Employee Experience Strategy

Executive Summary

Andrew Reise Consulting was engaged by a large telecommunications provider to assist in developing an employee-focused strategy to enable their new brand. Our client already had a strong company culture, but they needed to ensure they had the Right Employees with the Right Behaviors required to deliver the new brand promise. It was critical that the company’s front line employees understood and emulated the brand in order to optimize the power of the brand and the overall customer experience.

Program Implementation

Our client was preparing to launch a new brand that would further differentiate their business from against their competitors by providing the best customer experience. The brand strategy would not be successful if they did not have the right employees to deliver the brand message. Specifically, our client wanted to focus on the following two areas:

Right Employees: What attributes do employees need in order to deliver the new brand? Did their existing front line employees have those attributes? Did the company have the right processes, policies and career paths in place to attract and identify candidates with these attributes?

Right Behaviors: What types of behaviors are required to deliver an emotional brand? Did the company have the right training, development, and compensation programs in place to ensure they were promoting and developing the right behaviors?

Creating the Employee Experience Strategy

Andrew Reise worked with functional leaders across the enterprise, including representatives from Sales, Customer Service, Brand, Marketing, HR, Learning and Organizational Development. Andrew Reise consultants facilitated dozens of workshops to assess current state and identify pain points and opportunities that led to future state recommendations. We then grouped the recommendations into tactical projects and created an implementation roadmap.

1. North Star

A compelling mission and vision statement was established that focused on creating engaged and committed employees that would be able to create an emotional connection with their customers. This was our North Star and set the tone for what the team had set out to accomplish in the strategy phase.

2. Behavior Model

The team created a model that leveraged the existing company culture as inputs and identified key behaviors and competencies that would lead to our desired outcome of customers feeling the brand when interacting with employees. This model was a cornerstone of the strategy and was referenced throughout the strategy development.

3. Industry Research

Industry research was conducted to identify other companies that are known for having strong company cultures, engaged employees and an exceptional customer experience. This helped identify opportunity areas that would create and sustain the best possible employee experience possible.

4. Employee Lifecycle Mapping (current state)

An end-to-end employee lifecycle was developed to provide a process-centric view from the employee’s perspective. Internal company processes and capabilities were then mapped to the employee experience lifecycle to analyze the current state issues and opportunities. The result was a clear understanding of pain points and gaps.

5. Capability Assessment

Andrew Reise conducted an assessment of business capabilities using Andrew Reise’s Capability Maturity Model. The maturity level for each capability area was assessed on a 1–5 scale to determine the strengths and weaknesses of key capabilities. The result was a quantifiable assessment of individual business capabilities that identified areas of strength and opportunity for the overall employee

6. Employee Experience Strategy (future state)

Andrew Reise helped organize and analyze all input factors to create a set of strategic recommendations that would address the issues and opportunities identified throughout the strategy project. The strategic recommendations were grouped into strategic platforms or themes, such as:

Create talent and strengths based organization
Enabling employees to deliver on brand strategy
Measurement of customer and employee engagement
Enhancing employee experience through on-boarding, training, rewards, etc

7. Initiative Framing

In order to make the employee experience strategy achievable, opportunity areas were grouped together into tactical initiatives. These initiatives addressed key capabilities in areas such as talent selection/ assessment, career pathing, culture evolution, change readiness, customer engagement, employee engagement, performance standards, on-boarding, learning, employee rewards, HR systems and social media.