Providing good employee experience can have a positive effect on an agency’s capacity to boost the customer experience it provides the public.

Why? Because happy and productive employees are simply more likely to focus on good CX, said Brian Chidester, head of industry strategy for the public sector at Adobe.

“It’s foundational. We’ve heard for a long time: Good experience drives good customer experience,” Chidester said during Federal New Network’s Workplace Reimagined Exchange 2024.

But he also cited some proof of that hypothesis: “We found that organizations that are focused on driving better employee experience actually deliver two and a half times better customer experience. Organizations that have that intentionality behind it have one and a half times more engaged employees.”

Adobe has been working with the Veterans Affairs Department as it tries to improve experience across the employee lifecycle, from hiring through retirement. The objective is to understand and predict what people need at each step of that lifecycle, then build systems to support those expectations, Chidester said.

How good experiences can drive better recruitment

“They’ve really been intentional about taking a look at what that spectrum looks like,” he offered. VA leaders understand how good employee experience spreads to their employees’ families and the veterans the department serves, Chidester said.

“They’re really trying to not only support the employee but help the employee support their families through those career experiences,” he said, adding that such practices help an organization improve its brand as employer, making it a place people want to work.

“Adobe is helping them tell those stories, establishing that employer brand,” Chidester said. “So when they actually do that outreach, to start the recruitment process, people already know that brand.”

Modernizing processes connected to the workplace and enhancing those processes with predictive qualities essentially means converting them from paper to digital, he said.

Pandemic as digital transformation incubator

2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, provided a test case. Agencies found they could conduct new employee onboarding online.

“One of the things that we saw during the pandemic is something that you never thought would happen, which is an entire interview process shifting digital. Also onboarding shifting digital,” Chidester said.

Deft use of technologies, such as digital signatures, surfaced as one enabler.

“That’s something that Adobe does right now with the FBI,” Chidester said.

Digitizing can help reduce hiring times as well as improve engagement with prospective employees before they arrive for that first day on the job too, he said.

“The average ramp time to onboard an employee is 92 days,” Chidester said. “That shows you the importance of getting that individual engaged immediately and not just waiting till they’re actually onboard.”

Organizing data also helps improve employee experience. For example, people who perform benefits or adjudicatory casework often must invoke several systems, making the work cumbersome and responses to constituents needlessly slow. Chidester said pooling required data from multiple systems can increase efficiency and improve work satisfaction.

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