Beyond Employee Engagement and Experience

This newsletter is about a new multi-sided model for HR. This is just edition 2 and I haven’t yet explained what I mean by multi-sided, or shown you the model, although I have explained that it involves being both truly strategic and people-centric. Most people who know me will have seen at least some of my thinking around strategic HR, so this edition will continue my focus on how HR can be more people-centric. Once I’ve explained this, we can move on to being multi-sided!

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I presented on hyper-personalisation at theBTN’s ERUPT conference this week. The session continued the work I’ve been doing for UKG on describing hyper-personalisation . At the conference, I made a number of, what I hoped were, provocative remarks – one being that hyper-personalisation could be as central to HR’s evolution over the next 25 years as Dave Ulrich’s strategic HR business partnering models have been to the last (I made a similar suggestion in regard to multi-sided HR in my last newsletter).

I also suggested that we need to move beyond employee experience. (If I was into clickbait I’d probably suggest employee experience is 'dead', but that would be stupid, and I’m not going to do so!)

Presenting my BTN session. Most current activities supporting people centricity focus on employee experience, with this either being subservient to business and talent objectives (often leading to a 'lipstick on a pig' effect), or with experience being seen, rather dangerously, as more important than strategic organisational outcomes (sometimes seen in agile HR, hacking HR, people operations and similar approaches). Resolving these issues can't just involve balancing the approaches / objectives as doing this combines the downsides as much as it does the benefits. Instead, we need to transcend the paradox of being both business and people-centric by moving beyond experience.

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So what does this shift entail? Well, let’s look at how we’ve got to where we are now - with employee experience the main focus within people centricity in most major organisations - as this might provide a helpful indication of where we now need to go.

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Employee Satisfaction – Commitment – Engagement

In the early years of my HR career, we moved fairly quickly from a long-standing focus on employee satisfaction to one on engagement, which then continued for the next few decades.

Satisfaction was about stuff that organisations were doing to people, and how that was perceived – eg whether they got on with their manager, liked their colleagues or trusted their performance appraisal. When we surveyed people, they provided the data but this was about the organisation – leaders, managers, and HR. Taking action to improve satisfaction didn’t occur to these people very much as far as I could see.

Commitment was a response to a growing understanding that even when people were satisfied, this didn’t necessarily change anything about them and their approach to the organisation. However, that didn’t take us far. We then stumbled on the psychological concept of engagement, mangled it, and mainly decided that this was the only thing we needed to worry about from then on.

The key thing about engagement is that it’s about the individual – their psychological states, behaviours and actions. Eg many organisations focused on whether people would stay, say (act as advocates) and strive. However, lots of organisations and practitioners never seemed very clear on what they meant by engagement but focused on it anyway because everyone else was doing so.

(That doesn’t mean we should all standardise on one definition of engagement as seemed to be the intent of some parties for a while – that would be stupid. Organisations need to create different states, behaviours and actions in their people, and between different groups of people, so encouraging everyone to focus on developing the same thing would have been unhelpful. But I do wish many individual organisations and practitioners could have been clearer on what they meant by engagement, and why that was important to them.)

Organisations that knew what they were doing still asked about satisfaction, but because we also understood engagement, we could correlate these things and work about what elements of satisfaction were most important in creating engaged employees. And if something wasn’t correlated, we basically decided it wasn’t important and ignored it.

How we modeled engagement at Penna when I was there (linking tactical and strategic drivers or satisfaction with activities to aspects of engagement).

I think we got a lot better at taking action too. I know engagement scores haven’t moved that much, but I don’t think this was down to a lack of trying.

However, we focused on engagement way too much and for way too long. There are lots of other important aspects of human capital (the value added by people, if you don’t like that term), eg potential, that hardly ever got measured. And lots of other things which are important and that employees can comment on too (eg social capital – often now measured, partly though not fully, through organisation / social network analyses).

But the key problem with engagement (as well as satisfaction and commitment) was that it was all about us (the organisation – leaders, managers and HR) and getting employees to work better and harder for us. I think this then led to the term and approach being seen as rather manipulative, and employees asking themselves what was in it for them in being engaged.

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Employee Experience – Wellbeing – Fulfilment

About 10 years ago, and particularly during the last 5, and 2, we started to move away from engagement and look at experience instead. There were a number of linked changes behind this, including Pine and Gilmore's Experience Age book; growing self-actualisation and desire to move beyond acquiring stuff; businesses focusing on user and customer experience; techniques from design thinking such as the development of personas and journey mapping; new digital technologies providing a more integrated experience meaning that we couldn’t break things down into individual components of satisfaction in the way we’d used to; and better opportunities for continuous listening. More recently, we’ve seen the development of specific technologies focusing on making working in an organisation easier for people too. All these individual shifts were based on increasing people-centricity more generally, leading to changes within these different arenas, and then to a new focus on employee experience.

(Engagement is still important for organisations, as it’s different to, rather than lesser than experience. So ignore suggestions that since you can now use real-time sensors to understand short-term changes in experience that you can ditch your engagement survey – no matter how old hat that may seem. Engagement isn’t about those micro fluctuations in experience. It’s a longer term, more stable state that will often need a completely different set of actions to improve.)

However, I think the main push beind experience was that we’d had enough after 20 years focusing on engagement, especially since that hadn’t seemed to impact anything very much. This was aided by rather stupid commentaries from people who should know better criticising engagement for things it had nothing to do with (like it being all about perks!) and extoling experience for similarly exaggerated claims. That’s led to even more confusion about experience than there ever had been around engagement (like the suggestion that experience is all about the physical, digital and cultural workplace and has got nothing to do with the job that someone’s doing!?, or that something like organisational purpose is important because of the way that people experience the purpose – not the impact of the purpose itself. I mean everything is experienced somehow, but broadening the term that far seems to me to make it much less worthwhile).

However, there are two common aspects of what organisations mean by experience. Firstly, it's about stuff that is happening to someone – so in one sense, it’s a bit like satisfaction. However, secondly, it’s stuff seen from their perspective – it’s what they’re involved in, rather than what we’re doing to them. So we should call it people experience, not employee experience - it's about their entire experience (or as UKG term it, their life work), not just about their employment. The term people experience also applies more naturally to candidates, alumni, and contingent workers, etc.

This change in perspective to focus on the person is key, and forms a central piece of the multi-sided model.

UKG have introduced a framework called the“life-work journey” — designed to show how employees may have vastly different experiences based on six distinct phases of their lives, both at home and on the job.

However, I think we’ve now realised that much of what we’re doing in experience also hasn’t changed things very much. I’ll return to this point later to explain why not. However, one reason, a bit like my comments on why we moved from satisfaction to engagement, is that a good experience didn’t necessarily change anything important for the person. So organisations are increasingly looking at aspects of people themselves, such as their wellbeing or their fulfilment, and are also measuring these.

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Employee Transformation

Wellbeing and fulfilment provide more useful aspects of HR’s ongoing evolution, however, I don’t think these additional qualities mark where we need to go. Most people in most organisations don’t come to work for the experience of work, or to improve their wellbeing, or to be fulfilled. Money is part of it obviously, but people generally select their employer because want to achieve something – eg a personal aim or aspiration. If we really want to help people optimise their time, their states and their futures, then we need to be concerned with what these aspirations are.

So in my session for theBTN, I suggested that most organisations need to focus on employee transformation – on helping their people meet their own individual, unique aspirations.

I had also talked about this previously, at another session I delivered for UKG, this time at Teneo's HRcoreNordic. In this, I used Pine and Gilmore's suggestion that whilst experience is the mass customisation of goods and services, the mass customisation of experience is transformation. While most of these authors' focus is on consumers, the same logic applies to employment too (and there is also this ).

Presenting my Teneo HRcoreNordic session. In this, I suggested that the way that we have previously mass customised goods and services was through customisation and personalisation, and that mass customising experiences to form transformations will require hyper personalisation.

Read more about hyper personalisation in my report for UKG at HRZone , and in edition 1 of this newsletter.

At ERUPT, I noted that this understanding of people's unique aspirations and needs for personal transformation is the key to hyper-personalised HR, and it’s core to the people-centric side of the multi-sided model too.

Therefore, at least part of the future of HR is to help our employees transform. Expect to hear much more about this (and perhaps less about employee engagement and experience) over the next few years and decades. (However, engagement, experience, wellbeing and fulfilment are all still important for organisations too, as they’re different to, rather than lesser than transformation!)

So it’s this transformation that I’ll be returning to in later editions of ‘people-centric and strategic HR’. And if you want to ensure that you fully understand what you mean when you talk about employee transformation, and that you're facilitating the right sorts of transformation, in the right way, keep reading - and subscribe - here .

I’d love to hear your own views on the points I've made above.?Please share your comments below. I look forward to discussing these and broader points around multi-sided HR with you!

If you enjoyed this article, I also invite you to check out my broader insights on both strategic and people-centric HR in the Strategic HR Academy. Learn about the latest thinking and opportunities in on-demand courses on HR and Competitive Advantage; Performance Management and Reward; Organisation, Process, Work and Job Design; Strategic Partnering and HR Transformation. Then discuss application within your own organisation with me and other HR practitioners in periodic study groups (Work and Job Design starting now!).

Kind regards - Jon