Four Opportunities to extend EX (beyond just less awful!)

My last couple of newsletters have focused on insights and learning from what I thought was one of 2023’s best online conferences, though not one I presented at, which was run by HXWize on the employee experience.

I’ve noted Dave Ulrich’s definition of EX which focuses on wellbeing and his 4 B’s - being safe, becoming, belonging and believing – and have also added my own suggestion that EX needs to be seen as the activities that contribute towards these, it’s not the wellbeing itself.

I’ve also reviewed Joe Pine’s definition of experience as something memorable and distinctive (which he also describes as time well spent), not just nice, easy or convenient (time saved) as well as the opportunity for experience to be truly transformational (time well invested). Here, I’ve suggested that EX is different to other business related experiences as it often needs to provide an even more important, personal outcome – again related to wellbeing - based on the experience. The experience, even if memorable, is therefore generally only value for money for an employee. Providing more value / better use of time needs to focus on the important wellbeing related outcome too.

The outcome here can be enabling someone to improve their contribution to their employer, eg by reducing drag or increasing autonomy, so that they feel their time has been truly well spent; or helping the person meet their own needs, related to Ulrich’s 4 B’s, ensuring their time has been well invested.

I’ve shown the results of this analysis, based on Pine’s and Ulrich’s thinking below. Note that this equates pretty closely with my suggestions in earlier newsletters – however, I think it’s interesting, and hopefully validating, that I’ve got to the same place by starting with other thinkers’ insights on experience to those earlier suggestions which I developed just relecting on value for employees on my own.

The reason I’m sharing this with you is to check this thinking, and to contribute more generally to better and more people-centric management and development of people – so if you think I’ve got any logic wrong (ie if EX doesn’t need to be seen as an antecedent of wellbeing, or that this doesn’t need us to focus on helping people improve their contributions or meeting their broader, personal needs) then please do let me know!

So what?

I've promised in my lst two newsletters to also address the reasons why a clear and correct understanding of EX is so important.

The first of these should hopefully be farily obvious - if we want to increase value, we need to be addressing the things that will provide the value that we want. Simply trying to make HR or broader organisational life less awful, whilst often required, isn't going to get us where we want to go.

(Also, linked to, but more even more fundamental than this, is that just inserting the word experience into every sentence really doesn't do much for us at all, other then making us look rather ridiculous - eg this example I saw today asking us to share our experiences of the career development, or people growth experience. Career development consists of various activities and opportunities which don't have to be called experiences, and the outcome of these activities, both individually and together (ie career advancement) will often be more important than the way these activities are experienced. So what value does referring to a 'career development experience programme' provide??):

The second main reason for thinking this is important is that the activities we undertake, the way we measure them; and how we organise to deliver all depend upon what we're trying to achieve:

Activities (or, ahem, the 'experiences') -

Hopefully you can see that whether we see EX as all interactions, and making these less awful / more compelling / more memorable, or helping people achieve their objectives or to meet their own needs will influence the actions that we take.

Of course, experience isn’t the only thing we all define differently, or fail to define. For example, with engagement, Gallup’s definition of engagement as things a team leader can influence (eg checking progress regularly) leads to their focus on the team leader. These actions aren’t necessarily priorities if you think engagement might be something different.

Back to experience, and sticking with the example of career development, if we want to make the career experience less awful / more memorable, we might want to offer an exit interview, showing interest in someone when they have announced their departure, so they will feel more positive about us after they have left, or may even realise what a wonderful organisation we are and stay!?

If we want to improve peoples’ contributions, we might introduce regular stay interviews and talk more openly about how we might improve, in a way to help make them want to stay and perform.

But if we’re interested in helping people meet their own needs, we might need to offer much broader and ongoing career conversations, asking people about what’s best for their careers, eg,where do you want to go?, how could you achieve / work towards that here?, and what other opportunities might there be?, or how can we help you with them? (I like Beverley Kaye’s suggestions in ‘Love ‘em or lose ‘em’ for this).

Again, it all depends on what we're trying to achieve.

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Measures -

The most commonly used mechanism to measure experience is probably still the engagement survey, which in my view / definition doesn’t really measure experience at all. (Because we’re asking about satisfaction with items that contribute towards engagement to the business, not personal wellbeing).

Firms have also increasingly introduced real-time, continuous listening mechanisms at key touchpoints. These are more relevant if we’re interested in things being nice, easy and convenient. But if we’re interested in experiences being memorable or transformational, these real-time mechanisms aren’t going to help.

Some presenters at the conference talked about using employee net promotor score, eNPS, or employee customer satisfaction, eCSAT, surveys, which er probably closer to what’s needed.

But I didn’t anyone mention conversations with people about the experiences they remember; the amount of work friction they encounter; the appropriateness of their level of autonomy; or how the company is helping them meet their own objectives. All these would be much harder to measure, but potentially much more important too.

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Organisation -

This was the area where presenters at the conference had probably the greatest diversity of views.

For example, some presenters argued that EX and HR skillsets and mindsets are very different, and that “old HR structure cramps EX style” so the two need to be kept separate. Some people suggested EX is part of HR. But I think most saw HR as part of EX alongside IT, Facilities and sometimes Compliance(!), working together in multi-disciplinary agile teams using a product management mindset, capability and ways of working.

Several speakers talked about organising these integrated teams around employee journeys. I think that can work, although it’s harder when focusing on transformation, and every journey is different. And it may not take account of continuing needs for specialism, or the requirement to align with varying business strategies (employee experience / value doesn’t, or shouldn't replace strategic HR, which is why my main focus is my multi sided model).

The two main speakers also had very different views on this. As Joe Pine sees experience in the same way across different parts of an organisation (see newsletter 15), his suggestion is an integrated total experience organisation, combining EX, CX and UX.

And I described in newsletter 14, Dave Ulrich sees experience as a way of improving talent and hence part of people capability. Seeing experience like this leads him to suggest more or less the complete opposite to Joe Pine, which is continuing to organise HR along the lines of the traditional Ulrich model (balancing specialists and generalists, just with an increased focus on a broader range of dimensions, not just the design, and governing HR to allocate specialist and generalist resources with agility).

None of these perspective are wrong, but they reinforce the need to be clear what we mean by experience, so that we can organise around this.

I'll be continuning to provide some much needed clarity, including on activities, measures and organisation, during 2024, so do come back again regularly next year. Best wishes until then (unless I see you in the comments first of course).

Jon Ingham

Strategic HR Academy