Towards a Data-Driven Approach to Employee Experience

Martijn Seijsener, Global Head, Employee Experience, Credit Suisse.

Martijn Seijsener is a seasoned Organizational Development leader with extensive leadership experience in organization design, employee experience, large-scale transformation, service design, organizational development, learning and development, and culture design. He has worked for several reputed companies across Europe and is currently the Global Head of Employee Experience for Credit Suisse.

In an exclusive interview with HR Tech Outlook Europe, he shared his invaluable insights regarding the transformations within the industry, the ensuing challenges, and his roles.

Could you briefly overview a typical day in your life as a global head?

As global head of employee experience at Credit Suisse, I lead the HR policies and processes integration stream from the Credit Suisse side into the UBS service session. Before the news regarding the merger of UBS and Credit Suisse was publicized, we at HR were in the process of understanding employee experience within our organization. This was conducted by examining the organizational setup of our department and cataloging the products and services we offer our line managers and employees. Further, key areas with room for improvement and processes that could be simplified or automated were identified.

In brief, my days were preoccupied with leading cross-functional agile project teams looking at focus areas like strength acquisition and people development. People development within Credit Suisse covers everything related to talent, including talent review, senior talent review, promotions, succession planning, and the line manager enablement model. These processes were aimed at simplifying and standardizing the work and bringing down considerably the cost of operations.

At present, we have a standup every Monday with the project leads. These standups aid in understanding the kind of work the leads are engaged in for the end of the week and its progress report. Following this, I report to the head of HR transformation and connect with my counterparts within it and those within other facilities. This ensures that the broad strokes of the strategy developed are well aligned. Subsequently, I return to the teams and coach them on storyboarding, locate and address possible hindrances, and facilitate them in developing and delivering the products and the agreed-upon outcomes. This is followed by a meeting with the HR Executive Committee (HREXCO) and the Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO).

Could you elaborate upon the roles and responsibilities you have in the organization?

My responsibility in the organization is to drive employee experience. As far as the right strategy is concerned, it has three essential requisites, namely, a framework, governance, and the right data.

I believe the employee experience should function as a service provider and offer three things. The first is the clarity and transparency through data to understand where we need to prioritize. The second is the ability to have clarity and transparency in proceeding with those priorities, redesigning or rebuilding new experiences, and improving existing ones. The third is to offer the ability to measure and track measurements to align them to business outcomes and demonstrate any noticeable change or effect the redesign brings.

What are some of the challenges you face during your work, and how do you overcome them?

One of the challenges is certainly the availability of data, which I have overcome by availing myself of a vendor's services to bring me the relevant experience data.

“In my view, employee experience should fit within HR transformation and strategy, forming it and allowing it to go across then.”

The second challenge is what I term a not-invented-here syndrome. Employee experience needs to work across different verticals. However, we are not always able to provide good news and have to draw attention to the suboptimal quality of certain products and services being delivered. This makes it necessary for employee experience to fit within strategy and transformation so that we have the weight and gravitas to say such things without leading to a situation that warrants professional discussion.

Is there any new project or initiative you have taken in the organization, which has added much value?

During the organization’s move towards a cost transformation program, I reminded the HREXCO of the perils of a process redesign without putting it through the lens of employee experience. Specifically, my caution was about the likelihood of the organization reverting to its current state in the next two to three years if the aforementioned criterion was not met.

 In this case, my proposal was to recruit HR professionals from the existing organizations and have them join my organization as agile project leads to be trained in agility and design thinking. They would lead these teams in redesigning, process engineering, standardization, and cost optimization.

This initiative has proved successful because the teams have uncovered several pain points and areas of improvement. Further, we divided the improvement opportunities into tactical and strategic opportunities. The tactical ones, including talent acquisition, management, and people development, were easily addressed and solved. On the other hand, the strategic ones were handled by teams along with experts in these areas. We are currently in the process of finding suitable solutions to the strategic problems we have repurposed into the integration. This is because integration and transformation are two sides of the same coin; the only difference is how you channel that capability differently.  

In the end, we were able to drive transformation and are currently driving integration through the lens of employee experience. This ensures that the process redesign is coherent not only from the process point of view but also from the end-user point of view.

This was also the first time we had a thorough understanding of the value chain, how duplication of efforts and manual work can be alleviated by introducing technological alternatives. In brief, we have used the insights to understand the organizational setup of our HR department.

Could you talk about any technology you are looking forward to in the future which would add substantial value to the industry?

AI and Chat GPT are undoubtedly the major topics of discussion today, and their right usage will unravel new avenues and opportunities for us. Such technology can enable us to alleviate people's analytics so that one can use datasets more comprehensively. It can also remove the need for manual work that people analytics require.

However, I have reservations about new technology, primarily because people tend to see it as an all-encompassing solution when it is not always the case. It is first and foremost important to identify the biggest friction and pain points and then ascertain whether technology offers us the right solution to manage or solve them. When new technology is not implemented in a human-centred way and is neither alleviating pain nor helping employees, it only adds to their frustration.

There exists a technology that helps map out the journey and connects the different key performance indicators (KPIs) along the way. Further, I prefer simpler ones instead of a big set of KPIs. This is because the former requires considerable work to monitor, and different sets of KPIs through the same value chain prevent strong analysis of value stream mapping. In contrast to this, linking KPIs like employer promoter score (EMPS), customer effort score (CES), and customer satisfaction score (CSAT) with the technology mentioned above facilitates the location of places where the scores are low. This allows one to understand the issues and take expedient measures quickly.

This is a technology that I would like to implement within the next 20 or 30 years, which would allow us to understand from a journey perspective the location of the biggest friction points.

What would be your advice to budding professionals in the industry?

My advice would be to focus on two things. Firstly, one ought to emphasise experience data which showcases the quality of interaction employees have every time they want to solve a problem, perform a task, and engage with the company. The interaction can occur in two ways - digital touch points like systems and tools and physical touchpoints, including the security personnel and the person at the reception. Apart from this, the human interaction angle includes the alignments, the teams, etc. All of these combine to create the employee experience ecosystem.

Additionally, even if certain touch points are functioning properly, the end user might perceive the whole journey as suboptimal if proper performance is not maintained across the line. This can be illustrated through the example of airports. An airport has several touch points like arrival, passport control, security check, amenities, etc. Research done on airports by firms like McKinsey has revealed that the perception of the security checks being suboptimal leads to the whole journey from arrival to boarding being perceived as the same. This is enough to make people consider changing airports lest they should have the same unsatisfactory experience again.

This situation is equally applicable in the case of HR. Even if the performance management is functioning well, the poor performance of the talent or reward management might lead to the entire journey being perceived as suboptimal by the employees and line managers. Accordingly, one needs to amass experience data to identify priorities and locate shortcomings.

Secondly, the home of employee experience matters. I have mentioned earlier that employee experience needs to be able to work horizontally across different verticals, and it often makes its way into other parts of the organization outside HR. I believe employee experience should fit within HR transformation and strategy, forming it and allowing it to go across.

I have noticed in the case of my peers that employee experience often sits within communications, IT, or talent management. Putting employee experience within talent management is understandable as the latter covers important moments within the employee's life cycle, but it also limits the reach of employee experience.

Along with this, one needs to work towards bringing in product management abilities. Agility and design thinking are the two quintessential drivers, enabling one to redesign products and services and improve them continuously. In this regard, product management capabilities are indispensable for ensuring the success and development of these products and services correctly. 

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