Designing engaging employee experiences that deliver tangible results

As we’ve previously noted, effectively managing change should be among the highest priorities for business leaders today. Most digital transformations fall short of expectations, largely due to a lack of planning around employee adoption and a failure to sustainably scale.

In the first installation of this series, we looked at four factors we at IBM Consulting believe significantly impact a transformation’s success: the level of an organization’s readiness, the quality of its employee experience, the alignment of its operating model and how effectively it tracks its value over time.

Today, we’ll address the second variable impacting effective change: employee experience (EX). The concept encompasses the sum of all interactions an employee has with their organization. It is shaped by a number of variables including workplace culture, technology and environment, and it influences employee engagement, performance and overall satisfaction.

As the hard lines between personal and professional selves collapse, expectations of workers and employers alike have changed. Top enterprises are increasingly required to foster positive, flexible and empathetic work environments to meet employee needs and retain top talent. But, perhaps more importantly, satisfied, engaged employees with strong support systems are both more productive and more likely to embrace change. As we’ve found, employees adopt new business structures – and technologies – 34% more often when employee engagement is at the center of transformational design.

This presents a challenge for enterprises: How to design cohesive, engaging experiences that cultivate a sense of trust and delight across an organization when change is the only constant. But employers able to conquer this challenge achieve impressive outcomes. According to recent research from the IBM Institute for Business Value, organizations that nurture top employee experiences outperform on revenue growth by 31% compared to other organizations. Data from Gallup shows that enterprises that value EX see 23% higher profit than those that do not.

In the following sections, we’ll explore how organizations can create, execute and continuously operate employee experiences that not only embrace change in the near-term, but foster a culture of organizational agility and tenacity, no matter what the future brings.

Without enthusiastic employee support, even the most well-crafted business transformation is unlikely to succeed — which is why we recommend embedding EX deeply into every stage of transformational design, no matter the broader goal. A successful EX strategy is people-focused, deploying key technologies to ease administrative burden while retaining authenticity throughout. Implementing such a dynamic program over the course of a transformation requires organizations to flip their service delivery model from siloed, back-office processes to proactive ones.

Transforming HR models to embrace change happens at every stage of a business and digital transformation, from early design to iteration. During the design and planning phases, an enterprise should identify and assess systems that contribute to EX as they stand, including an analysis of current employee sentiment. They might also identify and prioritize initiatives that align with an organization’s long-term vision and strategic plan.

During execution, when an enterprise prepares and delivers its new systems, a business can prioritize people by activating accountability models for new workflows, as well as defining training programs in line with future strategic plans. And during deployment, workforce analytics dashboards can track value and adoption, allowing leaders to dynamically respond to how employees are using new systems. After the system is live, those same analyics help leaders iterate to ensure sustainable value. 

During each of these phases, it’s imperative leaders proactively communicate with employees about the transformation taking place across the enterprise and how it will impact them individually — by hosting town halls, leadership forums or through other relevant means.

Throughout these stages, we’ve found the following tactics help employees embrace change:  

1.      Engaging workers’ whole selves

2.      Embracing personalization in the workplace

3.      Training for the future

4.      Measuring dynamic interactions

Employees' sense of job satisfaction, level of engagement and overall well-being are intrinsically connected as their personal and professional selves overlap with the workplace and external environments. This means planning for effective, frictionless change involves considering workers’ whole selves — and various influencing factors such as workplace culture and policies, employee relationships and professional skills.

To most effectively place employees’ whole selves at the center of experience design, we’ve found it useful to craft a cohesive experience vision supported by an actionable roadmap. This roadmap should focus on addressing desired future outcomes for both employees and managers. Embracing this “whole self” model can be supported by a blended approach of tech integrations and human labor.

Given the mandate to engage employees’ whole selves, it’s critical for an enterprise to tailor experiences as much as possible based on individualized factors such as job, role and work and life experience. Currently, 56% of HR leaders say their employees expect a more personalized experience than they can currently provide at scale. Often, this means preemptively anticipating employee needs, whether it’s a new training opportunity or necessary paperwork based on a life event.  

Generative AI, with its ability to ingest and analyze vast troves of both structured and unstructured data, has created a powerful new venue for personalization efforts in the workplace. And through the combined use of generative and agentic AI, diverse groups of employees can receive proactive guidance and communications tied to their specific preferences, life events or informational needs.

Agentic AI, triggered by significant moments such as an upcoming vacation or a new child, anticipates best next actions from spoken and unspoken intentions to provides personalized recommendations and guidance catered to individual needs. Meanwhile, generative AI creates personalized communications based on a user’s preferences and work history.

Crucially, these technologies can provide simultaneous and hyperpersonalized communications on a global scale, ensuring a frictionless, specific and consistent experience for every employee regardless of their circumstance. 

And as these technologies make completing workplace tasks more seamless, the people working in HR departments can focus on crafting tailored resources and environments in which individual employees will adapt and thrive — along with maintaining availability to personally address urgent or sensitive situations. Relieved of administrative burdens and unnecessary friction, employees have more time to devote to professional development and genuine engagement with their workplaces.

In today's business environment, upskilling employes isn’t just an opportunity to improve capacity, but to engender ownership across an organization. This, in turn, increases productivity and facilitates trust and cultural buy-in. With tailored learning and development options, employees become more agile workers, habitually accustomed to improvement and change.  

Some training innovations, powered by AI, proactively engage employees. One example: scanning and analyzing LinkedIn posts to identify opportunities and recommend trainings. Others provide self-directed opportunities for growth, such as internal “talent marketplaces” where workers view open opportunities at their company and choose a short-term development opportunity in another department.  

This is in addition to more routine AI-augmented development programs, which can create customized learning and assessment paths for employees, adapting to their individual learning styles and goals. Such tailored training opportunities keep employees engaged and foster a sense of forward momentum.

In the context of a business transformation, such ongoing learning not only equips employees to perform more effectively in the future, but empowers the organization at large. Focusing on new skills in the midst of a workplace change presents an opportunity to further build and inform EX. In a robust transformation, training programs can act as part of a feedback loop, helping leaders adjust their plans to respond to employee needs.

Given the dynamic nature of employee relationships, finding reliable metrics to assess engagement and satisfaction has historically been challenging. This is a particularly critical factor during an enterprise transformation, during which pain points and bottlenecks must be addressed as quickly as possible.

The modern data-driven workplace provides numerous ways to measure both performance and sentiment. As we’ve found, constant monitoring is a necessary aspect of improving EX, particularly given how quickly workplace dynamics can change.  

HR professionals and stakeholders should take a multi-pronged approach to measuring the efficacy of EX initiatives. This might involve surveys, face-to-face focus groups, platform adoption statistics or interaction analysis of digital communications. Sentiment analysis performed on various forms of employee feedback additionally provides valuable information, supported by generative AI.

By mining system logs, enterprises can better understand how and when employees are engaged with various systems and tools, allowing leaders to implement targeted interventions. Some organizations, particularly those embarking on a wide-ranging transformation, adopt dashboards providing real-time insights into key metrics like user adoption, training effectiveness and stakeholder engagement. By measuring momentum and adoption early, organizations can quickly fine-tune their EX strategies to align with their broader buisiness goals. 

A transformation is only as good as its adoption rates and investing in a change-minded EX is among the most valuable decisions a company can make. By leveraging employee voices to design, streamline and drive unique experiences an enterprise produces not just more productive workers, but more agile and resilient ones. Through centering workers’ whole selves through a transition, embracing personalized experiences, dynamically upskilling workers and engaging in a practice of continuous measurement and iteration, business leaders set their employees up for long-term success.