Employee Experience (EX) Leadership

I have written a book looking at the key challenges leaders face in building trust and engagement. Here's why I've written it now, and what it's all about:

The Trust Gap

It feels like there is an almost perfect storm affecting trust inside organisations. The best leaders have long understood that trust building is a core part of their role, but the challenges have intensified recently.

In part, this is due to a decline in generalised trust and increased scepticism at large. This has been compounded by the fact that the complicatedness of modern work makes it hard for people to judge leaders' effectiveness. It's also hard for leader communications to cut through all the noise to get through to the front line. At the same time, the traditional employment deal has broken down and many companies have not articulated an alternative. Reciprocity has been damaged as it feels like more risk is now falling on the employee side of the equation. This is especially concerning for many people who worry that automation will further weaken their side of the deal in the future.

On top of all of this, the problem for many companies is that trust has never mattered more to their success.

How do companies really win in the modern market place? In an economy where products and services can be quite similar, what matters is the special element that your people bring through their own ingenuity, creativity, commitment and effort.

Moreover, in the future, as more routine elements of jobs are automated, employees will spend more time on tasks that require human insight and empathy.

Companies will be competing against one another on the basis of the degree of trust they can establish with their workforce, and so the superior experience, service and design they can then deliver to their customers.

Safe to Speak Up

So what's to be done? The leadership challenge to building trust is pretty extensive.

One of the most important resources available to leaders in building trust is employee voice. Feeling you can speak up and that your views are acted upon is a critical ingredient in building trust at work.

Voice is a form of upward communication and is part of an overall culture of transparency. It is a complicated area, however, and in many situations employees will often default to silence unless leaders work hard to capture people's honest opinions and ideas.

It is an area that my work has been focused on for twenty years – enabling employee voice and encouraging leaders to listen and act.

My book looks at how companies have used employee surveys and employee engagement programmes to routinise employee listening, effectively making it a leadership discipline. I highlight a whole series of companies that have done a fantastic job of driving positive change through engagement surveys.

The book then looks at how employee voice is evolving; in an age of big data and social media, there are opportunities to do more integrated analytics and continuous listening in order to better understand the complicated human equation of work and motivation.

In an age of big data and social media, there are new opportunities for continuous listening and integrated people analytics.

Employee Experience (EX)

EX is an emerging science that uses these new sources of data and applies new analytical approaches. 

EX gives a broad and holistic view of people and organisations, but it begins by understanding individual perspectives and small moments and events. It is not a snapshot in time, but rather a series of interactions that take place over time.

Simply put, employee experience can be thought of as "What's it like to work here?" From the run up to your first day, to the end of your first month, to your first anniversary, to a promotion, and so on, until you leave.

Is it a place where you can be yourself or do you have to put on a game face and try to fit in? If you do a good job, do people recognise it? When you accomplish a big goal, do people celebrate it? Is it somewhere you can learn new things? Is it a place where you can make a positive impact on customers, the community and the environment?

What's important about all these questions is that they begin with the employee. And by employee here, I am referring to anyone working for the company, whether in a full-time role, a part-time position, a contractor or a free agent. EX is about capturing their perspective. It's a bottom-up, personalised and individual view of the organisation.

EX analytics is about making sense of these points of view. It’s about identifying patterns over time between cohorts. In this sense, EX refers to analysing individual journeys together and dynamically, so you can understand and improve events, touch points and processes in order to gain a systemic lift in productivity and performance.

EX means analysing individual journeys, so you can improve touch points and processes and achieve a systemic lift in productivity and performance.

EX Leadership

For many organisations, EX requires a complete change in perspective.

Engagement is often a top-down exercise in alignment that’s led by management. With EX, the picture is more personal and conversational. As a result, it can be harder to manage by traditional means.

EX requires a mindset that is about enabling individuals and teams. It is about co-creation, rather than directing tasks and managing resources. It involves empathy and design thinking, as well as the ability provide support and to give inspiration across shifting and diverse networks.

In terms of EX leadership, the book highlights two key aspects:

Firstly, how some companies that are high in the EX maturity curve are pushing the boundaries and leading this emerging new science. In particular, it looks at how they use smart technology and analytics to activate their approach to employee experience.

Secondly, it highlights the key role that leaders have in building engagement and a compelling employee experience. EX leadership means providing purpose and meaning at work. It requires a focus on individual learning and personalised feedback. Above all, EX leadership is authentic.

EX Leadership refers to companies at the leading edge of this emerging science; it also refers to the key role that leaders play in activating EX to build trust.

Find Out More

Please contact me here on LinkedIn to learn more.

You can visit my Author's page on Amazon here.

You can buy the e-book here.

You can buy the paperback here.

(And here are the direct links to the e-book and paperback in the USA.)

You can also read more about EX Leadership here.