Resolving the 'Identity Crisis': A must-do for HR for a personalized employee experience
Late on a Thursday afternoon, with only three hours to go before the scheduled departure for my flight home, I was taken aback by a message informing me that my flight had been canceled. I immediately visited the airline's website to find an alternate flight, but my payment attempt failed. Remarkably, within just 10 minutes, I received a call from the airline's customer service. The agent on the line assisted me in completing the payment over the phone and also assured me I would be reimbursed for my canceled flight. The conversation barely ended when the new ticket arrived in my inbox—a process so seamless and smooth.
But how did the airline connect the dots? How did they know that the person whose flight was canceled, attempted to rebook a ticket on their website, and encountered a payment issue was the same?
The answer: Identity management!
Unlike, customer experience though, employee experience hasn’t managed to keep up with the various and evolving identities of employees on multiple platforms in a similar fashion despite having access to vast amounts of data. Theoretically, all that data should be enough to help create personalized experiences. Yet, many organizations still find personalizing employee experience an unattainable goal than standard practice. And the root cause for that is ineffective identity management.
So, what is employee identity management?
Personalization of employee experience for thousands of employees seems like a massive challenge because while most companies have employee data, they don’t yet have a way to bring them all together in a way that can let you look at employee information comprehensively.
In the above view, what you see is a unified employee profile.
A unified employee profile has all the data that you’ve ever captured about an employee (through any system) filed and documented in a way that can be used to personalize the experience for this employee, and every other employee.
And to get to this view, you need identity management.
Identity management is the ability to accurately identify, integrate and manage the various pieces of information about an employee across different systems and databases in an organization. This involves consolidating multiple identities or data points (such as name variations, contact details, job titles, roles, and departmental affiliations) that an employee might have across the company's network of applications and platforms into a single, cohesive identity.
Let’s understand this with an example.
John initially joined a company as a software developer. Over five years, he was promoted to a senior developer, then became a team lead and recently transitioned to a project manager role in a different location. Due to these changes, various systems have outdated or inconsistent information about John:
- The email directory lists him as a senior developer.
- The HR database has his latest title but an old department.
- The access control system grants permissions based on his role as a team lead.
- The internal communication platform shows him in the correct department but with outdated contact information.
As a result, John still gets emails inviting him to complete a training program meant for freshers. He might get overlooked for opportunities because his career path isn’t clearly mapped. His expense reports don’t get processed on time and throw up errors due to department misalignment. His Christmas gift vouchers get sent to his old address. And so on and so forth. Such bad experiences will eventually degrade his engagement and loyalty to the organization.
With identity management:
- You can collect and merge John’s data from disparate systems.
- You can then identify and correct inaccuracies or inconsistencies in John's records, such as outdated titles or departmental affiliations.
- You can associate all variations of John's identity across systems to a single, unified profile.
- You can ensure that any change to John's role, department, or personal information is reflected across all systems in real-time.
- You can then personalize John’s experience based on this information.
In short, to manage employee identities effectively, organizations need to follow five steps:
- Data collection: Gather pieces of employee data from multiple platforms and systems within the HR infrastructure.
- Data normalization: Consolidate the data into a single coherent library through ETL.
- Identity matching: Link email IDs, device logins, and other identifiers to a single individual.
- Identity enrichment: Add additional information to the existing employee profiles to enhance your understanding of the employee.
- Unified Profile: Consolidate all this data and map the relationship between different identifiers, providing a bird’s eye view of the employee.
You can complete all these five steps with Tydy.
Tydy for employee identity management
Identity management is at the heart of customer experience.
The fact that your Netflix account on your mobile and desktop is synced giving you a seamless experience, and the fact that you can cancel your flight on an app, by calling customer service, or at the airport counter is all identity management in action.
Tydy brings the same ability inside the workplace.
It sits at the center of your employee experience ecosystem, integrates with every other system to capture data, harmonize it, and then create unified profiles, like the one we saw earlier.
Now what that does for you is:
- You can use Tydy to create personalized employee experience journeys
- You can ensure changes in employee data in any system are captured on Tydy in real-time and shared with other systems in the network
- You can be sure that, without manual intervention, you will always have access to the most recent information about your employee
If you’d like to learn more about identity management with Tydy, drop us a line and we’ll get in touch with you.
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