Distributed working can drive a personalised approach to employee experience

Optimising employee experience for business benefit is an emergent trend of our increasingly digitally-connected but physically distributed work forces.

Gartner's Future of Work Trends - with data gathered in April this year - already identified 16% of employers admitted to increasing the gathering of passive employee data collection. For example: virtual logging/clocking in and out; computer and phone use; use of email, internal communication and chats; and location or movement.

The data is available to far more than 16% of companies. Working from home has rocketed to closer to 50%. There are ethical questions of course. The same ethical questions facing us as consumers. How relaxed we are about having our every key-stroke captured, stored, diced and used to serve us depends very much on the discernible benefits to us. Increasingly we want to understand what's in it for them, too.

But employers can use this passive employee data more effectively for carrot than for stick.

Given the reported 'burnout' experienced by many - the increase in monthly hours worked (with estimates running at 20-30 extra per employee per month), the physical and creative downsides of parking behind a computer all day, given all this and more, there are new opportunities emerging for data-driven, employer-led wellness interventions.

We are fine when our car tells us it's time to take a break after two hours in the driving seat - perhaps passive data can be used to enforce mental and physical screen breaks? And if, from aggregating data the employer can understand more about what makes an individual effective, even applying some of the A/B testing techniques so readily applied to us as live, real-time consumers, then perhaps demands on us, styles of communications, engagement in meetings, workshops, pitches et al, can start to be designed to suit end user needs with the kind of specificity we have long enjoyed as customers.

Welcome to insight-led, experience-centred, employee and workplace experience. We just have to treat employees with the same respect we have come to understand the customer must be treated with.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash