{"id":4775,"date":"2021-04-19T09:37:50","date_gmt":"2021-04-18T23:37:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sap.com\/australia\/?p=4775"},"modified":"2023-08-17T04:13:36","modified_gmt":"2023-08-16T18:13:36","slug":"understanding-the-value-of-employee-experience-through-the-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.sap.com\/australia\/2021\/04\/19\/understanding-the-value-of-employee-experience-through-the-pandemic\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding the Value of Employee Experience Through the Pandemic"},"content":{"rendered":"
On the latest episode of The Best Run Podcast<\/a>, I spoke with Kate Moonen, Head of Marketing and Digital Experience for Veolia ANZ<\/a>, and Steve Bennetts, Head of Growth and Strategy, Employee Experience at Qualtrics<\/a>, to discuss the importance of employee sentiments and pulse checks, particularly in light of the global pandemic.<\/p>\n Kate\u2019s career has been focused on customer marketing and personalised experiences for driving sales and customer loyalty. Whilst working for Veolia, she was asked to be part of COVID response team \u2013 to ensure people receive timely and consistent information during the pandemic while keeping tabs on staff during this challenging period.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of our biggest challenges, particularly during the pandemic, came from having a such a diverse workforce that is literally all over the country,\u201d Kate explained. \u201cI\u2019ve had the lucky pleasure of traveling all the way to Newman in Western Australia, which is a very remote depot where we operate. We have employees working there, others that are based in major cities or metro areas, with anyone from truck drivers to machine operators, to engineers, to lawyers, to sustainability experts.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a very diverse workspace, so technology has been really important in helping us reach and meet all of those different employee types since they all have different work schedules and different ways of operating.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Steve noted that many organisations with diverse and widely dispersed workforces faced similar challenges during the pandemic outbreak. \u201cTypically, we would have seen organisations dealing with the remoteness of their locations, but during the pandemic, we saw a lot of originations having to move their workforce into their own homes.<\/p>\n https:\/\/player.whooshkaa.com\/episode?id=814005<\/p>\n \u201cTechnology has been critical for a lot of organisations to reach out and have conversations with employees. Getting that feedback is absolutely critical, especially in those fast-moving days during the early part of the pandemic \u2013 to understand people\u2019s needs and what was happening at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n Kate said Veolia had previously measured employee sentiment annually or bi-annually through engagement surveys. \u201cThese were typically at the same time each year, but it was a little bit challenging getting engagement from some of the operational areas since a lot of them didn\u2019t have computers or were working off a laptop, so they weren\u2019t always able to sit down and fill in that engagement survey, which was reasonably lengthy and quite a big ask.<\/p>\n \u201cThrough the pandemic we had to adapt because we had to reach those employees faster, we had to take quicker pulse checks to reach them individually. We did a big process around collecting mobile phone information from employees so we could start to communicate via SMS and that has flowed through to our day-to-day operations.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re now able to, in a more agile way, take the pulse of our employees and send content to them, such as video messages from the CEO or from their leaders, which they can quickly access from their phone rather than wait until they get back to the depot or home computer.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe feedback has been really positive; I think people are feeling pleased and much more in the loop because of that personalised experience we\u2019re now offering.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Kate was surprised by the level of engagement from the surveys Veolia received from staff. \u201cYou do wonder about the uptake or engagement with people who are perhaps out in the field, or operational areas, or even working at home \u2013 but we consistently had really excellent response rates<\/strong> to our range of pulse surveys that we issued.<\/p>\n \u201cI think people felt that they wanted to take the opportunity to be heard, and the important thing for us as a team was to show that we\u2019re receiving and acting on that feedback, communicating that feedback to the broader business. We would regularly share communications, showing what came out of the latest pulse and what we\u2019re going to do about that, which was critical in maintaining that level of engagement. If you\u2019re asking people for their time, I think it\u2019s critical that you\u2019re demonstrating that you\u2019re going to do something with the feedback they provide.\u201d<\/p>\n Steve agreed with Kate, highlighting how organisations should collect data to inform future decisions and implement change. \u201cThis is one of those critical learnings as we look forward into the future of work. driving the next stages going out into the post-pandemic stage. We still want to be able to collect that feedback and act on that feedback with the same velocity and speed and the only way that we can really do that is through a digital listening platform that allows you to scale those listening programs, the feedback, and then the actions on top of that.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s why we\u2019re seeing, encouragingly, the experience management platform<\/a> that companies are using, like Veolia using us, to rollout and really capture information and drive the success of people returning back to work or back to whatever this new world of work looks like.\u201d<\/p>\n