How many of you have ever used Uber? What if you were using the technology but the car never showed up? That’s not a great experience, right? How many of you have ever shopped online? What if the products didn’t show up? Not a good experience. Experience is the whole thing; technology is one component of it. What are four things that I would say you must keep in mind when it comes to worker experience?

The first is consumerisation, and when I say consumerisation what does that mean? All it means is the way that you use this thing, you should think about being at least as good in your organisation. Do your employees have at least as good of an experience using the tools in your organisation as they do this? How many of you have an intranet? Does it look like a link farm? Does this look like a link farm when you turn it on? No. How many of you can search and find exactly what you’re looking for on your intranet in under five seconds? Why the nervous giggles? True question. How many of you search on Goggle and find what you’re looking for?

So, consumerisation just means do you treat your workforce at least as well as you treat your customers? Raise your hand if you treat your workforce at least as well as you treat your customers. Okay, it’s literally under 2%, so that’s a huge opportunity of growth.

It’s more than the technology, we talked about that.

How about they need us, we need them. What does that mean? That means in order to get the data we need to do our jobs, we need people and we need people to use this stuff. Because what if they don’t? We have bad data, we have holes in our data, our processes break down, and what do they do? Call, and we’re back to where we were.

Now, I’m old, as my kids will attest, I started my career in a world of DOS. Why are you laughing? Does anyone remember DOS? No, you don’t. You may have heard of it like a dinosaur, but you don’t know DOS. So, DOS, then there was Windows, then there was client server, then there was Internet, now there’s cloud, which is a form of Internet.

In most cases we’ve been doing the exact same thing with HR technology as we’ve continued to move through this legacy of technologies. But what haven’t we changed? We haven’t changed pushing it out to people in a way where they want to use it. You’re going to have a lot of people during the conference talk about change management, but everyone knows WIIFM, right? WIIFM should be your best friend. What’s in it for me? And the “me” is not “you”, the “me” is the workforce. If we don’t get them to engage in processes, there’s no way we’re going to get to where we’re trying to get to from our journey.

The last component of worker experience that’s so key to me is personalisation. What does this mean? When you go on that intranet, you don’t see something that doesn’t relate to you, right? When you go online, when you go to your app… Imagine if you went to the Eventful app and you saw every single conference in the world listed – the Advanced Retirement Association, Band Aid Fitters of the World – and you had to scroll through and pick it. That would not be personalised, right? You went out and saw things, that’s personalisation. So, when we think about worker experience, these four things are a must.

Jason Averbook is acknowledged as one of the top three thought leaders globally on the future of work. He is a leading analyst and consultant in the area of HR, the future of work and the impact technology has on that future.

With more than 20 years of experience in HR and technology, he has a deep understanding of how technology can be applied to common business problems, and how to help organisations realise the benefits of such solutions.