A job that didn’t exist a decade ago is now the 5th fastest growing job in the US according to a LinkedIn study from early this year. Behold the Employee Experience Manager!!
Why has this become an issue so important that it demands its own specific organizational responsibility?
We offer some thoughts on the answer to that question and looks at the key challenges facing the new Employee Experience Manager’s.
The Great Resignation has shifted the balance of power towards employees so far as there is a lot less fear of the consequences of changing jobs than prior generations experienced.
The pandemic gave many people a sense of how working from home for extended periods impacted their lives. Of course, many jobs simply disappeared during that period, but knowledge workers, in particular, were seemingly able to remain productive from their home offices.
The Great Resignation was more of a Great Reshuffle where employees swapped jobs at an unprecedented rate for those that enabled a continuation of the pandemic work-life balance. This reshuffle has forced many employers to adapt if they want to recruit and retain the best talent. The enduringly tight labour market has further exacerbated this trend.
One of the key tensions in this reshuffle is the desire, based on several recent productivity studies, to encourage employees back into the office. It’s clear that in many cases the productivity benefits of working from home were an illusion. Furthermore, working from home sidesteps many corporate culture initiatives, which is not always beneficial.
Yet many of the best employees are still holding out for employers who trust them to work from anywhere. Ensuring that employees are willing and able to work without direct supervision is one of unspoken tenets of the Employee Experience Manager role.
Without the relationships that come from being office based, issues employees encounter with their computer equipment and software, can weigh on their overall employment experience.
Client facing employees feel these issues even more acutely as they have real-time obligations from customers that can be impacted by a poor digital experience. With the emphasis on customer feedback, individual client facing employees are rightfully concerned that their feedback is impacted by shortcomings in their workstation environment.
The issues are not limited to customer facing employees. With less fear of switching roles, and less direct supervision to address job satisfaction issues, what starts as a niggling issue with a particular application can easily be the trigger to open a recruitment website.
A failure to objectively address these issues not only affects employee job satisfaction but can also drive expensive “sledgehammer to crack a nut” upgrade cycles at the endpoint. Stated differently, there can be many reasons why an employee’s digital efficiency is compromised, few of them are resolved by acquiring more powerful computer hardware, yet that seems to be the default solution for many organizations that lack the insights to make a more considered assessment.
The Employee Experience Manager has become an essential part of an organizations strategy to ensure digital efficiency is optimized and job satisfaction is maintained.
Any organization wrestling with the pressure to maintain productivity, while ensuring recruitment and retention of the most talented employees, is not compromised by ignoring the post-pandemic working patterns, will be looking for Employee Experience Managers.
Download our report with 2000 UK Hybrid workers to understand the knowledge gap organizations face in understanding the employee experience and proactive steps organizations can take to measure and optimize the hybrid working experience.