As companies increasingly offer their employees an experience on par with that of customers, HR may find itself working more closely than ever with the marketing department – and may even have that duty taken off its hands.
Michelle Berg, chief executive of
Elevated HR Solutions, works with companies to create exceptional employee experiences, spanning recruitment, onboarding, performance management, compensation and communication.
Its clients are increasingly seeing employee experience as an area worthy of their focus, especially when they’re spending so much time developing their customer experience.
In future, Berg says, “there’s going to be much more marketing involvement [in employee experience], because it should mirror customer experience … so the relationship between marketing and human resources, if you want to do it well, should grow stronger.”
“There’s some people out there, and I’m kind of there, but not all the way there, but [some marketing clients] are even spinning it now that marketing could even run employee experience, similar to how communications tend to be under marketing at times as well, this could mirror that.”
While many marketers may feel reluctant to take over the role from HR, Berg sees their creativity and expertise in targeting audiences as an advantage.
For HR professionals working to develop or improve their employees’ experience, Berg suggests a good relationship with marketers can help.
She adds that candidate experience is just as crucial, so HR should be considering how candidates think and feel throughout the application process.
For example, Berg says, one of her experience-focused hotel clients offers candidates a voucher 20 percent off, simply for applying.
Through the onboarding process, HR should be asking the same questions: “What are they hearing, feeling, seeing, thinking?”
“The truth is, when an employee starts a new role, it is one of the scariest things in the world: who are they going to eat lunch with? It’s little things like that, all the way into: how is performance measured? Having those critical conversations and being really upfront, and again, anticipating what they’re thinking, feeling, reading, is definitely key to the employee experience.”
From there, it extends right throughout the company to the way the leadership communicates with workers.
“It’s really breaking every single process in the human resources department, and then asking the question: how is this being delivered? How is this being perceived?”
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Employee experience: passing fad or here to stay?
Why did Airbnb get rid of its HR department?
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