The best digital employee experience: what is it, but above all, how do you realize something like this? Anjo Jongenelis, IT team manager of the Employee Services and innovation department at PostNL, told us all about it when he was a guest on our podcast YellowChat and. he emphasizes the importance of supporting employees with easy and efficient access to various systems and information.
Anjo Jongenelis (64) has been working at de Post for 45 years: from when it was still called ‘the state-owned postal services telegraphy and telephony’ (colloquially: PTT) until now: PostNL. A company in which there is a lot of innovation; for Jongenelis it is no longer comparable to the company where he started his career more than four decades ago.
Curious about the story of Anjo Jongenelis? Read more, or listen to the full story in the podcast (Dutch only), then you can be sure that you won’t miss a thing.
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Jongenelis comes up with all his ideas during long walks with his four-legged friend. In the podcast he talks about the project he implemented together with Evolve. That’s why we start with the digital employee experience.
What is that: digital employee experience?
Digital employee experience, also known as ‘Digital Employee Experience’ (DEX), refers to all the moments and ways in which an employee is digitally in contact with the organization and in which his experience is formed.
To a higher plan
The initial question with which Jongenelis came to Evolve was: help us with a channel strategy. With the aim of taking the digital employee experience within PostNL to the next level. Peter Haan (CEO and founder of Evolve) outlined a number of scenarios after research within PostNL. the follow-up question from PostNL was: what is the minimum we need to do, to take a step forward, with the aim of substantially improving the user experience of our employee.
The first step to a better employee experience
A program board was formed with colleagues from the business, colleagues from IT and communication colleagues and the first step was determined. Jongenelis: ‘we have done large-scale user research on the various employees within PostNL. Based on these results, an attempt has been made to improve the current platforms and create more coherence.’
After a year, it turned out that this first step was not in the right direction, and that it was not going to be. Jongenelis: ‘we saw about a 15% improvement in terms of user-friendliness, but there was nothing more. That was because we were trying to make adjustments to the software. But you are dependent on the supplier, and the roadmap of the supplier. SaaS is a service, you use it as it is intended.’
“We have to have something that we can influence. Something that smolders nicely, so that it is also recognizable for the employee ‘PostNL’. And that you are not ‘bothered’ by the SaaS solutions that are underneath. Then you can think in the direction of – again-a SaaS solution, which, for example, forms a shell over the various SaaS solutions. But you always just don’t have it. In addition, the user experience remains the same as within the SaaS solution, such a shell does not change anything.’
“Then we thought of creating a presentation layer, within the intranet. With good user-friendliness. The underlying systems are a ‘black box’ for the end user (red: the user can work with them, but does not know what is happening at the back). For example, the employee requests leave via the intranet, while the HR employee receives and handles the Leave Request in the HR system.”
‘If we can make this process, which is so important for many employees, a little easier, we will help them enormously.”
Use case: the salary slip
At PostNL, many employees work variable hours. For them, the paycheck is extremely important: Jongenelis: ‘Peter walked the path with us to get to the paycheck. He came to the conclusion that the employee had to log in again three times, in different environments. After many clicks, you were finally on your paycheck. If we can make this process, which is so important for many employees, a little easier, we can help them a lot.”
The solution seems pretty simple: then we put that payslip in an easy-to-reach place on the intranet. But is that really what makes the employee happy, or can it be even better? “By talking to the employee, we found out that employees only want to know: is my basic salary correct, are the extra hours I have worked on it and are my expenses reimbursed? It’s not about that complete paycheck at all. This data will therefore soon be personalized on the intranet, probably accessible after one click.”
From Project to Portal-team
Intranet is now under the responsibility of a full-fledged department, with the team including a UX’er, UI’er, a Scrummaster, data analyst, tech lead, channel lead, Content Manager, dev ops team, tester and administrator. With this team, Jongenelis wants to make the intranet ‘adult’.
The team didn’t just get off the ground. It took a solid business case. In this business case, the ambition is expressed to increase employee satisfaction by 0.3%. This satisfaction is measured twice a year by means of an employee motivation survey. Thanks to the size of PostNL as an organisation, the investment per employee is relatively low. However, the vision of Jongenelis and van de board was decisive: “we just have to want this for our people.”
And from business case to new platform
In May 2022, an agreement was reached on the business case, a little over a year later, in april 2023, the new intranet was delivered. Fully realized in new technology, with an intranet based on the so-called Mach thinking (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS and Headless CMS).
Personalized information presented to the employee
Many different types of employees work at PostNL, from department manager to mail deliverer and from factory employee to communication employee. There is now a dedicated editorial team that manages the content on the intranet. They look at the content of and for employees. This editor also ensures that the help content (such as information about your leave days) is offered in a target group-oriented manner. This means that as a mail deliverer you see the information that fits your position, not the information for the parcel deliverer. The content is accessible to everyone and can be called up (via search), but in principle you get the information that is relevant to you.
For a uniform employee experience, it is necessary that the information is also offered uniformly to the different target groups. And that’s what this central editorial team ensures.
It is clear that Jongenelis is driven by innovation. In the podcast, Peter and Bram ask him what the next step is on the roadmap.
Jongenelis: ‘one of the things we are doing is looking at how our employee can easily log in on the floor and on the street. These people are often not behind an SSO (Single Sign on). As an organization, you want to use MFA (Multi Factor Authentication), and you often need a mobile phone for that. You are not allowed to have it with you at the factory. We are now investigating whether the employee’s access batch can be used for logging in. That they authenticate 1 time, by reading the NFC chip in the pass with the mobile device. I am now working on figuring this out to make it easier for the employee.”
Want to know more about our work? View our cases here. Interesting? Contact us via this form or email Peter Haan: peter@evolve.eu.
