Employee experience (EX) is maturing within and beyond the HR remit to become an engine for organization transformation and optimization. Early efforts to collect and draw insights from the voice of the employee (VoE) are exposing the conditions and challenges for how business is executed in the front office. The expanding scope of VoE insights is driving efforts to embed the data behind them into operational models while improving manager responsiveness to individual challenges and risks as they emerge: Trending factors are passing up into operational guidance while anomalies are driving managers to where risks and opportunities around employee retention, mobility, engagement, and empowerment need to be managed.
As EX transformation gets underway, HR remits are changing and taking on new stakeholders in areas of learning, workflow design, wellbeing, rewards, recognition, inclusion, communications, and knowledge transfer. Operational VoE insights are further accelerating HR partnerships with IT to extend VoE insights to more of the company. The HR-IT partnership opens the flood gates to expand VoE and performance-informed personalization into operational resourcing and workforce planning. Beyond the IT partnership wall, extended VoE insights start making front-office execution for objectives and key results (OKRs) more measurable around levels of employee resourcing, skilling, enablement, team management, and quality of communications and collaboration. On one hand, VoE, AI, and now GenAI support personalized resourcing and access models in employee resourcing, training, enablement, assignment, and alignment to teams, tasks, and work types. On the other hand, personalization starts to impose new accountabilities on executive leadership teams that are suddenly faced with metrics that benchmark how realistic OKRs are for targeting untapped opportunities.
EX transformation is at once scaling resource investments to where employees engage and benefit from them in the context of OKRs; at the same time, it is catalyzing businesses to be more adaptable and responsive in designing processes and OKRs to reflect what is possible across an ever-changing workforce and associated landscape of employee skills, characteristics, needs, and interests.