How do we attract and retain top talent worldwide by providing a great experience?
An international telecommunications software company was struggling with employee satisfaction and attrition after receiving poor scores from their annual employee feedback survey. They had several proposed solutions that were software-focused but wanted to understand the complete experience from the hiring process through retirement.
Activities
- In-Depth Interviews (Employees)
- Affinity Diagramming
- Persona
- Wall Walk / Opportunity Workshop
- Recommendations Report
- Case Study
- Employee Experience
- Engagement Type
- B2E
Approach
With an extremely tight timeline of only one month, my team flew to their overseas headquarters and with the aid of an internal employee acting as a translator, we set up stakeholder interviews with 8 c-level employees to understand the scope of the EX and then created a detailed interview script. We conducted 12 in-depth interviews with employees at multiple levels and departments within the company. We then created a day-long workshop with the c-level employees to understand the pain points within the employee journey and the areas to focus to help improve the overall experience.
Data Synthesis
We collected 800 data points from employees and then created an affinity wall of data for each stage of the employee journey that also cross referenced sentiments and how workers felt during each stage. We created 2 personas (a literal Jeckyl and Hyde) that represented the 2 primary ways employees engaged with the company. We then devised a workshop that let them act as employees through the journey, and allowed them to create opportunities and solutions
Output
The stakeholders realized the employee experience was not just based on the type of software they were given or the hours they worked. Rather, there were deep rooted issues of trust, a lack of autonomy, and a disdain for those employees who were able to skirt the rules thru nepotistic or fraternization channels. The stakeholders immediately formed a task force to track the employee experience and incorporated more emotional factors into their annual surveys to ensure the are collecting feedback about the most important issues employees face.
Our final deliverables included:
- A Jeckyl/Hyde persona that illustrated how workers feel if they ‘go by the book’ vs ‘go around the system’ to get work done and further their career.
- A full sentiment map of the employee journey that highlighted pain points and opportunities generated from the workshop.
- A prioritized list of solutions that the company can parse based on area of the journey and department(s) responsible.
