Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer.
Today, I’m speaking with Mary Kaplan, product marketing manager at employee experience platform, LumApps. We’re going to talk about what employee experience is made of, the importance of communications, and what employers think of it all. That and more on this edition of PeopleTech.
Hey, Mary. Thanks for joining me. So LumApps is about employee experience basically, and a lot of platforms in that space focus on communications. I’m wondering why that is.
Mary:
Yeah. You’re exactly right. I think also it’s kind of how the market has evolved. A lot of platforms who are calling themselves employee experience platforms were born in that intranet or corporate portal, corporate communications space. Not all of them because you’ll see some employee experience platforms that are born solely in the HR world. But I think communications is absolutely key because we are seeing, as the years go on, as we maybe are tenured at a company or even move a position or move to a new company, the number of applications that we use tends to increase. It doesn’t tend to decrease. Technology is beautiful and it’s amazing, but it can be overwhelmingly complex. And I think communications and making sure everyone is aligned and playing for the same team, knows where the company is heading and their team is heading have been…
You would think with all the new communications and the tools, it would be improved, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes, things are just getting lost. There’s almost too many applications, too many ways that we communicate with each other. Things get lost. Things are in silos. And so I think employee experience platforms recognize that communications need to be improved and can be improved in a variety of different ways. At LumApps particularly, we like to put the employee at the center. So this notion of hyper-personalization and really knowing who you’re talking to and targeting your audience with the right communications, again, helps so that you’re not kind of sifting through information to find what you need as an employee.
Mark:
So why not just use a regular communication tool, some sort?
Mary:
You can, and a lot of our customers do. And personally, the favorite part of my job is to see our customers grow year over year. Let’s say they bought LumApps four years ago. They were using paper bulletins on the board. Then they transitioned to LumApps and they were all about top-down communication. And now, they’ve been able to use the tool to grow to leverage more bottom-up communication or peer-to-peer communication. So a lot of companies do start with Juno. The main goal is communication, and it’s getting the message out, and it’s making sure it’s heard. But as we think about the maturity model of just businesses in general, a lot of businesses who are more mature or maybe more apt to look at more additional functionality, they see that it’s so beneficial for employee experience to offer more than just top-down communications.
If your communications are asking employees to complete something, which it often is, well, then make that experience easy. If I need to communicate with you about our 2023 goals and I’m asking you to do something about that, I shouldn’t give you four other applications to jump into, with four different logins, to get what I’m asking done. And likewise, I shouldn’t ask you to log onto a computer if I can deliver it via an app. So I think, companies, again, are looking at employee experience and thinking communications can really play a central role in that, but it’s that beautiful kind of convergence of IT, HR and comms, that’s where we see the real beauty of employee experience and how many, I would say, positive strides can be made to improve employee experience.
Mark:
Now, do you have a definition of employee experience?
Mary:
I tend to go back to Gartner’s definition. I think it’s really robust and it’s the sum of all cumulative interactions that an employee has with their place of employment. So it’s those connections with coworkers and managers, but it could be, of course, the digital touchpoints and tools. It could be milestones that they’ve reached and really everything in between. And so it is this notion of, and I think that’s why it’s so complicated at times, it’s so broad. It’s all the touchpoints an employee has in their day-to-day work. That’s what makes up employee experience.
Mark:
Okay. And do you think… I’ve heard people say that the employee experience can involve things like the facility. If it’s a nice facility, that’s good. If it’s not, it’s bad. So do you believe that, that it goes beyond communication?
Mary:
Definitely. Yeah. I think it really is everything. The facility, the physical location is super important. And then when that was kind of ripped away, as we know for so many people, they transitioned to online remote work, and it became such a more emphasis on those digital applications. If you are not in the office with your coworkers physically and that’s all stripped away, then where does the water cooler chat happen? Where does the kind of spontaneous collaboration or just getting to know people get in furthering your connection and knowledge happen? And so, yes, I think it’s more than just communication.
And I think we play in the space of digital employee experience only because we’re a software application. But, yeah. It’s really those… It’s everything. You can only have a great employee experience if you can potentially find parking and find a desk and your office isn’t flooded. That’s number one, I would say. Yeah.
Mark:
Yeah. No floods is a good thing. So how do you think that employers today, when you come at them and you start to talk about experience, how do you think they view experience? And how should they view experience?
Mary:
I think it’s a really great question. I think it is becoming easier to see which employers are getting it right and which aren’t. And for me, the first step in getting it right is just prioritizing it. And I think employee experience has always been a topic, but often it’s been a topic left to HR and left to that notion of culture and that notion of maybe well-being. But now that we’re seeing HR… I would consider HR, IT and communications, they have to all hold hands. They have to all be working towards the same goal of employee experience because so much of it is online, so much of it is just cross-departmental. I should probably add in the operations team in there as well. And so, I think companies who, number one, make it a primary focus.
I’m always in the camp of try. If your employees know you’re trying, they’re going to give you grace, I think, for the most part. But if they think it’s not a priority for you, that’s going to be less grace. And so I think, if you have that tiger team of representatives, leadership across the business, that have said, “Okay, we are going to prioritize employee experience. We’re not going to boil the ocean, but we’re going to look at our employees, define key personas to us, and kind of map their employee journey and say, ‘Here’s how we can really improve that process. Here’s a gap that we can try and fit, whether it’s a new technology or repurpose a technology or a new program or strategy.'” You don’t have to say, “We’re going to just totally optimize every employee’s experience every single day all the time.” You would just kind of fix whether it’s what could be the low hanging fruit or it could be the ones that make the biggest impact throughout an employee’s life cycle. I think that’s the companies that are doing the best job.
Mark:
How did the whole notion of hybrid work, how has that impact… I’m sorry, let me start again.
How was experience impacted by hybrid work? What kind of shifts did employers need to make to bring it there?
Mary:
I think it was hugely impactful. I think employee experience, at some companies, not all companies, went from, “Okay, once a month, on Fridays, we have pizza and people can wear t-shirts.” That was employee experience. And to now, it’s like, no, employees are working from home. They’re working longer hours. They are getting burnt out. We are not making it easier for them to do their job. So almost the whole notion of employee experience, with the influx of hybrid work, I think, was both turned on its head and under a microscope at the same time. And I think it has required a real shift in thinking is…
I’m like binging Mad Men. I’ve never watched it, and I’m watching it today in 2022 and it’s hilarious. But you see, I’m just thinking, wow, your day consisted of lunches and breakfast and whiskey at 4:00 PM. And it’s like, I’m on the phone from 8:00 AM to 5:30, and I’m at home and it’s like sitting, eating my lunch in front of my computer. And I understand that’s me and that’s boundaries and we’re all working on it. But as often, I would argue, a lot of people say, working from home or working hybrid certainly means I’m not working less. My hours in front of my computer are probably more. And I think all of that is just leading to your employees need their experience to be prioritized.
You’ve asked for them to change the way they work, whether that was in office to at home, or to mentor more employees because you’ve had major turnover and you’ve had major onboarding. You’ve asked your employees to change the way they work, but have you really changed what you are providing for them? And have you really thought about their experience in an impactful way?
Mark:
Let’s shift gears for a bit. I’d like to talk about the platform. First question is, how important are integrations to you? I mean, how important are they in general, but also specifically to LumApps?
Mary:
I think they’re very, very important because I do think there is no longer one tool to rule all tools. All tools have to play nicely together, or else you’re just having a very siloed and distributed digital workplace. And so I think, again, thinking about employee experience, if you can have all your notifications feed to one platform, that helps your employees not have to jump into multiple platforms to get things done. If you can have your search search through multiple platforms instead of just one repository, again, it’s helping your employees find what they need quicker.
So I think integrations are super important. It’s important to remember what’s behind them. It’s not just an integration for integration’s sake. It’s really to improve a process or a workflow, or to make someone’s work life easier. So I do think they’re a really important thing to keep in mind when looking for a new platform.
Mark:
How do you approach them in house? I mean, when you’re doing development or doing product design, how important are the integrations, and how directly are the other providers getting involved with you?
Mary:
They’re really important. We, early on… I mean, from our very beginning, we were open API because we always recognize that there will be a company with their own development team who wants to create their own integration. And then we transitioned early on to a more friendly SDK. So again, putting the power of custom integrations in your hand, whether you’re a partner, building something on behalf of a customer or a customer building it themself.
A good example could be like DISH Networks. They had this homegrown solution of a Room Finder. And it was really important for them that LumApps integrates with this Room Finder. Well, it’s a homegrown solution. So our development team did not develop that integration, but a partner with DISH Networks we’re able to develop that through our SDK and integrate it seamlessly. So I think we’ve always been kind of open and very developer forward. If a customer wants an integration, they talk to us. We scope it. We see if it’s beneficial to all of our customers. And then if not, they always have the SDK available to them.
Mark:
How have you seen employers’ attitudes about experience and the platforms and all of this? How has it changed over, say, the last five years?
Mary:
I think it kind of goes back to what you said at the beginning. The last five years, we were very much in the space of communications. Almost all of our new business was around intranet. They had either outgrown a previous solution, or never had a digital solution and were looking for one. And we’ve grown as a company, as a product, and our customers have grown as well, kind of together, and of course, in a partnership. That’s kind of what does drive our roadmap with integrations or even with specific ways that we build out the product in terms of one to many communications or one-to-one communications is…
Again, we want to make sure the employee’s at the center stage, which I think is the crux of employee experience and what we’ve seen a lot of our customers move towards. And what they really see as a benefit of our platform is, “Oh, it’s so great that our team that’s based in Ireland feels like they have a very customized experience, as does our team that’s based in Mexico.” It’s not the same for those two teams because it’s in their own language. Maybe it even has specific branding. Of course, it’ll have different content. And that’s something that has always been at the heart of LumApps and the way that we design and build our product.
I think it might have to do with the fact that we were born in France, and so we’ve always had global and multilingual and personalization at our core of who we are as a company and a product. But we’ve leaned into that even more. And this is how employers are seeing employee experience change is being able to use those tools like AI and machine learning. I can now recommend to you what you might like based on who you are, your profile or what you’ve read in the past or what someone like you has read. And so I think, as the market continues to change, as what employees want and what employers want continues to change, we are just working in partnership to kind of bring that to the forefront as much as we can.
Mark:
Okay. Mary, thanks very much. I appreciate your time today.
Mary:
Thank you.
Mark:
My guest today has been Mary Kaplan, product marketing manager at LumApps. And this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We’re a publication of RecruitingDaily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs, visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com. And to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM Technology Report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www.hcmtechnologyreport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.
Image: LumApps
