“It is all of the interactions and experiences that the employee experiences within the company, in the key moments of their professional career and their daily life. »Sophie Clejan, Employee Experience Director, Orange Group, in StratégiesEmploi on 10/27/2015.
Since the Essentials2020 plan, announced in March 2015 byStéphane RichardCEO ofOrange Group, the employee experience is at the heart of the strategyOrange, just like the customer experience. A symmetry of attention whose ambition for the Group is to offer an “incomparable experience” to all of its audiences, external and internal.InsightQuestaccompanies theOrange Groupand trains several hundred designers and producers of internal solutions (HR, IS, Finance in France and abroad) in better integration of this internal marketing and communication logic, in order to facilitate the deployment of this strategy and to best deliver this promise of an incomparable employee experience.
The employee experience is becoming a subject of attention and mobilization for several large groups.
This concept of employee experience is making headway within large international groups and far exceeds the logic of internal climate management, which has already been implemented for many years. Because the employee experience covers a much larger territory than the sole logic of the climate (which is a consequence of this experience).
The central services of a company: human resources, IT, information systems, management control, etc. are in essence designers and producers of services, solutions or initiatives for employees. This production is often self-centered and initiated by business experts who believe they know the needs of their final targets. However, especially in large groups, this belief in an almost “immanent” knowledge of the needs of different internal audiences very quickly reaches its limits and can lead to a divide between designers and users.
In the application domain (from the intranet to mobile apps intended for employees), Design Thinking techniques quickly came to reestablish the link between designers and employee users in order to have services (help desk, HR information, business applications) whose functionalities and ergonomics better meet the needs of their targets.
However, and once again in the largest groups, it is clear that the volume of services produced can lead to congestion which makes each of these services difficult to understand by internal audiences. To follow through on our point, certain applications can be designed with test employees using UX Design best practices and ultimately be little used by employees after their launch. Because of course the framework of the employee experience cannot be limited to a logic of “testing” the initiatives undertaken. Naturally, central questions arise clearly further upstream and downstream that go beyond the operational excellence of the design. Let's see this upstream and this downstream.
Before even starting to think about an idea for a new solution (your new intranet, updating a business application, launching a brand new service), the very early question of identifying the needs of internal targets is essential. The employee experience involves resisting the temptation to begin developing a solution before having the assurance that the scope of employee needs is well mastered (which is already covered by other existing solutions, which is essential or rather secondary to enable employees to carry out their missions, etc.).
Obviously this solution, this service or this initiative will only be truly understood, remembered and used by employees if it is clearly communicated. However, internal communication on a solution risks getting mixed up with an already large volume of communications to teams. The rule is then also the one we find in external commercial communication: the right message, to the right target and at the right time.
Basically, these different very upstream and downstream aspects are essentially the same as we observe in consumer marketing:
What we have just mentioned amounts to preparing designers and producers of internal solutions to know how to clearly articulate a value proposition, as marketers do in the context of commercial offers. This clear value proposition has the advantage of aligning internal development teams by focusing on “users” and also better informing internal communication.
The use of the term “internal marketing” sometimes raises some questions or even objections. The term “marketing” should not be shocking if it is well defined as the preparation and launch of a solution in a place which is a market where needs and solutions meet. This “market” is more of an oligopoly, therefore with competition and limited choice.
However, this logic of a meeting of needs and an offer remains an absolutely crucial state of mind that solution designers must have in mind.