A New Model for Employee Communication, Part 23: Employee Experience

Employee Experience (EX) is frequently confused with employee engagement. It’s an easy mistake to make and, to be sure, they have much in common. They are not, however, the same thing. Engagement is an outcome of a company’s behaviors. That is, employees are (or are not) engaged because of things the company does that affect the employee’s emotional bond with the company. EX is something a company creates that goes well beyond emotional ties. EX is also one of the best opportunities for communicators to have an impact on the organization’s bottom line.

This is the latest installment in a series of posts exploring a new model of employee communication, designed to deliver measurable results that demonstrate the impact on the organization in ways that matter to leaders.

The four overlapping circles at the center of the model represent the best opportunities for employee communication to affect an organization on a day-to-day basis. This post introduces the final of our four circles, the Employee Experience (CX).

The customer journey map defines the various touchpoints a customer has with an organization. The customer, however, meets their needs through a variety of interactions, including many over which the company has little or no control. In fact, the organization may not even be aware of some of these touchpoints. Companies that pay attention to them, however, can take steps to ensure they contribute to the overall Customer Experience (CX). These people and resources to which customers turn, along with those the company does control, are all part of an ecosystem, a term borrowed from science that refers to a community of living organisms co-existing with the nonliving components of their environment, interacting as a system. Forrester Research has invested heavily in studying customer ecosystems, which it defines as “the web of relations among all aspects of a company—including its customers, employees, partners, and operating environment—that determine the quality of the customer experience."

If Customer Experience (CX) is the cumulative impact of interactions between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship, the Employee Experience (EX) is the product of interactions between the organization and an employee over the span of their relationship.

Think about that. The number of times each day you interact with a company from whom you have made a purchase can cover a range from zero to several, depending on the product or service. If you drive to and from work and make a couple of other trips each day, you interact with the company that made your car three, four, maybe five times a day. If your car breaks down, you need scheduled maintenance, or you get a recall notice, that number could increase…but not much. You may interact with the company when you buy accessories. Your participation in a car club also counts as part of the CX. On a particularly busy day, you might engage with the company six or seven times in a day.

If you’re a user of Microsoft Office, you engage with the product for longer stretches of time but not necessary more discrete instances.

In the Employee Experience, though, you interact with the company dozens, maybe hundreds of times during the workweek, and more than likely a few times over the weekend. EX is far more complex. There are far more touchpoints. The employee journey is much more convoluted. And the consequences of a bad EX can have far greater repercussions than a bad CX.

Nearly 80 percent of executives rated EX very important (42 percent) or important (38%), according to a 2017 Deloitte survey. Yet only 22 percent said their companies were excellent at building a differentiated employee experience. Fifty-nine percent said they weren’t ready or were only somewhat ready to address the challenge of delivering a great EX.

That’s troublesome, since EX influences a host of vital aspects of the business:

• Employee engagement
• Company culture
• Recruiting
• Retention
• Productivity
• The bottom line
• Alignment with purpose, mission, vision, and values

Engagement

Engagement and experience are not the same thing but they are joined at the hip. We covered engagement in installment #14 of this series, defining an engaged employee as “one who gives her best to her employer every day. She is psyched to come to work and help the company succeed. She cares about her work and the company. Because the confines her job description is confining, she even makes discretionary efforts on the company’s behalf.”

A great EX is not one of the drivers of engagement. (The drivers are a strategic narrative, engaging managers, employee voice, and organizational integrity.) As Ryan Pendell explains it in a Gallup post, “Engagement describes the basic psychological needs that must be met in order to perform your work well. This includes things like knowing what’s expected of you and having the materials you need. But it also includes emotional and social needs, like doing work that you are good at and connecting your work with a higher purpose.” Engagement derives mostly from relationships, Pendell concludes.

That’s not necessarily the case with EX, which could include how long it takes to get reimbursed for expenses, whether your paycheck shows up on time, how well your benefits function when you have a critical need for them, how that call with HR went, whether the IT support guy treated you with respect or contempt.

Still, if all of an employee’s interactions with a company add up to a bad EX, though, it’s hard to imagine that employee feeling like she can bring her best self to work. It’s hard to imagine her wanting to make a discretionary effort on the company’s behalf.

Engagement is one component of the EX.

Culture

I have noted before that my favorite definition of organizational culture is “the way things are done around here.”

“The way things are done” can mean anything from how complex processes are to whether the company provides snacks in the break room. Who gets recognized and rewarded, and why? Is my boss accountable for keeping me informed and providing me with useful feedback? How easy is it to get the training I need? Is that training any good?

The reason companies invest in culture is to provide an environment where people want to work. Coming to work in an environment that motivates and inspires you would contribute to a great EX. Coming to work in an environment people just can’t wait to escape from as early as possible? Not so much.

Recruiting

Sixty percent of job seekers will use Glassdoor two weeks before applying for a job to decide whether they should pursue the job, then two weeks after to prepare for interviews, according to Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman. Glassdoor is not the only resource job seekers use to find out what existing and former employees thought of the company. Comparably is the new kid on the block, pitching the idea that it provides more transparency about what it’s like to work at various organizations.

I took a look at one of my former employers on Comparably: Mattel, Inc., which has 49% positive reviews and 51% negative. One negative review struck me when I saw it. When asked “What would you most like to see improved at your company,” an employee answered, “I would like newer equipment.” Having the right tools to do the job is critical. Hearing from existing staff that this is a problem, a lot of prospective candidates would opt not to pursue a job.

A strong EX minimizes the likelihood of bad reviews on job rating sites like Glassdoor and Comparably—and in conversation at conferences, bars, and other face-to-face encounters.

Retention

Replacing an employee can cost between 30 and 200 percent of an employee’s salary, depending on factors like how much they make, how long it will take to hire and train a replacement, the value of that interim lost productivity, how it impacts the decisions of other employees to stay or go, and whether the employee’s vacant spot temporarily increases the odds of mistakes (and what those mistakes cost the company).

Too many leaders think employees will stay for the money. In fact, money just gets people in the door. Making the job all about the money is, in the words of CultureAmp CEO Didier Elzinga, reducing “their decision down to a purely monetary transaction. If you do match they’re salary they’ll be gone within six months when someone else increased that number.”

What influences decisions to stay with a company or seek greener pastures includes the company’s leadership, a sense of belonging, a higher purpose, psychological safety, the ability to bring your best self to work, great managers, a lack of friction in trying to get the job done, the right tools…

In other words, a great EX keeps people on the job, engaged, and delivering their best.

Productivity

There is no great insight behind the idea that a better EX results in higher productivity. An employee who lies awake on Sunday night dreading Monday isn’t likely to deliver the highest and best output when he gets to work. But some data to support the concept never hurts: According to BetterUp’s Employee Experience Index of 17,0900 workers, employees who rated their companies higher on the index had 28% higher productivity. According to BetterUp, the relationship between EX and productivity was six times greater than for engagement alone. 

The bottom line

Jacob Morgan, who makes his living on EX, assessed the EX of more than 250 global organizations. “Only 6 percent of the organizations I analyzed can be classified as experiential,” he wrote in a SHRM article, “but when compared to nonexperiential enterprises, they have four times higher average profits, two times higher average revenues, 40 percent lower turnover and 24 percent smaller headcount. Their stock prices also outperformed the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq.

Alignment with purpose, mission, vision, and values

Mark Levy, when he was the EX manager at Airbnb, said, “Anything that sets employees up for success or improves our culture should be part of the EX.” A post from recruitment marketing agency Core Matters notes that “your team buys into why long before what. A healthy culture rooted is rooted in a definite purpose, and a definite purpose comes from a solid foundation of values.”

Some may shrug off purpose/mission/vision/values as touchy-feely bullshit but their impact on EX—and, by extension, on recruiting, retention, productivity, and the bottom line should make their importance clear. (Revisit the post on engagement to review what happens when these statements say one thing and the actions of leaders and managers say something different. How does that dearth of organizational integrity affect an employee’s experience?)

Communicating the Employee Experience

Like engagement, you don’t have to look far to find ways to support EX through employee communication. For one thing, a strong information flow, with employees getting the information they need to do their jobs, is a boon to EX. Communicators can have a significant impact on managers’ ability to communicate (see Part 16 of this series). Our work with executives, from getting them in front of employees face-to-face to ensuring they close any say-do gaps (see Part 18), to helping them articulate the company’s purpose, vision, mission, and values all help improve EX. So does promoting recognition, both the formal and the informal types. Then there’s empowerment, since a strategic employee communication function is multi-directional, giving employees a voice (see Part 17).

Back in 2014, AON Hewitt measured EX (which logged a 21-percent improvement in North America over 2013) and found enhanced communication was the biggest driver of the increase.

I’ll get more specific about internal communications and EX in the upcoming installments around Employee Journey, daily interactions, work-life balance, and job satisfaction.

Up next

In the next installment, we will dive into Employee Experience with a look at the employee journey, which is not unlike the customer journey (except that, while customers interact with a brand frequently, employees interact virtually every minute for most of their weekdays).

The graphics for this series were created by Brian O’Mara-Croft.

Previous Installments:

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Overview
• Part 3: Alignment
• Part 4: Listening
• Part 5: Consultation
• Part 6: Branding
• Part 7: Channels
• Part 8: Culture
• Part 9: Vision/Mission
• Part 10: Values
• Part 11: Practices
• Part 12: People
• Part 13: Place
• Part 14: Engagement
• Part 15: The Strategic Narrative
• Part 16: Engaging Managers
• Part 17: Employee Voice
• Part 18: Organizational Integrity
• Part 19: The Customer Experience
• Part 20: The Customer Journey Map
• Part 21: Touchpoints on the Customer Journey
• Part 22: Engaging in the Customer Ecosystem