Abstract
The aim of this article is to study the employee experience of human resource information systems (HRIS) as the sum of all perceptions that managers, employees, and the human resource (HR) personnel develop in their interaction with different channels (IT applications), such as Web sites, portals, personal digital assistants (PDAs), kiosks, call centers, e-mails, and other such instruments. Nurturing the employee experience of HRIS (also named only employee experience) means finding a perfect match between employees’ expectations and the HR proposition, which entails focusing to the experience each employee has every time he or she interacts with human resource management systems through different channels. We discuss the employee experience as a critical factor that managers need to consider in order to increase HRIS effectiveness. The organizational implications for managing the HRIS employee experience are discussed by way of three factors: the channel integration, the human-computer interaction, and the organizational culture of HRIS.
TopBackground
The Employee Experience
From a theoretical perspective, the employee experience can be studied by way of marketing research on the customer experience, defined as the set of all perceptions a customer develops in interacting with a company, its services, and its products. This topic is addressed in the scientific literature (Pine, Gilmore, & Gilmore, 1999) and in managerial research (Lasalle & Britton, 2003; Seybold, 2001). Following the application of customer experience theories to the employee experience concepts, companies that manage the employee experience well are assured of three main benefits: (1) in the short term, improved the quality of relations between the HR function and employees; (2) in the long term, greater employee loyalty; and (3) increase in employee productivity and the value of organizational intellectual capital.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Knowledge Management: The organizational processes developed in order to equip people with the knowledge required to make decisions well.
Feedback: The return of a portion of the output of a process or system to the input, especially when used to maintain performance or to control a system or process.
Organizational Culture: A reality-building process that causes people to see and conceptualize specific events, actions, objects, expressions, or situations in a particular manner.
Usability: The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use.
Business Intelligence: Business intelligence (BI), a term coined in the late 1980s, describes the enterprise’s ability to access and explores information, analyzing that information and developing insights and understanding, which leads to improved and informed decision making. BI products include decision support systems (DSS), executive information systems (EIS), and query and report writing tools.
Learning Organizations: A successful organization must—and does—continually adapt and learn in order to respond to changes in environment and to grow.
Channel: A means of communication or interaction such as: Web sites, portals, call centers, kiosks, e-mail, and so forth.