Is Employee Experience really the Future of Work?

You must focus on your employees if you want a great experience that delivers service excellence. I put forth that HX=CX+EX. That CX and EX are flip-sides of the same coin; just that EX has been 'neglected' by the value-creation drive (Digital Transformation) for the past decade. Enter Simon Sinek with his ground-breaking TED talk (think it's still #3 all time!) that got me thinking about the Golden Circle. However, today, this concept is essential and might be what saves your experience at a time when experiences need saving.

Employee Experience is not a fad. However, the term might be. We call it Employee Experience because it is alliterative and goes with Customer Experience. Still, it was probably called something else before that and may change to something else later.?

The concept that you will be more successful in caring about your employees is not a fad. Unless, of course, we are replacing our teams with robots. Sans that singularity, chances are you are employing humans, and ensuring they have a pleasant experience is essential.

The key word here is “experience.” As experiential animals, we have experiences constantly. Of course, there are Employee and Customer Experiences, but there are also vacation experiences, family experiences, sport team experiences, etc. We experience things all the time. Ignoring any one of those doesn’t have good consequences for the experience.

Moreover, trends don’t always get the buy-in they should from senior management. If experience management is a trend, it could mean that organizations hire people to mind theirs but give them no budget and no authority to do anything. Eventually, when the experience manager can’t get anything accomplished, they will quit or get fired, and that will be that. So, for all of our sakes, I don’t want Employee Experience to be a fad.

Employee Experience Management is a Leadership Choice

An essential thing to remember is that minding how your employees feel during their time working for you is a leadership issue. Managers and senior teams need to decide how they will treat their teams. For example, will they appreciate their employees’ outside responsibilities, career goals, and personal well-being needs? Or will they pay them to work and stay out of all that?

Employee Experience management, like Customer Experience Management, needs to be diffused throughout an organization. Moreover, caring about these things not only makes it a better place to work, but it also has reciprocal effects. Feeling cared about as an individual inspires most people to give more at their jobs and try a little harder on behalf of their employer.?

So, just like it is everyone’s responsibility to provide a great Customer Experience, it is also everyone’s job in management to manage the Employee Experience. In many ways, all I say about Customer Experience apply to the Employee Experience.

It's all relative, trends vs snapshots..

We always reward snapshots rather than trends. If a sales person was trending upwards, consistenly, but missed his/her number - we would give commision to the 'rock-star' that over-achieved that quarter or month. Sinek in his book Leaders Eat Last comments how those that make the Navy Seals aren't always the fittest, biggest, brawniest solo super-stars. Rather, it's the 'little guy' like Captain America that helps (and saves) his/her comrade to the left/right. To understand people, we should determine their baselines of truth.

Before COVID, many people had no expectations about getting to work from home. However, after being sent home to work, a lot of people realised it was kind of nice to be able to skip the commute, the parking fees, the noisy/distracting environment they had to work in at the office, and any number of other annoying things about working in-person. They also liked having access to their kitchens, completing small home tasks during the day, and wearing gym clothes all day. Now, firms are asking people to return to the office, and many employees view this return to what used to be expected as a loss.?

Therefore, optimising the Employee Experience might require discovering these baselines of truths that the overall HX is judged by and re-defining what's possible if we are losing out in 'benchmarks'. Changing these baselines of truth and expectations is essential in a highly competitive employment market - to date employment statistics are still buoyant (even amidst the technical recession!)

So, How Do We Build a Great Employee Experience??

There are a few things to manage when improving your Employee Experience. First, like the baselines (needs, wants), another essential consideration when building a great Employee Experience is looking at what each kind of employee archetype wants. In other words, we should understand each employee archetype, better.?

Twitter just went through this. You might have heard that when Elon Musk bought Twitter, he laid off many people. Then, those that were left received a threatening email that said, “If you aren’t ready to be hardcore, show yourself the door.”

Not surprisingly, many people left, 50 to 80 percent by some estimates. But, interestingly, many people stayed. To me, the people who stayed are an excellent demonstration of how different people have different goals and things they want out of work. These people read that email and thought, “Hardcore? No problem. I want to be a part of it.”

Whenever possible, we should accommodate our different employees and recruit accordingly. For example, management consulting firms often recruit MBA students. These positions are like Twitter these days, hardcore. They require an enormous amount of time and loads of travel. However, some MBA grads want to do it, at least in the short term (not surprisingly, another group wants to do it long-term, too). So, the job accommodates that. The MBA student takes the position, does it for a few years, and then moves on to a new post. When the employee leaves, the company understands, and everyone parts as friends.?

It also goes back to the fundamental questions we always pose our clients about their intended Human Experiences:

• What’s the Employee Experience (similarly, CX) that you’re trying to deliver??
• Which emotions are we trying to evoke in our employees? How are we going to go and evoke those emotions??
• How do we design that into the employee journey? It's all about journeys..

The answers to these questions will drive our culture, which is critical to the Employee Experience. Purpose before Vision before Mission. Understanding our culture is essential if we want to hire the right people who will be happy in this (our) culture. Otherwise, we will suffer the consequences of a bad fit - in the CX world they say it's 5x more 'expensive' to attain a new customer vs retain an existing one; now go figure how that translates with a 'bad fit'.. in summary, the Experience Equity (ROX) erodes drastically.

For example, suppose we answer to the first question is an experience that fosters productivity. In that case, the answers to the second and third questions should relate to how to get that productivity. Moreover, productivity is the culture at our company, so we should own it. By contrast, if the answer to the first question is providing an experience that reduces employee churn/turnover, then the answer to the following two questions should work up to that goal. In other words, what emotion would make an employee want to stay for a long time at our company? How can we work that emotion into their working experience? And so on. These are all intricately linked -and rightly (designed) so.

Leadership is crucial, too. ?It’s a topic we return to on the podcast, and I cover a lot here because everything about our org starts with the leadership. So therefore, if we want to build an effective Employee Experience, we must have leaders who can get us there.?I highly recommend Sinek's book ( in fact all his books - Leaders Eat Last & The InfiniteGame).

Richard Branson has two quotes I love related to this concept that reflect his leadership style:

• “Look after your staff, and they’ll look after your customers.”
• “Train people well enough so they can leave, then treat them well enough, so they don’t want to go.”

The first one is reflective of what I have been talking about here. The second one is an excellent one to add to the first because not enough orgs take seriously that employees care about their career progression. Therefore, they don’t provide a path for someone to advance in their careers, which means they will leave. For some companies, that’s great; they designed that Employee Experience to end that way. However, other companies do not want their employees, whom they have poured their time and energy into, to leave.?Purpose before Profits. People before Profits - the chant goes.

An example of a company that gets this concept is Coca-Cola. Some benefits of employment at Coca-Cola are the in-house daycare, the on-site dry cleaner, and a pharmacy. These three things make it easier for employees to handle parts of their personal lives at work. For working parents, it’s a huge benefit to have your kids on site, reducing the stress and strain of the morning rush with one stop for all of you. Plus, getting some of those errands taken care of during the work week frees up weekend time for employees, which is a benefit. Contrast that to a Tesla or Twitter!

There are always things we could do to make employees’ lives a little easier and boost their enjoyment of the employee experience - hence why it's an Infinite Game. Again, the Return on Investment (boo. That should read Return on Experience - read my thoughts here why ROX is the new ROI : xxx) for our efforts in this area is employees who appreciate the benefit and are a little less distracted and more focused on work. And that's a good way for the Future of Work..