Steps to Happiness in Employee Experience

Pasi Nikkanen: Hey. Welcome to another episode of Happy Today. Today, we're going to talk about steps to happiness. So I think that topic many of our customers and people we talk with, experts, are talking like, "How do I get started? How do I get started?" So where should we start? What are the really the practical steps to get started with employee experience?

Sami Kallio: All right and they are, and the practical steps are much, much easier than kind of the how you change the culture in the company. So very, very practically. First start, don't think about the real moment that we start after this and this project and all that, your end user are having that experience's already. So start immediately so that you start to understand how they feel.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah.

Sami Kallio: That is the very, very practical.

Pasi Nikkanen: Good.

Sami Kallio: Put it up and running. Start to learn. The next step, for me, is to start to share that information, and share that information openly between customer and partner. If you have outsource service desk, or with the agents, or even the business, and so on. So really start to use that data, and then showing everybody that you care about it, and that will be a really, really strong message to the whole organization, and IT, that it's something you care about now.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah, I think that's the might be the biggest mistake if you first measure, and then you are so scared of sharing with everybody, and you tried to first make it right, or start to clean up the data, or something like that. I'm totally correct to share it, because then you can have meaningful conversations. Why is today like that? What does it tell us? And start to understand what's actually behind it.

Sami Kallio: And then there is not only one person owning that data.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yes.

Sami Kallio: Because one person cannot change the experience.

Pasi Nikkanen: No.

Sami Kallio: Somebody can be an expert on it, and do their the recommendations. And I think that comes to the next step, which is identify the development areas. Of course, you should be also identifying those things you are doing right.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yes, to celebrate.

Sami Kallio: And celebrate it. Yeah. But it's... When we are talking about developing services, you have to find those areas that can be done even better.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah, and maybe it's just even like, find one thing where everybody agrees that hey, this is a good place that we can fix. And if you can make an impact on that, and actually show in the numbers, because you're continuously measuring now, then show that was there any impact on your actions.

Sami Kallio: Yeah. So let's see you have started to measure, you started to share. Then one thing to get the people involved would be that you have a one half a day workshop, innovation workshop.

Pasi Nikkanen: True.

Sami Kallio: You just bring on the table three problems that you are having, and get all the people involved to think about what we should be doing differently that we solve exactly that thing.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah.

Sami Kallio: So, for me, that is innovation. You have a problem to solve, and then you talk about it. And that's kind of way to teach the people in your organization that culture of being employee centric or...

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah. Yeah. But I think we see so many different types of companies. So how do you see that the company maturity level actually affects on your kind of journey on this?

Sami Kallio: Okay, here we come to even to some organization team very, very scared of this data. But the only thing to get rid of that scare of end user experience, because I already I said, they already have that experience. So if you are the only one not knowing it, you cannot develop your services. So again you have to start from the conduit measurement, start to understand what is going on. Next step being that transparency-

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah.

Sami Kallio: ... and doing the decisions based off the data.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah.

Sami Kallio: Then it comes to the acclimate at level.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah.

Sami Kallio: And then something-

Pasi Nikkanen: I think if we still stop a little bit on the transparency. It really is a maturity level. Is the company transparent with the data.

Sami Kallio: Yeah.

Pasi Nikkanen: It has, or if somebody tried to hide it, then you kind of own it, and like you said, so that is really a maturity of the organization.

Sami Kallio: And also I would say maturity of the partnership, if there is an outsource service desk provider. So are they willing, are you as a customer willing to see that data continuously, and work together with your MSP to be better, because it's always cooperation there.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah, that's actually a really good point. I kind of forgot that, but I think that's even the most important, when you have an outsource partners.

Sami Kallio: Yeah.

Pasi Nikkanen: And when you, many times do you have external vendors working with you, being transparent with them.

Sami Kallio: Yeah.

Pasi Nikkanen: So then you can actually, it leads to really good cooperation.

Sami Kallio: Yeah. In the history of our company, we have had cases when MSB has not been willing to share the data-

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah.

Sami Kallio: ... in the beginning. And nothing happens to discourse. But sadly there has been also a case where customer, which is weird, was not willing to share the data with their provider. So that cap between the vendor and the customer was so bad, there was no trust.

Sami Kallio: Transparency brings you the trust, and then you start to be more willing to, also together, to focus really on that one.

And then we come.

If you. Now, let me call you to my favorite.

Pasi Nikkanen:  Yeah, I would. I would. So setting targets.

Sami Kallio: Yeah.

Pasi Nikkanen: Because if you're measuring something and you don't set any targets, then why are you doing?

Sami Kallio: Yeah, yeah. And I really, really hate the traditional SLAs, and I have said that so many times in different occasions. The reason for that is that it's not trading at all the end user experience.

Pasi Nikkanen: True.

Sami Kallio: And that's my experience level, agreements are the way to go in the end, but we are not recommending do that from the first day.

Pasi Nikkanen: I see.

Sami Kallio: You first have to start to learn, you have to start to be... With your vendor, you both have to trust that data. And you have to be first transparent to each other-

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah.

Sami Kallio:... before you can really do that change, because it's all about trust.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah. And I think we'll start doing some interviews, some episodes about the experience level agreements on their own, because it's a huge topic. So just understanding that part of maturity is that you cannot go there before you have done this, these other steps.

Sami Kallio: Yeah.

Pasi Nikkanen: Where does everything lead to? What is the final step in your point of view in the maturity?

Sami Kallio: Ah well, more smiles. Let's face the time, is this. But I think it's about really being the culture of the IT, and the whole organization partners, if that changes, and that needs about two years from the beginning. It's not first day, but you need to build a culture so that everybody's really understanding that the entire experience is the real reason why we, in service management and service, is why we really exist.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah.

Sami Kallio: And doing this is based off that motivating project teams with the data that okay, now we set a target not to be ready 15th of September. We set the date target to be making end users more happy, and more efficient.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah.

Sami Kallio: Which is more motivating. Same thing for agents. So it's all about thinking everything you do from the perspective of the end user.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah.

Sami Kallio: And that's really a cultural change from the current situation.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah. Yeah, it was just the visiting one of our customer, Campari. And they mentioned that their biggest challenge is the culture, because they are starting basically from scratch. But it's not the technology. It's not that.

Sami Kallio: Yeah.

Pasi Nikkanen: But so any other sales are the biggest impact of employee experience measurement is that the change of culture.

Sami Kallio: Yeah.

Pasi Nikkanen: So it's nothing to do with technology, or having some nice measurements somewhere, or even the XLA, but it's really the whole culture of how we develop things.

Sami Kallio: Yep.

Pasi Nikkanen: All right. I think that's a good summary of how to get started, and we always happy to chat more. So if you want to connect, you can find our contact information from happysignals.com. But thanks Sami. I appreciate it. It's, I think, a lightening understanding of how to get started. Thank you.

Sami Kallio: Thank you.