Productivity and performance are key concerns for CEOs and businesses but top-down approaches to employee listening do not lead to better outcomes. That’s the belief of those behind the employee experience (EX) platform provider Welliba, who suggest a different approach must be taken to tackle the root causes of concerns.
Personalisation that is backed by behavioural science and AI offers new perspectives to meet employees’ real needs, they argue, because many businesses only focus on measuring work context to assess EX.
“If we can use new technology to understand the real-time interaction between employees and their environment, then management can course-correct more quickly,” explains Katarina Coppé, chief commercial officer at Welliba.
A culture based on measuring social impacts, while providing personalised insights and feedback, is key to worker satisfaction
She contends that focusing on a person’s response to their direct manager, their work conditions or their rewards leads to an incomplete picture. People’s characteristics must also be considered for EX, if it is to make a tangible impact on employee belonging and wellbeing, she explains.
This can be achieved by a holistic employee-experience management approach, she suggests, while pointing out that most employees don’t even get to see the results of traditional employee listening surveys.
“People are not given insights into what they can do themselves to improve their own experience,” Coppé adds. “We have put employee ownership at the heart of our approach. One large multinational had a very low response rate from its traditional surveys but after turning to Welliba, this rate multiplied by 20.”
Welliba deploys AI-driven technology to understand what’s behind issues such as attrition and job satisfaction. Welliba’s EX+ platform was designed on strong foundations of behavioural science, psychology, psychometrics and traditional HR techniques – and is used in 73 countries in 11 languages.
Chief information officer Achim Preuss says making the drivers of employee experience measurable allows companies to predict and explain their employees’ human behaviour.
“There is also the aspect of positive psychology, understanding what makes people thrive,” he explains. “Performance is the result of the capacity of a person, their abilities and skills, plus the context, the process and the mindset of that person. We collect all the signals to produce evidence-based feedback.”
Each person is unique
Welliba’s approach is built on five principles:
- A science-backed holistic concept to understand experience
- A modern alternative to old-style surveys
- Privacy by design
- Forward-looking data connected to business metrics
- Live automated personalisation for each employee
As a result, EX+ can predict how employee experience will impact people and business outcomes such as flight risk, absenteeism, psychological safety, wellbeing, trust and more.
“Every human being is unique,” Coppé says. “Our technology brings that uniqueness into play. EX+ understands how individual employees react, based on personal characteristics and context, and it can predict critical outcomes at scale.”
Pointing to traditional methods of employee engagement, Welliba CEO David Barrett suggests that the “signal to action” is absent in most systems. Roadmaps for change then take months to produce, he says.
Barrett highlights that even when they are ready to roll out, they have virtually no connection to how the individual feels or perceives the system they work in, or how it matters to them. Instead, Welliba’s solution accounts for way more of the variance in predicting people and business outcomes with “the self” as the focal point, he adds.
Performance is the result of the capacity of a person, plus the context and the mindset of that person
“Many systems assume everyone is equally affected by something like their conditions, work environment or policies,” Barrett explains. “But anyone with any common sense would know different humans respond differently to these stimuli.”
EX+ can be configured for companies of all sizes, whether 50 employees or 80,000. It can also be used to target specific groups when HR needs additional insights or wants to provide additional support.
“Our approach is very versatile,” Coppé says. “We are helping a Fortune 500 company to support the employees of a recently acquired company. Onboarding gets a lot of attention: several companies have asked us to help them get new insights into the experience of their early career talent.”
She adds: “We are also working with a global company to improve the wellbeing of employees across the organisation. That project will involve thousands of employees.”
Helping employees and employers
Welliba has also recently supported a leadership team during a “stressful business transformation”, Coppé explains, with that project seeing personalised EX insights and guidance used to improve their wellbeing, learning and development.
Privacy is core to the platform too, meaning employees “know they can be open and honest about their experience because their individual data is only accessible to them,” she adds. Users are motivated by the personal feedback EX+ provides, Coppé suggests, with employers and people leaders able to see the aggregate data to understand what they can do to help, without needing to view individual employee responses.
This approach is benefiting airline pilots, who can get self-insight into their wellbeing and other aspects that may be boosting or blocking them. Their answers generate personalised guidance, and privacy by design means the information won’t have negative consequences on their ability to work.
“Our system helps HR to reduce the complexity of understanding employee experience to instead focus on the root causes of problems. They can then decide where to invest resources, development and training to a specific group or across the business as a whole,” Coppé adds. “This prevents investment decisions being made solely on ‘anecdotes’.”
Barrett challenges traditional processes, warning: “There is too much usage of blunt and superficial instruments that only capture part of what EX is really about.” He adds that creating a culture based on measuring social impacts and qualitative data, while providing personalised insights and feedback, is key to ensuring “employee satisfaction”.
Welliba can also be used to meet the growing role of industry-specific mandatory reporting for regulation and compliance. “We’re able to do targeted interventions for many thousands of people simultaneously,” Barrett explains. “We are extremely strong at replacing outdated models and technologies to continually focus on data insights and services.
“Welliba’s goal is to allow people to advance in a way that benefits themselves, their team, their employer and wider society.”
For more information please visit offer.welliba.com/raconteur
