Now is the time to design your employee experience 

McLean & Company, a trusted partner of HR and leadership professionals globally, has published Design the Employee Experience – a new blueprint to guide HR leaders in designing an employee experience strategy. This timely research blueprint will allow HR leaders to find the sweet spot where employee needs and organisational strategy meet. 

Employees’ expectations of their experiences at work are evolving. Similar to their daily customer experiences, they want an overall employee experience that fits more seamlessly into their lives. McLean & Company’s 2021 Engagement Survey, with over 202,000 respondents, suggests that positive employee experiences lead to engaged employees, and engaged employees are five times more likely to recommend the organisation than those who are not engaged. 

Increasingly, employers are recognising life outside of the workplace and adapting work to accommodate it. Life can impact work and work can impact life. Impacting the employee experience is dependent on creating a flexible framework that allows the organisation to operate effectively while allowing enough customisation for employees to adjust to suit their needs and context. McLean & Company’s Employee Engagement Survey found that employees who believe their managers care about them as a person are 3.4x more likely to be engaged than those who do not. 

HR has a critical role to play in leading the organisation’s employee experience efforts. As an expert in balancing employee and employer needs, HR is well positioned to impact the employee experience positively and proactively.  

Designing the employee experience is not a linear process. The blueprint’s iterative approach allows for movement back and forth through any of its outlined steps based on feedback that is gathered. 

In the newly released blueprint, McLean & Company’s framework models a five-step process to design the employee experience to encompass all employee interactions with an organisation. The blueprint is intended for HR leaders to start with the employee life cycle and identify moments that matter, where the employee and employer needs are most aligned, and use a design thinking approach to engage employees in the process of identifying and designing a best-fit solution.