Retailers particularly fight for the right balance of cool, easy-to-use, on-brand experience to allow people to shop more easily, in the case of my current employer (unnamed) where I spend much of my time, to actually inspire them to do projects, and therefore spend more money with us.
This is all great - the rub I have is that we, along with many other companies, really misses the trick of the Employee Experience. Our store colleagues are generally more engaged with the brand than the guys in the office. This is not unusual and is the same just about everywhere I've worked. The store colleagues are at the coal face, and are the real face of the brand in front of customers, so like the website we spend quite a bit of time on that. But what of the internal systems?
Let me give you the example that has irked me this morning - I have to log on 3 times in all to book a holiday. I needed to log on twice just to check my email. Why? Because we have provisioned systems based on their functional ability rather than the experience of using them. We don't do this for customers because we want loyalty and buy-in, but we ignore this when provisioning internal systems... why again? We're the same humans, we just happen to be on the payroll, but you can't "buy" loyalty. You can only buy time.
First I logged onto the machine I'm sitting at - which is a perfectly reasonable hot-desk equipped with Windows 7 and all the usual Office and related tools.
But then I wanted to book a holiday - so I connect to the intranet. Our intranet has been moved to Office365 along with our email - a perfectly reasonable thing to do - but we haven't linked up authentication very well, so I'm required to log in again. I navigate to the HR area and find the link to book a holiday which takes me to one of a seemingly never ending list of third parties with SaaS solutions we use to provide services. Unfortunately none of these services use any form of single sign-on, so to book holidays I have to log on AGAIN. Worse, this third one doesn't use my network username it uses my employee ID, which is on my pass, but that's in my pocket... you get the point.
The second rub is that the solutions we put in place are functionally rich but interactively very poor. The general web design is a lot, LOT less than we would demand from our own website, or indeed most companies would demand, but because the Employee eXperience is not a factor in choosing a solution noone cares. I'm sure the price is good, and I'm sure that the bulleted list of features is comprehensive, but still - they're terrible to use. I don't mind naming and shaming... Capita Travel's website is pretty terrible, and has forms which a) don't fit in the width of a reasonable browser window (say 1280 across) and b) don't provide scroll bars, so you have to resort to drag-selecting text to force the frame to scroll. Or we could take a look at Northgate, who provide much of our HR related systems. Again, poorly tested in browsers means it's all too easy to have content which doesn't fit in the frame. Apparently for some of these systems (not necessarily the two I've mentioned) Google Chrome is not supported.
I'm going to say that again in case you didn't realise how fundamentally stupid that is.
Google Chrome is not supported!
Stick that in your Non-Functional Requirements for a customer facing website and see where it gets you!
If employees are using good quality systems, which make them more efficient and less tetchy then I really feel that engagement with our employers in the office would be much improved, and it really doesn't cost much, but could yield massive benefit in employee satisfaction.
And don't even get me started on our timesheet system...
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