"Six Emotions Play A Primary Role In Employees’ Assessment Of Their Workplace Experience"
Since employee experience has assumed a central seat in the HR fraternity as the new age remedy for driving employee engagement and productivity. With this, extensive research studies by many leading organizations, including Oracle, on workplace effectiveness, neurosciences, and HR technology have revealed that in total six emotions play a primary role in employees’ assessment of their workplace experience - Emotions of Being heard, Being connected, Being able, Being empowered, Being involved, and Being unique.
Let's see how Shaakun Khanna, Vice President - Cloud Applications, Asia Pacific, Oracle Corporation has devised and embedded this agenda within the culture of Oracle.
1. According to you what are the new dimensions of the workplace and how are they changing w.r.t to the rapid advancements in technology?
Today if look at how any workplace functions, it is different from what traditionally the definition of work and working style used to be. The global pandemic the biggest driver of this shift has completely transformed the dimensions of the workplace and this change will continue to take place for the next few years. If we look at the new dimensions, there are a total of four to five dimensions that have rapidly come into existence. First and foremost is how we consider work today, it is evolving with time and becoming an outcome. Earlier, work was perceived as the amount of time any employee is committed to give to any particular organization on the basis of their skill set but that’s not the case anymore. Companies today are not concerned about employees' qualifications or skills, rather they are bothered if he or she can deliver the desired outcome rightly or not. And this was predominantly evident in the pre-pandemic times when we saw a wind of layoffs happening across sectors. From that perspective, the whole dimension of work has changed as it is not a linear thing any longer.
The second one is the diversity in the types of workers such as workers can be full-time, part-time, fully dedicated ones like machine or deep worker, etc. Companies can have multiple employees with different skills serving one purpose altogether. With remote and hybrid working models getting normalized, organizations and employees are looking at more flexible and result-oriented working styles. The third dimension is the changing role of technology. Earlier technology was a slave to mankind but now we are becoming slaves to technology because technology for the first time perhaps is taking the role of a decision-maker as decisions are overriding. In nutshell, technology and analytics are evolving with innovation and ideation every day at the workplace.
Lastly, it's the whole social structure of the workplace has completely transformed over the last few years. Previously, employees used to maintain both their personal lives and professional lives separately and at the same time used to spend a lot of time in engaging or interacting with teammates at a place of work. But due to this remote working, social interactions have reduced drastically, and that's where the neuroscience element comes into play. Fundamentally, employees need that social interaction to be effective and productive at work. This is also the reason why it's becoming increasingly difficult for the new joiners to adjust and that’s why they say the great resignation is now turning into great regret because a large part of those people is not able to build those kinds of connections and it is having a neurological impact.
These are a few big shifts that they may have not talked too much about but are transforming the workplace of today.
2. Neuroscience is said to be a scientific study of the nervous system, how can it be coupled with employee experience and HR technology?
While we understand that neuroscience is a scientific concept and employees are both entirely different subjects and hard to interlink but we cannot ignore the fact that human beings do not operate outside their nervous system. Whenever we talk about an interaction or an experience, be it technology-driven or influenced by an external environment, our
nervous system invokes some kind of chemical reaction. There are certain endorphins that get released and defines our behaviour, feeling, thinking at that particular point in time. Thus, it becomes extremely most fundamental factor to consider. This also indicates that unpleasant experiences often trigger a non-productive behaviour of a human.
Today, we have come across several discussions around depression, especially at work, that's nothing but a neurological reaction to a particular situation for a prolonged period of time. Keeping this behavioural change in mind, we have identified six critical domains of professional working. This can be looked at as six emotions that play a primary role in employees’ assessment of their workplace experience, which are Emotions of Being heard, Being connected, Being able, Being empowered, Being involved, and Being unique. In fact, these emotions need the right kind of neurological response from employees, which is today being defined by technology, and that’s how neuroscience technology, and employee experience are linked.
3. Digitalisation has taken a central seat at every workplace and changing employee experiences as well, but it is often misconstrued as employee digital experience whereas it is much more. What is your take on this?
It is quite ironic to see that employee experience has become synonymous with the digital experience, which is only just one part of it. Digital skills do add to employee growth however, we need to look at digital capabilities and employee experience as two separate buckets. Apart from the physical environment at the workplace, it's also about emotional experiences that shape up the overall employee experiences. As we discussed about six emotions or pillars, it is very critical for an employer to look at an employee experience as a set of human experiences that invoke some kind of emotions, and digital is just one of them.
The other reason for this misconception is that everyone is spending hours within the digital ecosystem today. Round the clock, we’re living a digital experience in almost everything that we do, be it watching TV or making a financial transaction, or traveling. Therefore, a constant subconscious comparison is happening between various digital experiences that we have. Furthermore, today the customer side of the experience is far superior than the employee side of the experiences and that creates frustration. This is the reason when we talk about employee experience should be equal to customer experience, there's a massive disconnect out there. But the fact is that most of our transactions or interactions are with the customers than employees.
4. What is your understanding of the emotional quotient of employees and how it can help in assessing their workplace experience while overall impacting performance?
I feel the fundamental challenge in the human aspect of the workplace is that employees generally do not have the required levels of emotional resilience or emotional quotient. And here comes the role of an effective leader to understand and address that through effective workplace policies, and also implement the right technology to balance employees’ emotional quotient.
Today, technology has a very eminent role to play in helping employees overcome their lack of emotional resilience. This lack of emotional resilience can manifest in different aspects which could lead to workplace stress, depression, and all sorts of undesirable work for
workplace behaviours. Technology is transformative in nature, but it can trigger both right or wrong kinds of emotions, and that's the challenge we are grappling with.
5. With the talent gap widening, organizations are struggling with recruitment. How do you see technology playing a vital role for CHROs and HR depts in enhancing recruitment within Organisations?
Absolutely there is no denial to that with employee priorities shifting and transformation in the relationship between an employer and employee, there is a gap that is widening inch by inch every day. If we look at the overall talent challenge, I personally believe that technology is going to play a forefront role in five different aspects. Talent retention being is the first one and most important one here. Today, the majority of organisations are struggling to hunt for the right kind of talent, though hyper-personalization will have a massive impact on organizations ability to retain talent. And when more and more personnel are retained, this challenge might get resolved.
Another aspect to it is technology and here specifically assessment technology and big data analytics today are helping organizations to select better employees, thus it is essentially playing a prominent role in expanding the overall talent market or talent base. For instance, the Oracle Recruitment Solution has built-in consumer grade capabilities which can attract the right kind of talent just like any commercial. It can essentially be implemented to set up any organisation’s internal talent marketplace, basically an increase base from which an organization can hire. The last aspect would be about proactive upskilling which organisations can improvise so that they don't face any challenges specially related to talent repurposing their existing talent. Basically, retention, expansion, attraction, selection, and upskilling are the five different levers through which technology can help organizations solve the increasing talent challenge.
6. Do you think over the last few years employee priorities have also been shifted owing to their changed outlook towards handling work?
Over the last few years, especially during the global pandemic-induced remote working culture has led to a categorical shift in employees work priorities. While they have realigned their needs at work—and with giving more weightage to their values, goals, and personal lives, their employer choices have almost been more prominent and demanding. According to our recent AI@Work study, 88% of employees said the meaning of success has changed for them since the pandemic, and work-life balance, mental health, and flexibility have become new top priorities for them. And nearly 44% said that having a meaningful job contributes more to their success than a steady salary check. Employees have become so confident over these few years that they are even willing to resign if their companies are not ready to offer them the flexibility, purpose, and growth opportunities they’re looking for.
Employees today want to develop their professional careers, achieve new skill sets, build meaningful connections, ultimately, they want their work to be a meaningful part of their lives. All these reasons owing to a shift in their priorities and thus most of them are handling their work life differently today.
7. What role does technology have to play in the work ecosystem that is driven by emotional experience?
We already discussed about the role of technology in transforming the workplace and overall employee experience. There are several advanced technologies like Cloud, Machine Learning, IoT and others that display a great potential to evolve the entire workplace landscape, but Artificial Intelligence (AI) specifically can evolve the employee experience emotionally as well and can help them make intelligent decisions. The same AI@Work study states that 93% of Indians believe robots can support their career better than humans.
While this study also found that AI has overall changed the relationship between employee and technology at work and is strengthening the role HR teams and managers need to play a big role in attracting, retaining, and developing talent. As AI can also assist HR teams in analysing traits basis data-backed insights and know about reasons for employees exits. This way HR leaders can alert teams when similar behaviour patterns emerge and can address the situations proactively. Thus overall, technology and analytics have a crucial role to play as it can present insight on work behaviours, employee interests, the propensity to volunteer, among other factors.
8. How are companies augmenting the emotionally blended technology experience at the workplace? Also, how is Oracle supporting businesses with its unique products and solutions to tackle this transition?
Today several companies are trying to provide an employee experience that caters to their emotional element, meanwhile is flexible, scalable, and fulfilling in its nature. As mentioned earlier, it is extremely essential for organisations to realize this emotionally driven behaviour of employees and frame their employee strategies aligned to that. Many organisations are already addressing these challenges by improving employee skill sets, providing freedom of work, ensuring mental wellness, giving them a space to maintain a work-life balance, undertaking employee initiatives, and creating engagement platforms among others. Companies are enabling these changes with the role of technology itself and that’s where solutions providers like Oracle come into the play.
At Oracle, we have specific product capabilities or technology capabilities that can help businesses and managers not only measure how people are feeling around the six critical emotions mentioned earlier but also do something about it. We have ‘touch points’, for example, which is our inbuilt continuous learning engine that caters to employees’ needs of being heard. Furthermore, we are also having proactive communication built into Oracle HCM, which allows people to make the right kind of connections and indulge in the right kind of conversations. We have designed products like Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) that can tackle these emotions-related challenges.
