#2 Notes from the implementation side of employee experience

Launch day is the least interesting day of an employee experience platform implementation.

I know. That's an odd statement from someone who clocks a massive amount of time implementing employee experience platforms.

Of course launch day is exciting. It's what everyone builds towards. Weeks (sometimes months) of workshops, planning, testing, last-minute tweaks and the inevitable "can we just..." conversations all lead to one moment.

Go live.

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy launch days just as much as the next comms person. But it's also the point where I stop being interested in the launch... and my interest in everything that happens afterwards goes from flicking the kettle on to boiling point. By the time I close my laptop at the end of a launch, I normally have a pretty good idea how successful it's going to be.

I can't predict the future, and there’s no "Hot tub time machine" shenanigans going on here. It's not even because I've looked at day 1 analytics (and I do love the ol' numerical stats).

What I've realised over the last few years is that implementation isn't really about getting everything switched on. It's about knowing what not to switch on yet. Which, honestly, is way harder than it sounds.

When you're in Comms, IT, HR or project delivery, it really is:

Eat. Sleep. Implement. Repeat.

You're in the workshops, the planning sessions, the testing and the project meetings. You're thinking about the platform before your first coffee and probably still thinking about it when you're brushing your teeth that night.

Here’s a mad thought. No-one else is.

The factory worker, bartender, ambulance driver or shelf stacker isn't thinking about it until it becomes another change they have to deal with.

Another login. Another place to look. Another annoying thing to learn alongside everything else they're already juggling.

I honestly think we massively underestimate how much change we're asking people to absorb. Mostly because, to us, it doesn't feel like one big change. It feels like a series of perfectly reasonable little decisions made across several months.

To everyone else… they all land at once.  That's why you'll often hear me say something that can sounds a little counterintuitive:

"Let's leave that until Phase Two."

Not because the platform can't do it. 9 times out of 10, it usually can. That's half the problem. It's because your people might not need it yet. And, if we're being completely honest, your project team might not be able to do it properly yet either. Capacity is a real thing.

Every feature, workflow and integration sounds like the best idea ever on its own. Before you know it, you've got ten of them. And all the baggage that comes with them… more testing, more training, more decisions, more deadlines and seventeen new opportunities for something to go slightly wrong at the worst possible time - right before launch. My advice? Have a little patience (did you sing that line? I did), and a little bit of restraint.

I'm seeing that first-hand on a project I'm working on at the moment. The platform can do an enormous amount, so naturally the temptation was to make it do an enormous amount before launch. What’s actually happened is we've spent months challenging each other. The client has challenged us, we've challenged them, and at various points we've all probably challenged our own sanity.

But it's worked.

Not because anyone wants less from the platform. We just started asking a better question:

"What will genuinely make people's working day easier from day 1... and what can wait?"

When a whole project team starts asking that, not just Comms, not just IT, and not just the person responsible for keeping the project plan green, that's usually the point where I start to relax. It's not when the platform is perfectly configured. It's not when every feature has been demonstrated, or when every task has a reassuring (and dopamine supplying) tick next to it.

It's when the conversation changes.

It stops being: "Can we switch this on?" 

...and becomes: "Should we?"

Or, even better: "What will this actually mean for the people using it?"

That's when I know they’re gonna be alright. They've stopped trying to prove how much the platform can do from the start and started thinking about how they can use it to help somebody do their job.

And I'm so here for it.

Because launch day isn't the finish line. It's the day you hand the keys over and hope nobody immediately drives it into a hedge.

What happens next depends on whether the organisation keeps giving people a reason to come back. Whether they can find something quicker, get an answer without chasing three people, or complete a task without opening five different systems.

That matters so much more than whether every possible feature was switched on before launch.

So of course, like a fancy dinner party, a perfectly executed launch is lovely. Enjoy the moment, get the photos, share the cake. But remember, in six months time nobody “on the ground”  will care how smoothly launch day went. They care whether the platform makes their working day easier.