Create Authentic Employee Experiences, Focus on Moments That Matter for Your Employees

With the current talent and business climate and other disruptions like high turnover and low workplace resiliency, HR teams seek actionable insight to optimize their employee experience strategies.

The recent Employee Experience Summit set out to bring together HR leaders and professionals and help them discover the latest HR tech and innovations. The sixth annual event held in Toronto opened the door to exploring current trends, learning how to develop employer branding strategies centered around experience, and finding inefficiencies that lead to the development of effective processes.

As the summit once again embarked on helping advance HR strategies through working groups, peer-led breakouts, roundtables, and topical how-to sessions, SoftServe’s Iryna Tkach, Global Director of People Experience, and Harish Sridharan, Associate Director of Organizational Job Architecture, shared how mapping the employee journey helped SoftServe uncover the “moments that matter” for employees and revealed the areas to prioritize for the biggest impact.

The case study presentation — How to Create Authentic Employee Experiences and Focus on Moments That Matter for Your Employees — is based on a project SoftServe launched in 2022. The outcome was how to better understand what was unique about being a SoftServe employee and develop a common view of what it means to have an authentic experience as a SoftServian.

Other discussion points during the session from the case study included:

How to map the as-is employee journey and involve the right stakeholders.	How to select the right methodology (e.g., design thinking) and tools (e.g., interviews, workshops, persona creation).	How to use the results of the employee journey as an asset for other strategic talent projects and internally promote the work.

Employee Experience: A Q&A

After the summit, Amy Kostek, Senior Industry Success Analyst at SoftServe, sat down with Iryna, who leads SoftServe’s Global People Experience Team and has many years of experience in workforce strategies, global talent mobility, leadership development, and employee experience.

Following is a Q&A between Amy (AK) and Iryna (IT), focusing on the employee experience, HR strategies and initiatives, and the right HR tech solutions.

Today’s business and talent environments are particularly complex, as HR leaders face evolving needs of the workforce and organization. At the same time, HR is stepping up to become a more strategic partner of the business, which requires a transformation in the fields of digitalization and automation of HR tasks.

One key insight that stood out to me was the growing importance of technology to enhance the employee experience. Various presentations showcased how automation and digital platforms transform and elevate HR through digitization by automating processes, especially traditional administrative tasks like gathering, analyzing, and acting on employee data to make more informed decisions.

Other trends discussed were around skills management and capability building. There was a strong emphasis on skills scarcity and skills gaps on the organizational level, and the fact that many companies underutilize the existing skills of their employees. Often this happens due to the lack of a systematic approach to skills and lack of skills visibility in an organized and holistic way.

Several sessions at the summit emphasized the need for organizations to focus on the growth and development of their employees and connect these opportunities to employee experience and employee retention. This resonates with us, at SoftServe, as employee growth has been identified as one of the drivers that strongly influences the engagement levels of SoftServe employees, according to our recent employee engagement survey.

To build sound employee developmental programs, we see many talent and HR leaders start with an analysis of their workforce’s skills, knowledge, and experience. This approach provides many benefits, especially if companies implement a unified system of assessing, tracking, and developing skills across their talent ecosystem.

We ask questions like:

These and many more questions are top of mind for HR and talent leaders. And if approached in an organized and thoughtful way, answers to these questions at their fingertips will not only optimize operational processes, but also contribute to higher levels of employee satisfaction.

Considering the evolving nature of work and the expectations of modern employees and technological advancements, we plan to focus more on the digital experience of our employees and continue thinking about how we can better equip our HR teams, so they remain a strategic bridge between the workforce and organization.

We will also continue to use our internally built solutions tailored and customized to the specific needs and processes of SoftServe. A few that we would like to highlight are Staffing Board, which is software designed to help with daily staffing activities like reviewing candidates, interviews, hiring, and progress tracking; Apollo Tools for an employee dismissal prediction model that assesses a turnover risk score; and Open Tech, a charity crowdsourcing platform that supports social initiatives. These and other solutions help SoftServe address unique needs and challenges and enhance employee experiences across the talent lifecycle.

One of the biggest benefits of tech implementation at the HR level is the creation or improvement of visibility over the workforce, which often results in a stronger alignment between the company’s strategy and people management.

The analytical capabilities of technology also give HR leaders the information they need to make informed decisions about workforce planning, succession planning, skills development, and other areas of high importance for the company.

For example, if HR has visibility over the skills of the company’s workforce through a solution like SkillSearch powered by Microsoft Viva, they can provide business intelligence to the organization about existing skills and skills gaps, and curate effective reskilling or upskilling programs to ensure the company has the skills needed to deliver on its business strategy.

Also, having visibility across your talent means HR increases employee engagement and retention, providing internal mobility opportunities to the employees by matching their skills with existing internal projects and assignments.

Conclusion

Among the goals of the Employee Experience Summit are to create an interactive event where HR leaders and professionals level up and execute on progressive and competitive employee experience programs, and engage with innovators on employee experience tools, techniques, and solutions.

Collaborating with a trusted HR tech partner like SoftServe and implementing innovative technology like SkillSearch powered by Microsoft Viva can boost employee engagement and retention, improving the employee experience.

Let’s talk so you may learn how to quickly locate internal talent, decrease pressure and costs for external hires, increase employee satisfaction through reskilling, and streamline your HR administration.