Getting hired by a consulting firm, especially the Big 4, was a dream for most management graduates until a few years ago. But as aggressive hiring sprees shifted to an industry slowdown and layoffs, leading the industry down the path of the Great Stagnation, interest has cooled.
Slower growth opportunities, comparisons with glamorous peer careers in industries like IT, and anxieties around generative AI don’t help – consulting talent is more disengaged than ever.
Enhanced EX: A business requisite
As a talent leader or a consulting firm owner, you might ask yourself – is this even a good time to invest in Employee Experience (EX)? The short and definite answer is “Yes, absolutely!”
While the industry goes through its cycle of slow metamorphosis, it is critical to bring employees up to speed in terms of affinity, productivity, and performance. This is key to nurturing a culture that can inspire the output consulting clients increasingly demand; your talent must be prompt, agile, and innovative. This demands deep engagement, collaboration, and a strong sense of purpose.
Enhanced EX is also critical in the context of minimizing stress levels for employees on active projects. Well-engaged and motivated talent is key to long-term client impact, powerful relationships, and repeat business.
An intuition barrier
While EX remains a complex beast for most organizations and industries, it is particularly a vexing one for consulting. Why?
- Lack of alignment to a larger, unified goal; every consultant is aligned to their immediate project goals
- Limited interactions and bonding with colleagues during client site reporting
- Client stakeholders, their work environment, and related stressors have a high influence on the EX
All of this leads up to an environment in which employers have more limited relationships with talent. As a result, this barrier prevents even EX experts from tuning into how top talent thinks, feels, and turns up to work.
The AI and automation opportunity
The good news is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel on your ops to elevate their experience. You only need to see beyond outdated employee feedback methods and generic, cookie-cutter surveys; take a personalized, fluid, and responsive approach across the employee lifecycle, just like top EX leaders did in 2023.
What does that mean?
To begin with, nurture an AI and automation-led integrated EX ecosystem. It lets you understand and connect with every employee in a highly personalized, relevant, and timely manner, transforming their experience. It can help you evolve from coming across as a passive, disinterested leader or organization to an entity high on intent and meeting the moment for an employee.
An end-to-end EX management platform that leverages new tech can help you make this practically possible without straining your resources. Effective employee experience management in consulting can make a huge difference in both large and small firms. The right platform and partner can prompt you to ask the right questions, get you deeper answers, and cue interventions to make a difference at the right time. Imagine knowing your employee’s state of mind as well as their next desk fellow, even when you don’t see them in the office for weeks on end.
SogoEX is designed to engage employees across channels and formats, enabling them to express themselves in more ways than one; as a busy leader, read between the lines easily with technologies such as NLP and high-value metrics such as sentiment score. At a team level, you can sense every shift in employee moods and play to them with pulse surveys and engagement reports. In fact, with the platform’s AI-led HR analytics, you can arrive at top EX priorities and your most impactful talent engagement decisions with presentation-ready reports.
When was the last time you were able to pull together a presentation-ready employee engagement report within hours rather than days?
The future of consulting talent, EX, and revenue
As consulting clients increasingly expect your talent to foster a vision beyond immediate project goals, your employees must find themselves adequately poised. This calls for an emotional work state (if not the physical work environment) that’s truly inspired and engaged. The right culture can elevate transformation, stir disruption, and most importantly, instill faith that can win long-term mandates.
Achieving such an engaged workplace does not happen by accident. Consulting firms that succeed put EX at the core of operations. They prioritize tracking, understanding, and transforming every employee’s lifecycle in a manner that furthers their sense of purpose. Enhanced revenue, improved employer branding, and top talent will follow.
Ready to get started with EX management that lets you counter the current industry tide and emerge resilient for the next wave of growth? Sogolytics can help!
