Moments that Matter

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Research suggests that we remember emotionally charged events better than neutral ones. Maya Angelou, an American poet, and civil rights activist, famously said, “People will forget what you said, people will also forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel”.

Any experience a customer faces is a consortium of moments which can evoke a range of emotions but there are a few Moments of Truth which have particularly strong emotions attached and which are hard to overcome.

Every organisation hopes to seek out these MoTs and ensure ‘delight’ as an emotion. ‘Customer delight’, as per Plutchik (1980), is a combination of 2 emotions i.e. ‘Joy’ and ‘Surprise’.

Extrapolating it to an organisation context, we often talk about Employee Satisfaction and rarely Employee Delight. However, similar to moments of truth, Moments that Matter (MTM) is gaining more traction for enhancing employee experience.

Throughout the employee and business life cycle there are several moments which cause an emotional reaction e.g a promotion, birth of a child, change of role, negative feedback etc. All these individual experiences have a major impact on business. A future thinking organisation will seek to create a seamless and consistent employee experience across the life cycle and, in the process, ensure certain magical moments for the employee.

I would like to call them the 4Ps of employee experience:

Of these, certain hygiene factors i.e. Personal wellbeing and Productive environment need to be focused on but it is eventually the Professional Development and People Experience which make an organisation truly aspirational.

Steps towards inculcating the 4Ps

  • While embarking on this journey, it’s critical to put the employee at the center and NOT the organisation, its leaders or HR.
  • Conduct employee surveys to understand pain areas and then setup cross functional teams to help focus on the major ones.
  • Map out the employee life cycle from pre-hiring to exit. In each of these processes there will be critical moments as per the framework which evoke strong emotions. e.g. employee role change: it impacts two Ps i.e. productive environment and people experience.  Thus its critical to ensure role clarity, seamless transition out of old team and role, smooth onboarding by new manager, seamless integration with the new team. While the entire experience of this change needs to be positive, there will be certain moments which will be charged i.e. the day of movement how is he welcomed into the team or how is the handover organised for his old role etc. These could be contextual to the organisation and the teams, so accordingly certain moments need to be given special attention.
  • There will be some moments of truth which an organisation would want to broadbase for all employees while some would be different bases different segments. Segmentation could be basis talent mapping, role, gender etc.
  • It’s important to focus on the most meaningful moments and not get carried away by all or easier ones e.g. certain leaves are more emotionally charged than others e.g. maternity leave, grievance leave and should be dealt with differently.
  • Pay attention to any major overhauls happening. Such as an organisational change, a takeover, a pandemic like covid 19 etc.  In the current covid-19 a lot of companies have had to overhaul their technology strategy for smooth operations. Whether it’s the issue of balancing home life and work life, technical difficulties, coping with isolation etc there are a multitude of issues people face while working from home. Am sure this had taken most organisations by surprise and the ride would have been anything but smooth. However, it is important to consider what is the strategy going forward, how can this process smoothen out for new joinees, how can we ensure greater emotional well-being of our employees.