To deliver an optimal employee experience, focus on four principles inspired by the user-centric, iterative practice of design thinking. While this is a topic that might seem out of content in what is happening today, the shift to remote work does bag a reinvestigation of existing processes in HR to encourage a conducive employee experience of the shift.

Be clear. Employees can’t do their jobs well if they don’t understand what is being asked of them, the purpose of the work, or how they should prioritize their tasks.

Keep it moving. Once an employee dives into a task, a sense of satisfying productivity should set in. Ensuring that your people have that experience, though, requires the ability to put yourself in their shoes and create a sense of flow within your systems.

Make it pleasing. Ask yourself what it would take for employee experience to be a delight — for example, through gamified training modules or KPIs.

Don’t neglect the foundations. Ultimately, employees have a right to expect that “it just works,” whether “it” is their human resources self-service portal, their expense management system, or their system interoperability. It’s also critical that user experience be accessible to all, including employees with any type of disability.

Delivering on these principles will set your organization up to improve productivity and deliver powerful outcomes. But when it comes to employee experience, you can’t just set it and forget it. You need to build a way for employees to give robust and ongoing feedback. And with that experiential data, along with operational data, you can then adopt a methodology that we call return on experience to leverage insights for continuous improvement and measure the impact of your employee experience work on value creation and realization.

It’s time for a step change in what we ask of our teams and colleagues, and in how we respect their time and attention. The principles presents a new way to build employee experiences that go far further than satisfying functional or administrative needs; they help to engender a sense of community, responsibility, and pride.

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