The Experiences That Matter Most

One of the most profound insights I’ve heard in my many interviews with Heads of Employee Experience was with Paul Davies at GE in 2017. Paul talked about their light-bulb (no pun intended!) moment of mapping experiences of those who did NOT get a job offer – 98% of the 2 million people who applied.

He then talked about the millions of others THOSE people influenced who were potential GE customers and employees, even shareholders.

Then he said, "We see more clearly that people bring life to work and work to life. We simply cannot separate the two."

If that was true in 2017, how much more is it true of work today, where in the past 2 years people have literally worked in the midst of those they love and care for?

How much more important is it then that we empathize with our colleagues and co-create positive work experiences and moments that matter that allow people to live their life in a way they can most support those they care for?

This thinking shaped how we think about a framework for Journeys for the Human Experience of Work. We give credit to IBM, Microsoft and others who put ‘Live’ (as in the life we live with others) in the ‘Inner Circle’ of HX Journeys, as they have the highest impact and greatest connection to what defines us. Think of Mazlow’s hierarchy. ‘Grow’ journeys come next, focusing on development and learning experiences. ‘Work’ journeys sit on the outer core, dealing with ‘hygiene’ and how work gets done.

What does this structure tell us about the journeys or experiences we should focus on?

We are annoyed when a digital tool or process doesn’t work, but we join and leave for what we perceive to have impact on those we love, including ourselves.

A few years ago, Harvard professor Clayton Christensen wrote in ‘How Will You Measure Your Life?’ about a company picnic for employees at the advanced-materials company he ran in the 1980s. He saw a young scientist, Diana, and noticed the joy and love she shared with her husband and two young children. For the first time, Christensen was able to locate her in the larger context of her life, and to call up a vision of how a day of positive experiences and support at work could send her home with “a replenished reservoir of esteem that profoundly affected her interaction with her husband and those two lovely children. And I knew how she’d feel going in to work the next day—motivated and energized. It was a profound lesson.”?

How can you get this kind of empathetic insight into your organization and create more positive experiences for your people?

Here are a few tips from Human-centered Design:

?1-???Help your leaders take more of an interest in the environment that your colleagues come from. I’ve coached many CFO’s who were impacting their teams negatively, despite being brilliant in financial matters. I helped them turn around the morale and performance of their teams by employing a few simple habits of starting conversations and emails by asking one or two simple questions about their colleague and then listening - what they did on the weekend, what they do for hobbies and learning, and generally paying attention to what they talked about and making a bigger deal about how important that was to them. Taking the time to regularly follow up on moments in their life that are shared will show they care.

2-???Create simple interview guides that are more qualitative and narrative in nature – DevOps people would tell us to start by asking about a particular problem or situation by saying ‘Tell me about - fill in the blank e.g. your first day at work, your last performance feedback meeting, or a time when you worked remotely with your team on Project X, etc. You ask lots of follow up questions (“Tell me more…”), stay out of judgment, hypotheticals or advice-giving, and just listen. In this context, you can listen for motivators, emotions, moments that matter, etc. But here's the point: work to understand the context in which people work, what are they doing when they're not at work, who are the people they're working for and why, etc.

3-???Teach how to use these guides with your business managers – Anna Wozniak tells about how she created and modeled such an interview guide and taught her business managers how to ask questions and especially how to listen. She says at first they wanted to have her present in conversations but now they regularly do this on their own and love the results and insights.

There are of course other tools that help include creating Personas and focusing on motivations, preferences, patterns of use over demographics, and mapping the experiences of those Personas. We recommend you map Experiences within the 'Inner Circle'. And in all your Personas and Experiences, understand again their context - why do they work, who are they working for, how do their experiences impact those people. Even for the outer circle work experiences. Embed these practices in your HX Listening and drive for Organizational Empathy.

What can you do to broaden your focus to what impacts those ‘inner circle’ experiences people have with your organization?