Employee experience guidance paper
White Paper
White Paper
- White Paper
- Behaviour
- Capabilities
- IT Services
- Requirements
- Roles
- Value
- ITIL
April 14, 2020 |
6 min read
- White Paper
- Behaviour
- Capabilities
- IT Services
- Requirements
- Roles
- Value
- ITIL
Employees should ensure that they uphold their job description correctly to avoid situations that lead to unhappy customers, co-workers, and managers. People often rely on other people and things to help them get their job done, therefore, digital technology is an increasingly important tool. Unfortunately, complex digital systems are inherently open to error, so disruptions are inevitable. The way in which it is managed and utilized should be considered.
Measurement and metrics are the foundations of IT and service management. Service level agreements are used to achieve customer satisfaction and typically include: resolutions, the average time to recover service, availability, performance, and more; all of which are tracked and maintained. Service providers also use them as a tool to protect themselves when dealing with customer complaints. Having service level agreements in place will document expectations and avoid miscommunications between the customer and service provider.
A better approach is to recognize that incidents can be unpredictable and to instead focus on the different emotional needs and outcomes for the user; even when these are beyond the control of the service provider.
Successful service interactions are achieved socially. Therefore, a systematic management approach is not beneficial for business productivity. Employees should demonstrate to customers a clear understanding about the status of a situation and what they can expect. This will ensure that customers are left feeling satisfied rather than uncertain. Transparency is a powerful tool that service providers can use to foster trust with the customer, which will help create a mutual focus on the desired outcomes and improve collaboration between the parties involved. There are two steps to ensure this:
This approach demonstrates to business stakeholders the value that IT and service management brings to the organization. It effectively creates trust in what the service provider is doing and trying to achieve, while fostering better collaboration with other units, partners, and suppliers.
- Measure the users’ perception of how IT incidents affect business productivity and their satisfaction at work.
- Ensure that the data, targets, and trends are transparent for everyone within the organization.
This approach demonstrates to business stakeholders the value that IT and service management brings to the organization. It effectively creates trust in what the service provider is doing and trying to achieve, while fostering better collaboration with other units, partners, and suppliers.
Transparency creates change
After introducing employee experience outcomes and sharing these across the organization, managers reported an increase in employee wellbeing and motivation.
This also affected the service desk agents. Normally, they were only exposed to negative feedback in the weekly or monthly meetings. Now, they were able to see that 75% of feedback was positive. This is representative of most organizations that track the employee experience.
Furthermore, this changes the communication with the business stakeholders, who previously may have been subjected to the negative stories. Presenting them with facts based on large volumes of responses generates trust that the IT and service management function provides value for the organization.
Transparency creates trust
Stakeholders can trust data collated from hundreds or thousands of employee responses regarding employee well-being and productivity. Two years after the employee experience had been tracked, a workshop was held with the external service provider and the customer organization’s head of end-user services. After exploring their channel data, well-being, and productivity in different channels (phone, email, portal, chat, and so on), the customer had expressed to the service provider that they trusted them.
Prior to this, 18 months ago the external service provider suggested moving the support from an email to a self-service portal channel. However, the customer had been against it because they felt that it would be worse for the users; but the employees’ productivity data clearly showed that they were happier. Business productivity had improved by over one hour per ticket when using the self-service portal. Transparent data ensured that both parties could agree on what should be done next.
Trusting the data creates focus
Managing the feelings and opinions of business management can be time-consuming for teams who are trying to develop a new functionality. Data is a reliable tool as it is reflects individual opinions, reducing the time spent in discussions.
In meetings or during an Agile or DevOps cycle, organizations can continuously analyse the experience data and focus on short term actions to make small improvements. For example, organizations can have live screens in departments so employees are able to see trends and targets. These small improvements can be valuable in the long-term.
Summary
Although, it might still be useful to track internal measures such as the average time taken to recover the service, these measures will not be useful in establishing user satisfaction. It is more effective to capture feedback about business productivity and employee well-being directly from the users, and to share this openly to foster trust and focus efforts on the desired outcomes.
About the author
Pasi Nikkanen is passioned in making employee happiness and productivity as a strategic driver in service management. Pasi is the Chief Product Officer at HappySignals, podcast host on HappyToday – The Employee Experience Podcast and also a regular webinar and events speaker. He has worked with internal services and outsourcing at a large Nordic IT company of 15,000 knowledge workers and as a service designer for large global enterprises.
