Reimagining the employee experience

As a global hedge fund, our client provides its people with a working environment that boosts their performance and supports their ongoing development is a top priority.

With this goal in mind, the company knew it had to improve its legacy shared services processes, many of which were time-intensive and fragmented. It wanted to explore how redesigning processes with digital technologies could transform the employee experience.

The company's former CEO recognized that rather than pursuing this objective alone, partnering with an expert would allow the business to realize better ways of working more quickly. After extensive exploration, the company chose Genpact to redesign employee experiences across its shared services functions, specifically HR, finance, and facilities.

Together, we embarked on a multi-year transformation project to:

1. Improve the quality of services delivered to employees and clients
2. Provide better development and career opportunities for shared-services employees
3. Empower employees and management to spend more time on their core responsibilities
4. Enable the company to spend money more wisely

We worked together in a state-of-the-art service center to reimagine, design, build, and deploy employee experiences supported by advanced technologies such as conversational AI, robotic process automation, and analytics.

If you're looking to rethink the employee experience in your business, following this example is a great place to start.

Service design is a key first step for any experience-led transformation. It's a structured, interdisciplinary discovery process that helps organizations imagine new ways of working. It starts by understanding employees' needs and uses a variety of disciplines, including design thinking, ideation workshops, qualitative and quantitative research, personas, journey maps, and rapid prototyping.

Multiple stakeholders from different areas of the business met for service design workshops to address the needs of client-facing employees and shared-services professionals.

Using the workshops' findings, we then created a service design blueprint for paving the way toward an experience-led future, identifying where to make changes and connections across people, processes, and technologies.

Next, validate your workshop suggestions with user research. Although leadership teams often believe they thoroughly understand their employees and clients, the right research can uncover hidden issues.

Through research, it becomes clear that because each employee experience is unique, a one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work. Initially, Genpact identified more than 100 employee experiences as potential candidates for transformation at the firm through qualitative and quantitative research. Using rigorous evaluation, we selected 15 pivotal journeys that could set an example for positive change at scale. The next step was to use digital technologies to make these journeys a reality, meeting the needs of the individual to avoid pushing all employees through the same process.

For example, in many organizations, onboarding a new employee is an experience that's often riddled with inefficient handoffs between siloed functions and manual processes. This impacts employee productivity, satisfaction, and the length of time it takes a new hire to feel settled. It can also cause frustration for the hiring manager. Often, HR, IT, finance, recruitment, security, and the hiring manager contact new employees separately, causing delays and miscommunication.

Freeing up employees to focus on where they can provide the most value is critical for any transformation initiative. To do just that, the firm is looking at processes differently.

By building a portal backed by digital technologies, the company is creating a single-entry point that will drive consistent employee experiences. But it will be more than just a portal – it will bring together people and technology to augment the experience and ultimately predict what users want and need. For example, the portal can suggest services to employees – like booking a conference room – based on historical interactions and preferences.

Supporting the portal will be service desks with smart assistants. They will provide a digital view of the end-to-end journey of an internal request and remove the need for employees to waste time trying to find out how their request is progressing. Over time, employees will receive the same level of service from a digital channel as they would from a person.

For complex requests like coordinating shared services support for a company-wide initiative, involving the right people is important. Having a direct line to subject matter experts helps employees break from traditional workflows if necessary. Plus, senior relationship advisors can act as employee advocates by aligning teams and flagging issues before they become problems.

Of course, digital transformation doesn't happen overnight. It's a journey of continuous innovation that requires dynamic feedback loops to manage improvements and adjustments as the needs of the business, employees, and clients evolve. Genpact's advanced analytics solutions can continually measure and improve performance.

Indeed, many transformations fail due to a lack of measurement. At the start of the project, Genpact worked closely with the firm to define success criteria and measurement. Over time, managers can track employee performance and assess the effectiveness of these new experiences and journeys based on these KPIs.

Ultimately, successful experience-led transformation requires industry knowledge combined with digital expertise. It's this approach that allows the asset management firm and Genpact to reimagine employee experiences to support the firm's goal of delivering great portfolios and build strategic relationships with its institutional clients today and into the future.