Digital HR Services Experience –
The Big Lip-Service
Employee Experience (EX) approaches play an important role in ensuring high end-user adoption of digital HR services and hence a high digital HR ROI. Still, EX is not largely adopted in the selection and configuration of digital HR service.
December 6, 2023 by Timo Tischer
Findings from Interviews with Heads of Digital HR Systems & Services
We wanted to find out more:
- What is the status quo and potential role of Employee Experience (EX) in digital HR?
- Does EX matter to people responsible for digital HR services as a concept and approach?
- How are organizations bringing EX into digital HR (or not) and what obstacles do they face?
I investigated these and more questions in interviews with Heads of Digital HR Systems & Services of large organizations. The results are summarized in the report “Digital HR Services Experience – The Big Lip-Service”. Read on to learn more, or download the paper as a PDF at the bottom of the page. And of course: reach out if you have any questions or want to discuss how to bring EX into digital HR services in your organization.
The findings of this paper are based on 10 semi-structured interviews with people
responsible for HR systems or services in large organizations, like Head of HR IT, Head of
Digital HR, Head of People Services, etc. Key findings are the following:
1. Importance of EX:
Employee Experience (EX) is of importance for the mentioned roles. The question “How important is ensuring positive EX of digital HR services for your organization?” was rated on average with 4.7 of max. 5 (very important).
2. Organizational maturity:
Organizations are not yet very mature in embracing EX design and improvement approaches for digital HR. The question “How ready is your organization to ensure positive EX of digital HR services?” was rated on average with 2.9 of max. 5 (fully ready).
3. Current and aspired focus on digital HR service improvements:
Currently, investments into digital HR service improvements are still often directed towards saving HR or IT budgets, while the interviewees would like to see a stronger shift towards making easier the daily jobs of managers (especially) and employees as end users of digital HR services.
4. What organizations are already doing:
Common practices to bring an EX focus into digital HR include a) Qualitative feedback on running systems, b) Enablement & upskilling, and c) Communication
5. What organizations are not yet doing (enough):
Practices that are not (often) observed are a) Human-centered design, b) Strategy & organizational setup, and c) Success KPIs or cases
6. The biggest challenges that prevent a higher maturity are:
a) Missing budgets, b) Executive mindset, and c) Missing data
7. Key recommendation:
Collect quantitative moment-centric data to show the real quality of digital HR services, prioritize improvements, and prove their business impact. Broadly implemented and consequently used to improve systems, momentcentric data can become a holistic quality management system for digital HR services.
8. Next steps:
EX clearly matters as a lever to derive better digital HR services. But this lever is underused, and many organizations struggle with proving the value of EX to executives and hence changing their mindsets towards applying human-centered approaches in digital HR. It is now crucial to understand successful practices to overcome these challenges and move from understanding the “why it matters” to “how to make it happen”.
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