An innovation philosophy that can drive stakeholder value

Everyone should agree that the three most important direct stakeholders for any organization are investors, customers, and employees—not in any order, per se. A successful organization builds two-way relationships that are valued by each of these stakeholders and that provide the feedback loop needed to continue adding value over the long term. To innovate in meaningful ways, it’s important to understand what’s driving value for each distinct group. A winning strategy prioritizes those value drivers.

How can organizations begin unpacking those value drivers? There’s an important dynamic at play among these stakeholders that fuels my innovation philosophy. The relationship between employees and organizations is the foundation upon which the other relationships are built. Happy employees deliver great experiences to customers, which can translate to better financial returns for investors. But historically, this dependency gets overlooked. It’s often not rightly translated into strategy. By starting with your workforce, and finding ways to make the employee experience easy, smart, and human-centric, your approach to innovation can drive stakeholder value.

Innovation starts with the employee experience

Employee experience is generally managed by human resources in many, if not all, organizations. These experiences have typically centered around candidate experience, new hire onboarding, and policies regarding health and wellness, vacation time, sick leave, and more. As the world of work has evolved, we’ve seen a lot of progress made around enhancing these offerings to better support the workforce.

But the HR systems organizations provide their employees have received less focus. These tools historically focus on supporting the various “transactions” HR departments and employees make, from logging PTO requests and updating personal information to completing benefits enrollment. They have stopped short of elevating those transactions to deliver exceptional experiences to employees. The key to that evolution is in making their experiences easy, smart, and human-centric.

Make their lives easier

To put it simply, organizations need to make life easier for their employees. People want ways to easily complete the tasks they need to complete. With any HR system you’re providing employees, make sure the transactions are quick and easy for them to do. This means streamlining the steps they might need to take and providing a system that’s intuitive for them to navigate. The goal here is to make it as painless as possible for them to check tasks off their lists. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI tools, this aspect of HR technology will continue to quickly advance.

Offer insights to help them make decisions

As often as possible, within the flow of work, find opportunities to bring insights to employees to help them either understand or make better decisions. Consumer technology does a great job of providing information in the moment that matters. For example, you might see prompts like, “People like you were also interested in this,” or “If you do this, you should also think of this.” In the HR space, these insights can help drive actions related to retirement savings, tax elections, or learning and career development—all of which can greatly impact the overall employee experience.

Keep the experience human

As technology continues to evolve, this is perhaps the most critical piece. Unlike other business-to-business systems for things like procurement, supply chain, and finance, HR systems are meant to manage people—these transactions are done for people and by people. Many of these transactions generate emotions, like taking time off for the birth of a child or making a career move.

For instance, take the simple act of an HR practitioner entering a new hire. Beyond the ease with which the data populates and the necessary steps are completed within the HR system, let’s consider the additional elements that could make or break the employee experience.

When a new role opens, it’s common for internal candidates to apply. In this example, perhaps the internal candidate is not selected. When the HR practitioner enters the new hire, they might not know an internal candidate didn’t get the job. They also would likely not know how many times in the past 6 to 12 months this internal candidate has been applying for internal jobs. Those types of insights could make a big difference at this point of the transaction.

The next logical extension would then be prompting that HR practitioner to connect with the internal candidate for a career conversation, and even providing them with recommendations on how to approach the discussion. That forged connection tells the internal candidate they’re seen and supported. It’s the difference between a negative employee experience and a great one.

Put experience at the forefront

The above example is just a simple one, but it’s common. Solving for these types of instances can help advance the employee experience your organization offers and the overall culture you foster, as an extension. If organizations can build better employee experiences, they can ultimately deliver better customer experiences and financial performance as a result. When we say we live in a connected world, it’s not just the physical space we share—it’s the intertwined experiences we all share, too.

Sreeni Kutam is president of global product and innovation at ADP.