap to focus their CX efforts.
More recently we've had People & Culture leaders tell us they have a similar need for a strategic approach to help tie together employee needs with business objectives and direct where and how they use their limited resources to provide the best experience possible for their people.
This got us thinking; what if we took the same Human Centred Design (HCD) approach we apply to CX strategy and applied it to your most valuable asset: your people? We iterated our customer-focused methodology and developed a process specific to crafting Employee Experience (EX) Strategies that starts with understanding your business and its people’s needs in both the near, and long term. This insight is then distilled into an EX Architecture of practical frameworks that underpins the creation and prioritisation of your EX Roadmap.
Our discovery process combines two distinct research activities to help inform the development of an EX Architecture. Each research activity will help create a shared understanding of the current employee experience – what is working well for your people, where they are coming up against barriers and the opportunity areas.
By conducting interviews with key stakeholders and reviewing existing research, we gather insights to understand and gain alignment on the organisation's goals, challenges, and strategic priorities. This activity ensures the subsequent EX Architecture (see below) not only reflects employee needs but also supports business objectives, creating a balance between employee and business outcomes.
We conduct research with your people to assess the performance of your existing experiences, identifying additional pain points and provide the raw data that will inform the EX Architecture.
Having completed the research, this next phase is all about synthesising the data, uncovering insights and developing frameworks to create a coherent, actionable EX Architecture that aligns organisational goals with employee needs and preferences. The EX Architecture guides your organisation in understanding and improving current employee experiences.
Leveraging the research and pulling together the different strands of the employee experience into structured and usable frameworks. The EX Architecture includes a vision, guiding principles, employee segmentation models, journey maps, opportunity areas and a governance framework.
This phase is all about collaboration as we take you through a process of generating ideas that respond to the insights and frameworks previously uncovered. We'll help you mature ideas into realistic initiatives that improve your employee experience on dimensions that matter to your people. Initiatives will include quick wins through to more long-term opportunities which will be prioritised in a horizon-based EX Roadmap to give your team clarity on where they need to focus (and where they need to avoid being distracted).
Using a structured ideation process alongside you, we explore and develop responses to the insights, frameworks and opportunity areas uncovered in your EX Architecture.
Focus your efforts where they matter most. Mapping your EX inititives will help ensure that your organisation invests in improvements that employees will value and recognise, optimising resource allocation for maximum impact.
We will pull together the insights, EX Architecture and EX Roadmap into a compelling narrative that includes inspiration for a future state experience. Once the strategy document and artefacts are finalised with your input, we will help seed the EX Strategy with your wider People & Culture team and support them to define the approach to introduce it to people leaders and the wider business.
