How to Create Effective Employee Experience: Pivdenny Bank Insights

Companies are talking more and more about the need to treat employees as customers. But are they really ready to change anything? During a panel discussion at the HR Directors Forum of Pivdenny Bank, Yuliia Titurenko shared how the bank has transformed its HR processes, changed the approaches of its managers, and created its own service culture in two years.

Work on the Employee Experience started with processes. According to Yuliia, it is processes that set the foundation for further cultural change:

“We built Employee Journey Map to encompass all the steps on the employee career path and asked them what is important for a candidate, a newbie or a professional with over 10 years of experience under their belt. Thus we were able to detect the key “pains in the neck” and understand that some processes did not address the real needs of the employees”.

It launched a transformation that left almost no HR process untouched. However, according to her, even the best-tuned processes do not cover the main thing – the management influence, as an employee gets 90% of the experience working shoulder to shoulder with their higher-ups. That is why the next step was to introduce a service culture, where managers play a key role. To do this, the latter spent a day with employees and directly asked about their impressions at each stage of work: what they liked, what they didn’t like, and what spoilt their impression. In this way, it was possible to receive direct feedback from the teams and based on it create standards of interaction.

“When managers hear what people actually say and not receive info from HR, it changes both the perception and willingness to do something. In a year and a half, a group of ambassadors was created, which consisted of about 20 managers who test tools, discuss cases, and share experiences with colleagues. This approach works much more effectively than any rule “imposed from above”,” shared Yuliia.

Special attention is to be paid to the customised approach, because the system is not able to create a unique experience for each person, only the manager can do this. They know what a person lives by, can show attention, see potential, give tasks to develop their employee’s potential, and also create a professional environment in which people can see their strengths and show them. However, HR has to create conditions and tools that will allow the manager to be closer to the team.

Pivdenny Bank experience shows that working on Employee Experience is not limited to separate activities and automation. It is all about a company’s ability to build processes that people will actually experience and engage managers as co-creators of the experience. That is exactly when change becomes less about HR and more about the culture within.