Touch vs. Tech: The Employee Experience

I have recently re-entered the Human Capital / Employee Experience field after building my own omni-channel retail business; I am seeing many exciting and also frightening trends in our field that I want to explore with this blog.  Today, I want to talk Touch vs. Tech.

Human Resources professionals face the same challenges as other fields like customer relations, patient care and social work.  For years now HR has looked to technology as a panacea to throw at the problems of serving more clients who have ever greater and complex demands for talent, management guidance, data, education, problem solving, compliance and a host of other rapid changes occurring in people strategy.  We tend to plan in linear, chronological chunks but in reality change is occurring on a curve where sometimes it is accelerating in spatial leaps which means we are not even aware where we are on the curve.  Employees feel this and so technology can be a bridge or barrier. Sometimes people need a hand not an app to help them succeed. We need to make sure we know which one to offer to our employees and when.

Technology has lifted us up in many regards as a culture and society where information and feedback are delivered instantly to our eyes and ears through various devices, channels and online communities.  In many ways we feel more connected to the larger world around us because of this.  But there are also many who believe that while we may feel more connected, what we really have done is become more aware, but not more connected.  Lost in the technology and apps we use daily is the sheer reduction for physical and emotional contact that humans by nature need to feel nurtured, motivated, trusted, inspired and generally part of something bigger than ourselves.  We are losing the ability to connect with other people on a deeper and more authentic level.  OK, so I am not telling you anything that researchers and psychologists are not telling you about society in general, but what I want to comment on is how HR can fail to adequately recognize these trends and meet our mission to act as a guardian of the key asset we are hired to manage and protect, people.

I have a friend who recently went through a large organization’s Talent Acquisition process as a candidate for a critical management role in their technology area.  I was fascinated to hear her experience.  Through the course of her recruitment she only had two face to face interactions with people at this company which consistently gets noted as a ‘Best Place to Work’.  She started her job and other than her boss and two internal clients within thirty feet of her, she had no other interaction with the company at large.  Her New Hire Orientation was conducted at her desk via an online course and for any issues she has with her employment relationship she has access to a very well designed portal with lots of information for her to guide herself through the employee relationship.

So this experience is not uncommon and frankly not damaging in and of itself, except that this company has works incredibly hard to build a brand for employee recruitment where you can “Be a Part of Changing the World”.  After about a month I asked her, do you feel a part or bonded to an endeavor as exciting and deeply motivational as “Changing the World”?  She looked at me puzzled and asked what I meant?  She clearly was not living the ‘brand’ as we say.  And although it was all over her paperwork and on the portal, she had not had one conversation with anyone in the company other than a recruiter, her boss and two internal clients of her work prior to and upon starting her job.  And certainly she had no deep appreciation for the path the organization was taking in its industry and marketplace.
The technology helped the organization find and acquire my friend and her talent, but then fell flat on inspiring her to be a part of something special.  This lack of connection will be critical if they want my friend to truly be an innovator and feel engaged to disrupt the system positively.  She basically got a job and is satisfied, but is that what using all that technology promised us as HR professionals?  Don’t we want our field to be the catalyst for making people and the organizations we serve great?  Well of course we do, so before we look at technology as the answer it is critical to step back and decide how to implement it and when to throw it out and go low tech or what I call ‘High-Touch’.

Let’s dissect one part of her experience, her New Employee Orientation.  Hiring hundreds of people annually makes technology seem like the most efficient way to get people on-boarded and working.  In reality, this company lost a valuable chance at making a connection between their new employee and everything that is important to the success of the company.  So here are some low-tech, high-touch ideas for how my friend’s experience could have gone and how that would have placed her firmly in place as an advocate for the mission, purpose and goals of the company:

1. Bring the new hire in with other recent new hires from throughout the organization. This creates a referent group (pledge class) for the new hire.  People outside of your work area that you can bond with and build relationships that may help you on work projects later. Your network.
2. Have senior leaders in with the group to bridge the divide between them and the leadership of the organization.  Your senior leaders are in that job because they are great communicators who know how to inspire, let them do what they do best!  Have them there live if possible but here is where you could fold technology in and have them Skype in if the leader is not readily available or unable to get to the session.  Just make sure it is interactive.
3. Your Employee Experience team (I prefer to think of any staff members who touch anything that touches employees daily work life as Experience team members not just HR) must make an appearance to talk about the programs and processes the technology will help them access.  A face and handshake before throwing in the technology makes even the technology feel personal.  Help the new hire complete the forms and make the benefit choices with the experts there to answer questions.  If your experience team aren’t involved in this than you will see some strange trends like entire work groups all picking the same health plan because one person in the group tells them to versus employees deciding which is best for them.
4. Physical space is as critical as emotional space.  Take the time to show your new hires around the campus so they can quickly get over the ‘first day of school’ feeling.  We know spaces matter so help them find their way and the spots they may feel connected to like where they might enjoy lunch or quiet time.
5. And finally, get the new hire’s supervisor involved with a discussion for initial ramp-up that is formalized and shared.  Commitment to success starts day one.

I am sure there are many other great ideas about how to do on-boarding beyond this but the purpose is that we as HR must step back and plan when and where to use Technology and when and where to use Touch.  Base this analysis on the culture and change efforts that you are leading and which blend best suits the organization you want to build, not the organization you currently have.  Technology can do great things, but as long as we are still staffing organizations with people we need to be cognizant of the emotional and intellectual needs of our employees and whether that Technology can actually meet those needs. 

Thanks for reading, I look forward to bringing more blogs now that I am back in the game.