Employee Experience is the #1 Issue At Work - But Who Owns It?

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According to LinkedIn's 2020 Global Talent Trends Report, Employee Experience is the #1 thing that over 7,000 HR professionals are focusing on. I define employee experience as "creating an organization where employees WANT not NEED to show up to work by focusing on three environments: culture, technology, and space."

Now more than ever with COVID-19 and all of the challenges around social injustice and racism, employee experience is center stage. It's easy to treat employees well when the organization is thriving, but how your organization treats employees during times of stress is even more telling.

But who actually owns employee experience? I like to look at it as a type of ripple effect that starts with the most senior-level leaders of an organization and extends to every employee regardless of their seniority.

Initiated by the CEO and executive team

The entire employee experience journey of an organization starts with the Reason for Being and the values of the organization. This comes from the CEO and the rest of the executive team, it's the foundation that employee experience is built on top of. Executives need to incorporate employee experience and the reason for being into their talking points, meeting agendas, and priorities both internally and externally. Executives must be the biggest evangelists and champions for employee experience. If you look at organizations like Google, Accenture, Cisco, or Airbnb, all of their CEOs do an amazing job of using language and messaging that incorporates EX.

Owned by the people team

The People team (or commonly known as HR) is the task force that is responsible for coming up with strategies and tactics and make employee experience a reality. This group tests ideas, provides guidance, uses analytics to guide experience decision making, and takes ownership over making sure things get done and implemented. It doesn't mean that HR makes all of the decisions but it does mean that they help steer the ship. The main goal of the people team is to make sure that employee experience sits at the center of the organization.

Driven by leaders

Every leader at an organization is responsible for driving employee experience. This means making sure that the three environments I talked about earlier are actively being designed for and focused on in their respective teams. The people team will give you guidance on strategy and what to do, but as a leader, it's up to you to make sure you actually implement what they recommend. A big part of employee experience for leaders is making sure that they get to know their people as individuals not just as workers!

Championed by everyone

Every employee from the intern to the CEO needs to get into the habit of sharing ideas, participating in focus groups or surveys, collaborating with others, and providing feedback on what they would like their work experience to look and feel like. If you don't speak up to have your voice heard then you shouldn't be complaining about anything inside of your organization.

Employee experience is absolutely the next big battleground for organizations around the world. It's the organizations that are able to design the best experiences for their people that are going to be able to attract and retain top talent and thrive in the future of work.

Want to know how well your organization is doing when it comes to employee experience? Take the assessment and find out! You will also get access to my free employee experience training series!

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If you enjoyed the article and want more content like this here’s what you can do:

1. Subscribe to The Future of Work Podcast where I interview business leaders around the world each week. 

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3. Grab a copy of The Employee Experience Advantage, which is based on an analysis of 252 organizations around the world. 

4. If you are or want to be an entrepreneur then my wife and I just launched a brand new podcast on how to Be Your Own Boss, called the BYOB Podcast where we share what we did and how we did it. You can subscribe to that here.