The benefits of employee experience management for companies operating in the Asia Pacific region, especially in the context of rapid change and uncertainty about the future of work. Drawing on expert insights and the lessons learnt by APAC companies, the report also highlights the critical success factors for EX, shares some key measures of success, and provides insights into the HR transformation journey that has been accelerated for these organizations.

These five talent norms include job stability provided by companies, professional managers with a deep generalist skill set, a clear pathway up the organization, fairly predictable pay increases, and status symbols associated with seniority. Those five things characterize the old world of thinking about talent management, associated with the whole system of professional management, that I think is now unraveling, “In the last decade, there has been an explosion in experimentation in how we manage talent.” HR leaders and their teams will need to decide which of these trends are most important to their companies and decide what policies, programs, and changes they are going to adopt to shift the needle with respect to each.

An Engaged, Productive, and Future-Fit Work

The benefits of implementing EX programs can be summarized under three broad themes increased employee trust and engagement, which leads to increased retention improved efficiency and productivity and a future fit work ,employees trusted us when we told them, don’t panic they trusted us when we asked people who used to work an eight-hour shift to work a 12-hour shift and they trusted that we wanted to take care of them, and of their jobs. Further, the firm’s managers have become more people focused. “In Asia, managers typically focus on tasks, deliverables, and hard KPIs but since we started seriously measuring and listening to employees’ views, our people managers have recognized that this is important,”

Enhancing the employee experience, especially through digitalization, increases productivity by making HR processes more efficient and creating convenience and simplicity for employees and people managers. For example, in addition to reducing errors in its HR transactions, Medibank has reduced its onboarding time to a consistent 14 days. Similarly, Shiseido’s implementation of its global HR platform between 2018 and 2021 improved efficiency by eliminating manual and paper-based processes. For example, its entire recruitment journey is now conducted on a single platform, greatly improving employee experience. The digitalization of HR processes has the added benefit of shifting HR’s role.

The Recipe for an Excellent Employee Experience

APAC companies can enhance their employee experience by nurturing a strong culture and committing to a clear vision leveraging technology as an enabler applying design thinking listening, following up, and following through and considering diverse needs and contexts. Each of these critical success factors is addressed in turn, below.While the digital part of EX is important, it doesn’t replace the human part, which is generally about leadership issues, according to Bersin. For example, Medibank’s former CEO,Craig Drummond, set the tone of putting people at the center of what the company does, which was cascaded throughout the organization. People believe in our values, and we’ve also got a strong purpose which is focused on health and well being, not just for our customers, but also for our employees

Think like a product manager and apply design thinkingy

those companies focusing on personalization and customization are moving in the right direction toward greater intimacy with employees at scale. The dream outcome is to combine intimacy with scale, just as we are trying to do with our customers. This designthinking approach is Tata Communications, which developed 51 employee personas and appointed a product manager for its employee experience and value app. You need to think like a product manager and not like the classical HR or talent professional. The company applies this thinking in the design of its EX programs by testing hypotheses and iterating in an agile way.

Consider diverse needs and contexts

It has long been recognized among many firms that diversity creates better outcomes, but policies have fallen short of that recognition. “I think we’re going to see phenomenal progress in a very short amount of time,” he adds. For multinational companies, this progress includes taking into account the diversity of the different geographies in which it operates. Tata Communications, for example, has 12,000 employees across 40 countries, which forces it to develop products and programs that will work globally. “Of course, based on the requirements of different countries, you have to have some things which are localized, but other than those localizations for different countries, every single product that we have is global”.

While variation among countries and nationalities in the APAC region requires companies to be ready for country specific issues, employee issues are not that different. “Issues actually vary more by job role than geography”. In addition to this diversity of roles, Far East Organization highlights generational diversity as an important consideration its youngest employee is 21 and its oldest is 82. “We have to tweak the way we communicate one group prefers words others, infographics. And not everybody has a laptop or is tech savvy, but everybody knows how to use a phone. And for those whose work calls for it, we give them a corporate smartphone to facilitate more effective communication”. The company knows exactly who has no laptop and no easy access to the internet, and communicates with them via SMS.