The Employee Experience and Security

Employee concerns about security can be divided into physical protection and data protection. Physical security can be a major issue in jobs where robbery and other forms of assault may occur (e.g., retail store employees). Employees who witness or experience physical threats often suffer from anxiety for years afterwards.¹⁷ Advances in security technology are providing companies with a number of tools to protect the physical security of employees. This includes solutions that enable real-time control over people's access to facilities, active workplace monitoring, and remote intervention in the case of security incidents. These solutions can significantly improve physical security. At the same time, how and why they are being used should be clearly communicated to employees; otherwise, they may be perceived as a way for the company to monitor employees as opposed to protecting them.¹⁸

Data protection has become a major concern in all jobs due to growing incidents of identity theft and ransomware attacks.¹⁹ Most data security breaches are unintentional results of employees clicking on phishing e-mails or doing online activities that expose company data to outside attacks.²⁰ Employees are the greatest source of vulnerability when it comes to protecting workplace data.²¹ Creating data security is largely about protecting employees from themselves by influencing three aspects of the work environment: ability, awareness, and attitude.

• Ability involves making it easy to be secure or, more specifically making it hard to create security risks. This involves what are called frictionless security measures that automatically address security vulnerabilities, for example, integrating staffing systems and security systems to ensure employees are automatically given appropriate access to data when they start new job roles and automatically shutting off security clearances when employees transition out of positions.
• Awareness is about ensuring employees understand how to avoid security risks. This can be addressed through training and creating a culture that encourages and values secure behavior,²² for example, employees asking others for appropriate identification before giving them access to secure locations.
• Attitudes is about employees feeling a commitment to keeping the organization secure. It involves employees feeling a sense of engagement and ownership toward protecting the welfare of the company, its employees, and its customers. This is achieved by managing employees in a manner that makes them feel respected, cared for, and valued.

One of the consequences digitalization has on employee experience is increased security risk. The same tools that enable worldwide communication and data sharing also facilitate global data theft and misuse. A single security breach, intentional or otherwise, can do lasting damage to thousands of employees and customers. As security becomes even more critical over the coming years, a key part of creating positive employee experiences will be ensuring employees feel secure from harm.

The Employee Experience and Privacy

Privacy has become a major social topic both inside and outside of companies. Many countries have stringent laws that protect and limit the collection and use of employee data.²³ This is creating a unique challenge for companies given the inherent conflict between security and privacy. Security is about controlling access to information and physical spaces through surveillance and prevention. Companies monitor physical and electronic information to ensure the right people have access while keeping the wrong people out. Surveillance and prevention also trigger employee concerns about privacy and freedom. Employees do not like to be constantly monitored and many view privacy as a human right. Employees also do not want their access to data and physical locations to be highly constrained. Access to information is necessary to create agile, collaborative, and innovative organizations, and nothing hurts a person's sense of belongingness quite like a locked door that implies they are not welcome here. Employees want the freedom to access secure systems, data, and locations to get their work done without feeling like they are being constantly monitored. This requires balancing security access, personnel surveillance, and perceptions of privacy.

Companies find themselves in a difficult situation of needing to restrict and track access to data to protect security but not wanting to give employees an experience of feeling unfairly constrained and monitored. Achieving this balance requires giving employees insight into what data are being collected and why this collection is relevant to their work.²⁴ Employee attitudes toward privacy are influenced by the level of transparency and control they have over how data are being tracked and used.²⁵ Employees are more accepting of data monitoring when they know what data are being collected, understand why it is relevant to their jobs, and have some ability to access and control how the data are used over time.²⁶ People do not like the feeling that someone is secretly watching them. Companies can lessen employee concerns over data privacy through explaining how the organization uses data and, if relevant, providing employees with feedback based on the data (e.g., sharing data that provides insight into work patterns or other behaviors that might increase their self-awareness).²⁷

The book The Second Machine Age noted that “when information was mostly analog the laws of physics created an automatic zone of privacy. In a digital world, privacy requires explicitly designed institutions, incentives laws, technologies, and norms.”²⁸ As security threats increase, the conflict between protecting employee privacy and employee safety will only become more challenging. Addressing this challenge will require actively listening and collaborating with employees to create employee experiences that effectively balance surveillance, security, privacy, and freedom of access.

The Employee Experience and Compliance

The concept of employment is at its core a legal contract between an individual and a company that defines the terms of the work relationship and conveys certain regulatory protections. Compliance is typically thought of as an administrative activity to keep track of details related to actions such as payroll accuracy, job training certifications, and use of equipment. But how a company manages compliance can have a significant influence on employee experience. Even small contract breaches or violations of work rules, whether intentional or not, can significantly undermine employee trust in the organization.²⁹ It can also create significant financial costs and tarnish a company's employment brand.

The primary technology solutions used to ensure compliance are compensation, payroll and benefits management, contractor management, certification management, and facilities and systems access. The obvious benefits of these solutions are about efficiency. Automating compliance activities reduces paperwork and saves people from having to manually sign up for new systems, enroll in new processes, and request new resources. It also supports data security by ensuring people's data permissions match their roles. Compliance solutions also affect organizational agility and employee engagement. A company's ability to create new organizational structures, add new employees, manage acquisitions, or change pay practices is constrained by compliance solutions. For example, payroll solutions limit the ability of companies to add employees in new countries or regions with different compensation practices and regulations. Compliance solutions also damage employee engagement if they do not work properly, for example, failing to give employees access to the resources needed to do their role or messing up someone's paycheck.

A powerful example demonstrating the strategic value of compliance solutions for shaping employee experience occurred in a consumer products company in spring 2020. This company employed hundreds of salespeople whose pay was based on selling almost a thousand different products. Their monthly income was tied to achieving sales targets using a complex formula of commissions incentivizing different product sales in different regions. COVID's impact on consumer behavior made it impossible for salespeople to realistically achieve these targets, which meant they were going to lose most of their monthly income. The company was also facing significant financial losses, and its survival depended on finding ways to achieve some level of sales revenue. Fortunately, the company was using a compensation management technology solution that made it possible to quickly redesign and implement a new commission plan that reflected the changed economic environment. This provided employees with a way to preserve much of their income by selling against revised and achievable targets. Company leaders commented that without this technology it would have been impossible for the company to adapt its sales compensation structure so quickly, and they would have lost a lot of valuable sales employees when they most needed them.

If you asked someone to list technology solutions based on their impact on employee experience, it might seem unlikely that they would include compliance solutions such as payroll and compensation management. But if that person was an HR leader who has managed a complex global workforce or supported a company going through significant organizational change, then compliance solutions such as payroll and compensation management might be near the top of the list.

The Employee Experience and Organizational Safety Climate

Safety climate describes the shared perceptions employees have toward how safety is managed within the organization.³⁰ Fostering a strong safety climate can have a major influence on employee experience, particularly in jobs and organizations where there are considerable safety risks. A company's safety climate influences how jobs are designed and how employees are trained and managed. It is also visible in how people act such as employees being mindful to wear safety glasses in certain work areas or reminding each other to hold handrails while on a stairway. Safety climate affects the frequency of accidents and injuries that occur in an organization and influences employee attitudes toward the organization as a whole.³¹

There are right and wrong ways to build a safety climate. The wrong way is to reward employees for not having accidents or injuries, because this can lead to people intentionally hiding safety incidents.ⁱⁱ The right way is to focus on designing jobs and work schedules in a way that reduces risk of injury, ensuring employees have proper safety training and equipment, and recognizing and role modeling behaviors that reduce the likelihood of accidents and injuries.³² This may include using learning and certification management technology to ensure people have the right training and skills to safely perform different jobs, using wearable and biometric technology to monitor employee health statistics, and using experience measurement technology to track employee safety perceptions.

The Employee Experience and Corporate Ethics

An organization's commitment to ethical behavior influences the attitudes of employees and potential job applicants.³³ People, at least ethical ones, want to work for companies that share their commitment to integrity, honesty, and legally and socially appropriate actions. A company's ethical integrity is influenced by a range of factors. It starts with setting clear expectations with employees when they are initially hired. It then requires holding leaders and employees accountable for ethically appropriate behavior. How people act should be as important as what they achieve. The company should also have methods and safeguards so employees can report ethical concerns without fear of retribution.ⁱⁱⁱ A common characteristic of ethical companies is the willingness of employees and leaders to openly discuss topics associated with ethical issues.³⁴ Experience measurement technology can help promote ethical behavior by providing a forum for employees to safely raise ethical concerns and questions. Talent management technology can also be used to ensure ethical behavior is considered when evaluating the performance of employees, particularly those in leadership roles.

Maintaining corporate ethics becomes increasingly difficult as companies grow. The CEO of a large global company told me his biggest concern was that in a company their size someone somewhere was inevitably doing something they should not be doing. He said it was both impossible and improper to try to monitor every employee's behavior around the world, which was why the company placed a lot of emphasis on managing employees in a way that would make unethical behaviors easier to spot.

Creating Inclusive and Diverse Workforces

Companies have been working to create more diverse and inclusive cultures for decades. This work has taught us several things. First, there is financial value in creating fair, equitable, and inclusive organizations.³⁷ Second, there is no simple fix to create diverse workforces and build inclusive cultures. Despite years of effort, companies still struggle to achieve demographic equity, diversity, and inclusion. Diversity programs are frequently successful but rarely successful enough.³⁸ Third, two aspects of organizational culture affect workforce diversity and inclusion: meritocracy and multiculturalism.³⁹ Meritocracy focuses on ensuring equitable, unbiased treatment of employees. Multiculturalism emphasizes acknowledging, respecting, and valuing different groups. Multiculturalism is about how we socially interact, and meritocracy is about how we make decisions. Making a difference in diversity and inclusion requires both.

Meritocracy is about reducing bias in decisions associated with individual characteristics that are irrelevant to work performance, for example, assuming someone is more or less qualified for a job based on their perceived gender or ethnic characteristics associated with their first or last name.⁴⁰ The best way to create meritocracy is to build structured processes that base talent decisions on clearly defined, job-relevant criteria. Creating diverse workforces requires reducing bias in decision-making at every step of the employment life cycle starting with job design and continuing through recruiting, selecting, managing, rewarding, developing, and promoting employees (see Figure 8.1). This is because bias at one step can create bias in others. For example, bias in leadership promotion processes will decrease diversity among senior leaders. Lack of diversity of senior leaders will decrease attraction of diverse candidates, which will lead to fewer diverse employees. And fewer diverse employees will ultimately decrease the number of diverse leaders. It is not enough to eliminate bias at one area. Companies must root out bias everywhere that it occurs.

Multiculturalism is about creating inclusive cultures. The experience of work can be very different for someone with a different demographic and cultural background compared to their colleagues. People who do not belong to the majority demographic group in a company often feel less comfortable and less accepted. Promoting multicultural awareness helps overcome this problem by creating inclusive cultures where differences in backgrounds, values, and behavioral norms are recognized, accepted, and even celebrated. Multiculturalism promotes diversity and inclusion by distinguishing between organizational norms that are critical to supporting the company's strategy and mission versus cultural norms where diversity of thought and expression is expected, encouraged, and welcomed. An example is the shift in attitudes toward the presence of children in the workplace. In the past, many company cultures conveyed an implicit assumption that children should not “interfere” with work—that having childcare responsibilities made a person less productive. This created significant bias against women who tend to have primary childcare responsibility in most societies.⁴¹ In recent years there has been a significant change in this attitude. Companies celebrate and support employees in taking care of their children and communicate that it is possible to be both a highly productive employee and a highly involved parent. Solving a problem as complex as diversity and inclusion requires both multiculturalism and meritocracy. Technology influences meritocracy by shaping how companies recruit, select, manage, develop, and compensate employees. It also shapes multiculturalism by influencing how employees communicate and interact with each other. The design and use of technology can help in creating more meritocratic and multicultural organizations. Examples include solutions that help companies find candidates from different demographic backgrounds, reduce bias in the methods companies used to recruit and select candidates, help create a greater sense of belonging by bringing together employees based on common interests, or that automatically identify patterns in staffing or compensation data that suggest the presence of bias.

Supporting Remote Work Models

The 2020 pandemic forced companies to adopt remote work to protect employee health. This shift challenged long-standing assumptions about work including the belief that employees need to be in an office to do a good job. Supporting remote work opens up career opportunities for employees who historically were prevented from working due to family care obligations, physical disabilities, or economic constraints that make traveling to the workplace every day difficult if not impossible.⁴² Companies that support remote work can recruit from talent pools less constrained by candidates' geographic location or ability to commute. Companies that discourage remote work will also find it increasingly difficult to attract and retain talent.⁴³

Employees' desire for remote work varies based on their home office environment, commute time, job type, manager relationships, and individual personalities. But there are two things all employees want. First, they want flexibility to determine when they need to come to the office given their job, life situation, and personal preferences. Second, they want transparency in how use of remote work will affect their career at the company. Remote work does not mean working from anywhere at any time. Effective remote work cultures clarify when employees are expected to be working and not working. Employees should know when they are expected to be available for meetings and requests but should also feel comfortable turning off their computers and phones and detaching from work. Remote workers usually put in longer hours than in-office employees, and the risk of burnout among remote workers is even higher if companies do not encourage workers to set boundaries and take breaks.⁴⁴

Part of effective remote work involves periodically meeting in person. Remote work is often referred to as hybrid work because it involves a mixture of remote and onsite work. Remote work strategies should define when and why people are expected to get together. There are many reasons for in-person meetings, including new hire onboarding, team and relationship building, and problem-solving sessions that require collaboration over multiple hours or days. At the same time, companies should not require people to be together without having a clear purpose for getting together. Meeting in person comes with a cost in terms of travel and meeting spaces that require money and time from both employees and the organization.

Effective talent management practices are particularly critical to remote work. Remote workers tend to be more productive and engaged than in-office employees when they are well managed, but more stressed when their manager is not effective.⁴⁵ Onsite work environments are more forgiving toward poor managerial skills, perhaps because employees can use visual cues to guess what their manager is thinking. By contrast, remote workers need ongoing communication about goals, clarity on how their contributions will be evaluated, and more intentional activities to help them advance their careers. It is also important to ensure remote workers are not punished for having less face time with leaders in an office than in-person workers.

We do not know how the move to remote work will change the future of organizations, cities, labor markets, and societies, but there are things we can be certain of. First, remote work will be much more common. There is no value in returning to a past characterized by unprecedented levels of commuter traffic.⁴⁶ Second, companies have an opportunity to rethink the nature of work to create the world we want instead of accepting the world as it was. Technology plays a central role in creating an engaging and inclusive remote world of work, but this is not just about remote work technology. It is also about using technology to support and enhance the value of in-person meetings that bring together typically remote employees.

Improving Employee Health and Well-being

Work is a major source of stress for many employees.⁴⁷ This stress damages employee well-being, hurts performance, and increases absenteeism and health care expenses.⁴⁸ Stressed out employees are unhealthy employees, and unhealthy employees are not fully productive employees.⁴⁹ They also are unhappy employees who are more likely to quit. If companies value the happiness, well-being, and retention of employees, then they need to create healthier work environments. The term healthy workplace is often associated with things such as safe work practices, ergonomically correct office furniture, nutritious cafeteria food, and on-site fitness centers. Although these are valuable, they are not the primary factors that affect employee well-being in most jobs. What makes work unhealthy in most jobs are things that cause mental and physical stress:

• Poor quality relationships with managers or coworkers
• Working with customers or coworkers who are upset, angry, or abusive
• Concerns over employment security and access to career opportunities
• Financial worries and work-family conflict
• Working long and/or irregular hours
• Intrusion of work activities (e.g., e-mails and phone calls) into off-work hours
• Lacking clear job goals and role ambiguity
• Performing monotonous and highly repetitive tasks
• Being assigned tasks or goals that seem unattainable given existing resources and time
• Frequent organizational restructuring and job reassignments

Supporting employee well-being starts with designing jobs in a way that lessens the physical and mental stress placed on employees, for example, giving employees regular schedules that promote effective sleep patterns, ensuring they have clear achievable goals, and providing interesting work assignments. Actively listening and working to address employee concerns also decreases stress levels.⁵⁰ Companies can also provide employees with self-management technology solutions to help cope with work-related stress in a healthy manner. Examples include solutions that help employees improve sleep hygiene or that guide employees in the use of cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to reduce the impact stressful situations have on well-being. Perhaps most important of all is ensuring managers and leaders in the organization show empathy, sensitivity, and support toward the stresses employees face in their roles.⁵¹

Building Environmentally Sustainable Work Practices

The impact of climate change and carbon emissions has become a major social concern around the world. As a result, how companies approach environmental sustainability is having a growing impact on their ability to attract and retain talent.⁵² Most discussions of sustainability emphasize moving toward more sustainable manufacturing and transportation methods. But employee actions also significantly influence a company's overall environmental impact. Employees are often the main source of carbon emissions in less capital-intensive industries such as technology and professional services. The following are some ways employee behavior affects environmental sustainability:

• Commuting. Commuting is a major source of greenhouse gas emission. The recent shift to remote work models presents companies with an opportunity to rethink the use of office space and its impact on commuting. Companies can also provide incentives that encourage employees to commute using mass transit and other more environmentally sustainable methods.
• Travel. Business trips, particularly those involving air travel, represent a significant source of carbon emissions. Norms and assumptions about business travel influence whether employees conduct face-to-face meetings or use remote technology. When employees do need to travel, they should be encouraged to use more sustainable options such as trains instead of planes or electric instead of combustion cars.
• Workplace habits. Companies can encourage habits and patterns of behavior that decrease energy consumption and waste. This includes actions as simple as turning off lights and computers when not in use or using reusable cups and utensils instead of disposable ones.
• Purchasing decisions. Employees can be encouraged to consider the environmental impact of the vendors they employ, whether it is staying at more environmentally conscious hotel chains or procuring supplies from more environmentally sensitive providers.
• Job locations. Deciding where to locate offices and plants has a significant impact on the environment. Choosing locations that minimize commuting times, allow for reuse of existing facilities, and decrease use of resources to transport materials and products can reduce a company's overall environmental footprint.

Creating a more environmentally sustainable workforce requires leadership role modeling combined with employee awareness and enablement. For example, the best way to get employees to choose train travel over air travel is to have leaders visibly opt for train tickets instead of plane tickets. Most employees would probably think twice before paying to fly on a jet when their CEO took a more environmentally friendly train for the same trip. Leaders should also track and regularly discuss company sustainability goals and recognize employees for making progress against them. Employees can be educated on ways to be more sustainable and be given data and recognition that call attention to their environmental impact. They can also be given tools to support more environmentally sustainable actions. This can take a variety of forms ranging from putting reusable utensils in the cafeteria to using technology that encourages employees to purchase materials from more environmentally sustainable providers. Changing the culture of a company to encourage sustainable decisions and behaviors is one of the least expensive and most impactful ways to increase environmental sustainability. It does not require redesigning manufacturing systems, retooling processing plants, or shifting supply lines. It just requires changing the employee experience in a way that gets to act differently in the future from how they acted in the past.