Picture this: a woman – we’ll call her Jackie – goes to work each day inspired to do her best work. She’s competent, intelligent, and motivated. She’s qualified and confident that her skills can be leveraged effectively to help drive positive change for her employer and her clients. Except, whenever she tries to get her work done, it feels like the system is working against her.
Her internal business processes are clunky, slow, unintuitive, and just plain ugly. Nobody quite knows the entire process from start to finish, so there’s a lot of e-mailing around looking for the right person to action the next step. She knows there’s a lot of detailed, practical guidance material within her business that she can use to help achieve her goals, if only she could find it. The internal Business Management System (BMS) is a pain to navigate and unnecessarily complicated.
Whenever she gets involved with a bright, new initiative, someone immediately thinks it would be a great idea to fire up another SharePoint page to capture all the content. Except, nobody but the creator can actually find the page afterwards and within six months everyone has forgotten it exists. After its creator leaves the business, the SharePoint is left to die. The content stagnates and by the time someone in IT discovers it, the only sensible thing left to do is deprecate it as legacy content.
Everything is locked down extensively for IT Security purposes, which Jackie understands. However, it does make it painful and awkward to achieve practically anything. She feels like she’s constantly behind the state-of-the-art. Her friends’ daughter works for a new startup and things there just seem to happen. There’s little bureaucracy and very little friction. Of course, with a startup comes a hint of chaos, but sometimes that seems more exhilarating and enticing that the slow-moving world of corporate enterprise in which she finds herself.
It’s not to say she’s ungrateful. It makes sense that large companies move slowly. There’s a lot of people to orchestrate, a lot of systems and software that have accumulated organically over time, and historic processes that probably used to make sense but don’t any longer.
Every large company started out life as a small company at some point. Even that super agile startup will ultimately become a corporate mothership one day, if it survives long enough to achieve lift-off.
Jackie recognises that with a large enterprise comes a lot of security, stability, regularity, conformity, and perks. Private healthcare, great holiday allowance, a good split of maternity-paternity leave, a competitive pension scheme, a good social committee, and a fantastic Christmas party. There’s a lot to appreciate and be thankful for. That said, it’s hard not to feel like the weight of the business is crushing her intrapreneurial spirit.
For Jackie, she wants to feel impactful, nimble, fast-moving, and able to support her clients effectively. She believes that her frustrations come down to layer-upon-layer of legacy residue that is never cleaned out or redesigned. The business is always adding, never subtracting. The same systems that were installed at the company’s inception still exist today. Yes, some small changes have been made in discrete areas when something fell over, but wholesale redesign of the business architecture feels necessary to ensure the company remains competitive and the staff feel alive at work. Even a scoped redesign at her team’s level would be immensely effective at cutting out waste, accelerating workflows, improving efficiency, and making the team feel valued and considered.
You see, when a company fails to redesign its internal operating system on a frequent basis to accommodate bloat and change, the system starts to break down. And, its people suffer. They begin to feel like literal human resources and lose heart.
It’s like a car that’s driven for hundreds of miles without a service. It limps along. Everything feels like an effort and there’s a chance the car will eventually just seize up. Systems need redesign and rework to ensure they’re fit for purpose. Software gets redesigned and refactored over time. Buildings experience refit. But our organisations don’t prioritise the employee experience and the feeling of work as much as they should.
At TEE, we make it a rule that a better employee experience is the guiding principle behind every decision. This way, it’s simple for our people to know what the right decision is in any given moment.
If you think we can help your business to improve its operations and employee experience, then send us an email. It’s literally our mission to help.
Jackie knows that she could have a positive impact on her company. Sadly, she’s not in a senior role and doesn’t have the budget authority to make such operational decisions. She can see where the problems are, but others don’t share her vision.
Whilst her business puts clients at the heart of everything they do, they forget to look inwards at their own people. They don’t optimise the internal operating system for how work is delivered daily.
The unremarkable truth is that when employees are happy, and when they are given great tools and workflows, they deliver great work. Happy employees also love where they work and that joy radiates whenever they interact with clients and the general public. People see how thrilled these employees are and how much they love their companies and that attracts even more brilliant people. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle.
Yes, of course, clients and customers matter. But they shouldn’t matter ahead of your own employees. Family first, and then everyone else. Jackie recognises that her view is contrarian. However, she is positive that putting employee experience at the heart of all business decisions would lead to the better business outcomes for everyone! Clients included.
The people in your company are as vital to the business as your health is to your livelihood. You can be the most talented, intelligent worker, but if you don’t look after your health then it all falls apart rather quickly. Nothing matters once your health deteriorates. The same rule applies to your people: your business won’t survive long if your employees start leaving in droves.
It’s a hard reality to accept, but it’s an important one. Jackie sees it. And she wants others to see it too. Because then they can do something about it. She cares immensely about her company. She is proud of where she works. Her heart is in the right place and she just wants her business to succeed. It’s frustrating to see the frontline problems clearly, yet have no power to change them.
Don’t allow your businesses and organisations to seize up. Reevaluate how you work on a regular basis, keep up to date with evolving tools and technologies, ensure you maintain a collaborative relationships with your IT Operations team, see overheads as investments (they’re the oil that keeps the wheels moving), and make a commitment to put employee experience at the heart of everything you do.
Always ask yourself: does this improve the experience for our people? If yes, act.
Stay thoughtful.
James 🧡