The Only Employee Experience (EX) Model You Need - [ Part 2 ]

This is a continuation from my first article on The Only Employee Experience Model You Need - [ Part 1 ].

WHY EX

In part 1 we acknowledged the elephant in the room when it comes to our people strategies - there are simply too many competing models which has led to mass confusion, isolated tech stacks, and underwhelming results. 

The bottom line? 

Employee engagement levels still haven’t budged worldwide despite more than 20 years of study and implementation.

Employee engagement levels still haven’t budged worldwide despite more than 20 years of study and implementation.

Talk about sticking in a relationship that isn’t working! 

As a result, Employee experience (EX) has come front and center since 2017 as the predominant framework for delivering on these unkept promises.

So what, exactly, is EX? Here it is in a nutshell...

It’s the sum of all experiences an employee has with their employer over the duration of the relationship - from recruitment, to onboarding, to development, to exiting the organization.

The early returns on EX are delivering because the model is focused on the creation of continuous response systems where employee needs aren’t just measured - they’re met with agile solutions implemented at scale. After all, simply measuring your problems doesn’t make them go away - this is one of the major limitations from the employee engagement model and why the evolution into EX is occurring. 

Check out this chart below on the evolution from engagement to EX from researcher and thought leader Josh Bersin:

We do, however, need to give credit where it is due. Employee Engagement was able to get the conversation started around employee needs, and for that we should all be grateful. We certainly wouldn’t be where we are today without those advancements in measuring employee sentiment. 

However, employee engagement falls short in meeting the immediate needs of your people on a continual basis.

Think of it this way. The needs of the US workforce were very different on March 13, 2020 than they were on March 16, 2020 due to COVID. Organizations that already had EX structures in place were able to adapt more successfully than those who were simply doing quarterly engagement surveys.

I recently had a conversation [Your Employee Experience is All FCDD-Up!] with thought leaders Ira Wolfe and Joyce Gioia on this very topic. Here were some of the major take-aways and learnings from the episode: 

• The lag between survey to strategy execution is too long
• Anything related to people should be measured continuously, not just with quarterly surveys
• Engagement surveys are simply opinions. Opinions change frequently, just like people do.
• Engagement surveys have become similar to annual reviews
• Survey data are highly influenced by external factors (day of week, time of day, weather, life circumstances)
• Asking for input and then not following through is even worse than not asking at all 
• Engagement is a minimal expectation when hiring someone
• Social science is more interested in what people do than what they say they will do
• EX maps the employee journey and designs the intended experiences
• EX focuses on a strong core of rhythms that should be part of any organization
• EX creates continuous response systems to meet the needs of people
• 4 Principles of Connection ?? model addresses the core tenets of self-actualization through an EX lens and Why people want to work in the first place
• The 4 Principles of Connection ?? help establish purpose, meaning, and inspiration - all things that are a step above engagement
• Examples of some core rhythms: cadence of meaningful recognition, frequent feedback loops, coaching on "soft skills", autonomy, serving charities/community, opportunities to set and pursue personal growth goals

Now that we've briefly overviewed what EX is as a construct, let’s turn our attention to how you do EX well in your organization. 

HOW EX

Let’s start with this.

When thinking about your employee experiences - get practical before you get surgical. By that I mean most orgs need to focus first on some core EX rhythms before doing any deep assessment or analysis for supplemental experiences. 

When thinking about your employee experiences - get practical before you get surgical.

And the best part is employees have been telling us the same things they want/need for the past 20+ years (regardless of industry)...we simply need to listen and deliver:

• Frequent, meaningful recognition
• Frequent feedback loops
• Healthy Leaders
• Autonomy
• Opportunities to develop and grow
• Purpose

If experiences around these aren’t already in place, this is where you need to start - no surveys required. These core needs dovetail perfectly with the 4 Principles of Connection?? as we'll see shortly, and we’ll also get into some specific tactics.

Once you have a consistent rhythm of core employee experiences throughout the employee journey (Tier 1), you can then turn your attention to the process of mapping supplemental experiences for your teams/departments (Tier 2) and for individuals (Tier 3) in your specific organization through human centered-design processes.

If you’re in HR, this should really excite you - make no mistake, this is the future of your roles in the organization.

The human-centered design process entails:

• Empathizing with employees first (understanding their needs and frustrations);
• then moving to define the problem(s), and;
• then brainstorming to identify and choose the best ideas and solutions, and then;
• building prototypes to test what works and what doesn’t.

Fortunately, this process is easier than you think...and you’re already using it for a different audience - your buyers. 

That’s right. All of the work your marketing/revenue teams do to understand the buyer’s journey can be flipped and applied to employees. After all, employees are internal buyers of the organization.

Employees are internal buyers of the organization.

A recommendation would be to encourage some members of your marketing team to work alongside HR and a diverse panel of employees as an agile team to regularly examine your people data and then engage in the design thinking process for additional employee experiences that might be needed in the employee lifecycle.

In the not-too-distant future, AI will handle much of the heavy lifting related to capturing and examining people data to offer recommended experiences in real-time. This will afford the design thinking teams to focus more on strategy and less on the minutiae of execution. 

So we’ve established organizations need experiences at the organizational/everyone (Tier 1), team/department (Tier 2), and individual (Tier 3) levels. We’ve also established that a human-centered design process is essential for a systematic approach to creating and delivering impactful experiences throughout the employee journey.

The final, and arguably most important, thing we need to consider is the model that aligns to and delivers on the type of experiences your people crave and focus on why they even work in the first place. 

This is the 4 Principles of Connection??.

What EX

I’ve got to be honest. I struggle to remember things. I’m guessing you do too on most days given how much data and information comes at us constantly.

This is why I’ve struggled to remember and apply so very few models in my professional life. If I can’t remember what I had for breakfast last Friday how am I supposed to remember 20+ engagement drivers or EX attributes describing the bilateral relationship between people and organizations?

This is why we need to get ridiculously simple in order to become more effective. After all, complicated relationships rarely turn out well in life - and this is certainly true for business-to-employee relationships (B2E) too.

Complicated relationships rarely turn out well in life - and this is certainly true for business-to-employee relationships (B2E) too.

The 4 Principles of Connection?? offers 4 specific connection drivers to meet the hard-wired needs of your people. After all, survey and assessment data are useless if they don’t lead to the commitment handles for the daily actions that need to be taken.

Here’s a high level overview:

Connection to Self:

•  People want to work for organizations that help them develop as a whole person - not just in the rote skills of their job

Connection to Others:  

• People want to work where they're accepted for their authentic selves and where they experience a level of connection with the leadership and their team that creates strong bonds

Connection to Role:  

• People want to work where there’s clarity around their role and importance in the ecosystem and that their contributions matter

Connection to the Organization:  

• People want to work where they know the greater whole, of which they're a part, is doing important work in the world - especially in their own communities

You can check out additional benefits to this model, including aspects of healthy identity formation related to work, from my first article.

For now, let’s consider some real-life examples of what some leading organizations are doing in each of these 4 Principles of Connection??:

Connection to Self:

• Life mapping
• Wellness programs
• Personal Values frameworks
• Write down and track goals
• Aligning personal values and organizational values - check out my friends at The Aperio
• Contributing to personal causes or charities
• Journaling
• Dream programs - check out my friends at Dream Leader Institute
• Autonomy - 20% time
• Self-Appraisals
• Personal Branding

Connection to Others:

• Mentor programs - check out my friends at Engage Mentoring
• Life Challenge Navigation - check out my friends at LifeGuides
• Onboarding Experiences
• Essential Skills Coaching (Empathy, Humility, Emotional Intelligence)
• Frequent, meaningful recognition and appreciation
• Group challenges/excursions
• Cross functional teams

Connection to Role:

• Stay Interviews
• Advancement Paths
• Opportunities for professional development
• Role mapping
• Special Projects
• Inter-department meetings/collaboration
• Opportunities to meet with people impacted by your work (customers, community members)
• Identity statements connected to the organizational mission (NASA - I’m helping people explore Mars)
• Role target behaviors and alignment plans - check out my friends at BCAT 

Connection to Organization:

• North Star/Core Identity
• Service projects
• Explicit values framework with behavior success indicators
• Sponsor non-profits/charitable causes
• DE & I experiences
• Sustainable business models - Certified B Corps
• Employee stock ownership programs
• Flexible work options
• Referral programs
• EX Task Force

Once you know the experiences that are needed for your teams, the next thing to consider is how to execute these experiences consistently and at scale.

Unless you’re a very small organization, you’ll need an intelligent technology solution like Dulead (Virtual Director of Leadership and Development) to continually run and measure your EX strategies. 

It’s an exciting time for organizations to take the transformative leap in supporting their people and connecting with them on a deeper, more fulfilling level. When you apply the 4 Principles of Connection?? to your EX process, you can have peace of mind knowing you’re doing just that - cultivating purpose in the everyday.

In summary, here’s your EX game plan:

• 4 Principles of Connection?? model for the types of experiences
• Experiences at all three levels (org, team, individual), but start with Tier 1 (organization) first to develop core experiences in the employee journey
• After strong core, get more surgical for group and individual experiences with human centered design processes for EX
• Consider an agile EX Task Force comprised of employees, marketing, and HR leaders

In the third, and final, piece in this series we’ll take a dive into the metrics and measurements to understand the impact of your employee experiences. Stay tuned!