Hi. The other day we spoke about employee experience and showdown employee journey maps, provide a great way to understand processes involved with attracting great employees, how employees perceive their place in the organisation, and what are the levers that can be used to retain good employees, and other things they can be used for. There are two ways that understanding employees through tools such as employee journey maps, this essentially means understanding your colleagues. There's two ways, two benefits that this will bring to both Cx and brand roles. First, the more satisfied an employee is, the more likely the employee will be an advocate for the brand message. In fact, there are numerous studies that claim a link between employee satisfaction and corporate performance measures. I've added some research into reading materials. I'm always a little bit skeptical when, when viewing research that claims to draw lines between one action and a specific outcome. In this case, satisfied employees leading to better products, increased revenue, or higher customer satisfaction. In a complex and adaptive environment that we have with a modern enterprise, it's really difficult to draw such causes and effects. However, it really is undeniable, that when employees are happy to come to work, they're probably more emotionally invested in what they're doing. In Maria's course on brand strategies, she links to a presentation from Simon Sinek. I've also put this link into my class materials because I think, the emotional connection that Sinek talks about, is really important as a motivation for employee engagement and productivity. So, using tools like employee journey maps to better understand your employee engagement, or job satisfaction of employees, help because as the evidence seems to suggest, engaged employees are more likely to deliver products and services that make customers happy. Each touch point that an engaged employee manages will more likely be one that moves the customer along the customer journey in a positive way. So the second way that employee journey maps bring value to the customer experience and brand roles is that, and this is more pragmatic, consider adding a horizontal track to the employee journey, that measures the level to which that employee persona is able to articulate the brand message in the activities for which he or she is responsible. This makes the employee journey map a tool that enables visualizing the way that brand strategy cascades into various touchpoints and activities. Of course, in order to understand this track and how welcome employees fulfill that track, it implies some research. So interviews, surveys, analysis of employee deliverables, and this research will reveal the employees brand engagement. There are two benefits to this technique of creating a brand engagement track as part of the employee experience. First, you raise the visibility of the importance of connecting the brand messages and employee activities. It forces a conversation around the importance of connecting the two, and as departments work together on analysing and improving the employee journey, the implications of brand engagement are at the forefront. Remember, just like customer journey is the most effective aspect of employee journey, is that they enable a dialogue between teams responsible, in this case for the employee experience, and they create visibility around the most important issues for the employee experience. So second, creating a specific brand engagement track, one was at the horizontal tracks, obliges the team to look at possible ways to solve in the disconnections that are revealed in the research, right? If it becomes clear that back office employees are completely disconnected from the brand message, it's more obvious that teams working on the employee experience need to identify solutions to fix this disconnection. So in these last few days, we focused on employee experience. I hope it was clear how employee experience really is a critical aspect of your brand and customer experience efforts. See you next time.
