By Dr Amanda Salter

Research has shown that an improved employee experience (EX) drives workforce engagement, wellbeing, productivity, and ultimately, overall business performance.

In 2021, Willis Towers Watson reported in its Employee Experience Survey that 92% of employers were choosing to prioritise EX – a staggering increase from the pre-pandemic figure of 52%. Despite this, employees don’t seem to be getting any happier. A bellwether study by BambooHR found that employee happiness in the United States plummeted 10 times faster in 2023 than in the previous three years. This trend has been dubbed the ‘Great Gloom’, a worrying follow up to the Great Resignation. It’s time to double down on your EX to avoid being pulled into this downward spiral.

For the uninitiated, ‘employee experience’ is the sum total of all the interactions that happen between an employee and their employer. The savvier amongst us will see the parallels here with the term ‘customer experience’. EX covers the full lifecycle of your employees, from the moment they first encounter your organisation, all the way to joining, leaving, and perhaps even rejoining your organisation.

Despite the commonly heard messages from HR consultancies or HR IT platform providers, EX is much broader than just your stance on hybrid working or your ability to provide the latest and greatest technology for your employees. Far-sighted banks need a long-term, employee-centric EX strategy, a ‘north star’ that will provide focus, guide budget allocation, maximise engagement, and minimise staff churn.

I propose that a great EX strategy has five pillars: people, processes, policies, data, and technology.

1. Look After Your People

There is truth in the cliché, ‘your employees are your greatest asset’, but many banks struggle to live out this statement, especially in the area of training. According to a PwC study in 2023, less than half (45%) of employees say that their company is upskilling its workers. Some banks are just not keen on training their people. They ask, “What if we spend all this money training someone and they leave?”. The flip side of this question is: what if you don’t train them and they stay?

Invest in training your people. This also means freeing them up long enough from their day jobs to undertake training. Find out what skills they want to learn. Don’t limit people to a single career trajectory and consider offering flexible career pathways that include lateral moves to other teams.

Good leaders are key to your EX. Increasingly, employees are looking for leaders who are more than just bosses. True leaders are purpose-driven, transparent, accountable, and empathetic. They protect their teams from politics, fight for their interests, and prioritise their teams’ development. They give credit where credit is due and take the risks on behalf of their teams. As Nelson Mandela said, “It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory. You take the frontline when there is danger.”

Asia-Pacific leaders and managers need a highly nuanced understanding of what motivates their people. There is a significant spread of diverse motivations and values across the region. This is markedly different to the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East, where ‘meaningful work’ is by and large the single most important motivational factor. An IBM study, The Employee Experience Index Around the Globe, found that in India, ‘feedback, recognition, and growth’ is just as important as meaningful work. In the Philippines, it’s ‘coworker relationships’ that are important, whereas in Thailand it’s ‘empowerment and voice’.

Identifying and harnessing these factors intelligently will help you to drive a more effective EX strategy.

2. Optimise Internal Processes

If your employees are facing error-prone internal processes, multiple handoffs, and slow service delivery on a daily basis, they will not be looking forward to starting work every day. There is also no way that your end customer is getting a good experience either.

Optimise your internal back-office processes. Reduce the number of handoffs that take place between teams. If your entire back office functions like a well-oiled machine, your employees will enjoy increased influence and impact in their work, which in turn improves your EX.

One process that often suffers from poor performance in large banks is recruitment. Applicants will come away from their recruitment experience with a clear impression of how your organisation works (or doesn’t). If it takes six weeks for a candidate to get from a job ad to a job offer, you won’t be landing the best candidates. Many recruitment teams still struggle to reconcile the poor availability of hiring managers and the bank’s need for rigour, with the need to move quickly and respect each candidate as an individual.

There’s a monetary benefit to fixing frustrating and inefficient internal processes and systems. Simply take the amount of time your employees spend struggling to get their job done, multiplied by their annual salary to estimate the potential cost savings. These figures can be scarily high for large, complex banks.

3. Set (and Update) Your Policies

Obviously, your return-to-office policy has a huge impact on your EX, but there’s so much more to consider here. Policies have the power to make or break your EX. Positive changes in culture can be reinforced from the top down by creating new policies, like many banks are now doing for diversity, equity, and inclusion. There are also smaller ‘mini policies’ that can be put in place to improve life for everyone. For example, start all meetings at five minutes past the hour, to give people some breathing space between meetings.

A Future Forums study found that most executives (66%) are designing post-pandemic workforce policies with little to no direct input from employees. Don’t make this mistake. When faced with launching a potentially controversial or unpopular policy, take the time to invite employee feedback beforehand. This gives you an early signal about how new policies are likely to be received and the questions that will be asked. You can then either go into battle prepared, or you can quietly make some changes without needing to do a big climbdown.

If there are company policies that your employees are unhappy about, and you give them no channel to route their concerns, they will vote with their feet. Don’t hide behind your policies or use them as roadblocks. If you don’t address policy concerns and complaints, you can be sure there will be employees who will try to circumvent them anyway, possibly causing even higher risk to the bank. Remember what life was like before ‘bring your own device’ became an accepted policy?

4. Collect and Analyse the Right Data

The best EX strategy will be specific to your bank and your employees’ needs. To develop this level of specificity, you have to have enough detail about what your employees need, what their pain points are, and what has to be fixed across your existing employee experience. If you don’t know enough about these things, it’s time to find out.

Start with a clear picture of the full range of EX data that you want to collect. A combination of qualitative and quantitative data will give you a rich, contextual picture of your current EX, together with numbers to feed a business case for change. You want scalable and secure data collection mechanisms that anonymise and aggregate quantitative feedback appropriately. Many organisations run an annual employee feedback survey, others choose to collect data on an ongoing basis through a continuous listening programme. Exit interviews can also be a good (but often missed) opportunity to collect candid qualitative feedback. Whatever collection mechanisms you choose, make sure that it’s quick and easy for employees to provide their ratings and responses, not onerous and burdensome.

Ideally, you’ll want to collect data for both leading and lagging EX indicators. A lagging indicator measures the after-the-fact outcome of your EX. A high employee leavers’ rate is an obvious lagging indicator of poor EX. Leading indicators on the other hand measure the various factors that are likely to result in a lagging indicator. Poor employee participation in company-wide events, low rates of employee referrals for jobs, and poor results from employee feedback surveys can all be leading indicators that predict high numbers of leavers. Tracking these leading indicators gives you foresight and the chance to intervene and change things before you get an undesirable outcome.

Once you have collected your data, consider using tools and techniques from design thinking – such as personas, journey mapping, and ideation – to analyse the findings, create actionable insights, and help you determine the desired changes you want to make to your EX.

5. Meet Expectations of Technology

It’s a basic employee expectation that your internal systems will all work together seamlessly. Ensure your internal tech platforms and software (from HR systems to purchasing platforms and the intranet) are all integrated. Otherwise, you’ll be contributing detrimentally to point number two (efficiency of your back-office processes).

Provide ways for your employees to self-serve the technology they need and do their jobs at maximum efficiency. Allow exceptions and administrative rights to install safe technology on relevant employees’ machines – don’t let your IT department lock everything down too tightly. Recover and reduce operational tech – ensure that employee profiles, internal software licenses, technology vendors, and file repositories are audited and consolidated regularly. There are many technology-related optimisation opportunities hiding in plain sight that can not only simplify life for your employees but also save costs and enhance your bottom line.

A McKinsey 2021 research report shows that employees at companies with good EX are more inclined to surpass work expectations, translating to a 40% higher level of discretionary effort. Forward-thinking banks are those who capitalise on this goodwill effect on productivity. Treat your employees as internal customers who need to be served by your business functions and you can’t go far wrong.

If you don’t yet have a solid EX strategy, then use these five pillars – people, processes, policies, data and technology – as chapter headings to create a distinctive and directive EX strategy that sets out your bank’s vision for the future, focuses your resources, and delineates the strategic judgment calls that you are making for each pillar. This is the first but most critical step in a long-term journey towards improving your bank’s position in the EX league.

Asia-Pacific Banks in the EX Lead

ANZ has implemented an employee listening programme to gather feedback on 25 drivers, including trust in leadership, living company values, trust in management, and work-life balance. These drivers align to five key performance indicators through which the bank measures EX: engagement, well-being, experience versus expectations, intent to stay, and inclusion.

UOB’s employee value proposition includes weekly two-day remote working, an additional two hours off during the workday every month for personal matters, and a choice of staggered start work times. Following implementation of this new policy, morale and loyalty increased across the bank, with no negative impact on productivity. UOB ranked second in Asia in Time magazine’s World’s Best Companies 2023.

Dr Amanda Salter is Associate Director at Akasaa, a boutique content development and consulting firm. She has delivered award-winning customer experience strategies for the Fortune 500 and been an Agile practitioner for over a decade. Previously with Accenture’s London office, Dr Salter holds a PhD in Human Centred Web Design; BSc (Hons) Computing Science, First Class; and is a certified member of the UK Market Research Society and Association for Qualitative Research.