Why HR leaders Must Embrace Human Experience Management

At the modern workplace, it is critical to provide an environment promoting the safety and productivity of employees as well as keeping them engaged. Essential as this is, it requires a positive employee experience, which the traditional approach of human capital management (HCM) fails to provide.

How has the HR function evolved with time?

HR leaders have thereby evolved the function toward human experience management, or HXM. This is in line with a shift in the HR role from merely supporting administrative processes to actively driving and delivering positive employee experiences. Accordingly, HXM brings in the requisite tools and mindsets that help businesses to not just survive, but thrive.

The current pandemic situation has given a further push to HXM. Employees are in the midst of stressful times, dealing with their health concerns as well as the demands of working from home, on site, or a mix as may be applicable. In such a time, the regular dole of pay and benefits from HR professionals is not enough. These must be supplanted with great employee experiences around agility, company culture, opportunities for growth and development, and technology used at work, as well as a strong sense of community.

In what ways does HXM support employees?

The world of today is riddled with challenges on professional and personal fronts. HR leaders use HXM to provide much-needed empathy to employees, encouraging alternative thinking and 360-degree feedback. Along with this, they look to take conclusive steps to improve the work culture. The pandemic might have encouraged this shift, but these are characteristics employees desire in normal times too.

What factors promote the rise of HXM?

As businesses move toward a new normal, HXM will be an integral part of the future of HR and the tasks handled by HR professionals. The following requirements are the key contributors to the rise of HXM:

• Strong company culture: This is essential if a company looks to attract and then retain great talent. Great culture, however, does not happen by itself, and requires concerted, focused time and effort. A healthy work culture must be designed, and is put in place by proper attention to each employee, decision, and interaction. Behavior, beliefs, feelings, and thoughts are what go into making a great company culture. HXM helps here by focusing on employee needs, creating an environment that by itself encourages employees to work well and attain success in their endeavors.

• Handling stress: The workforce of today is multi-generational, encompassing six generations by some estimates. Each generation is dealing with how its life and work have changed, with blurring work-life boundaries and new ways of collaborating and working playing their part. These are on top of disruptions from technology constantly making inroads at work. In this regard, it is imperative for HR professionals to demonstrate empathy and appreciate how the needs of different employees are as unique as the persons themselves. HXM helps in embracing empathy by encouraging a view from alternative perspectives and honoring individual needs of different people. Proactively listening to employees and acting accordingly is the result, with the data on experience allowing a better experience for each individual?

• Demonstrating agility: The world of business is extremely dynamic, and HR leaders have had to take a relook at ways and places of work, methods and amounts of payment, and much more. The workforce must be versatile, capable of quickly responding to change, as its proper redeployment is a key ingredient of the resilience and reliability of businesses. HXM allows organizations to adopt a more agile approach to delivering HR responsibilities, with tools and methodologies to quickly realign resources.

• Meeting employee expectations: Employee experiences are affected by more than just salaries or managers. The workplace experience should match their expectations as consumers, and if it does not match what they are looking for, they could be swayed just like consumers could. HXM provides easy-to-use tools and technologies to improve the work experience by leaps and bounds, along with driving flexible work, real-time recognition, and other measures.

• Competing for in-demand skills: Technological evolution has led to a shorter shelf life of skills. Considerable changes to roles have brought about the need for new skills and training. A World Economic Forum study suggested that more than 54 percent of employees would require significant reskilling and upskilling by 2022. HXM helps to grow the talent pipeline suitably and retain the best people, for which HR professionals often choose to pick up some of the best HR certifications to be equipped with the skills and knowhow to help their employers win the war for talented employees.