Events

Talking about the crazy

As many of you know, we gathered folks together (in two concurrent sessions, due to level of interest!) to talk about how their organizations are addressing the massive disruptions resulting from the coronavirus. We believe our community has incredible insights within it, and wanted to provide an opportunity for as many as possible to connect and share.

The conversations were thoughtful, enlightening, and informative. Yet, the thing we took away the most was the level of hopefulness, which was expressed in many small ways. The best example was when one person mentioned:

“This is like our Independence Day (you know, the original movie, not the remake). Something is threatening our entire society, and we need to pull together and stop it. And we are!”

So how are we doing this, while at the same time trying to keep people sane, healthy, and productive (if possible)?

We framed the discussion in the context of our employee experience research, focusing on the 4 levers that drive a high-quality experience:

• A clear philosophy
• A supportive culture
• An articulated accountability
• An aligned measurement

We went through each of these levers and discussed what people are doing in different areas.

The mindmap: Results of our discussions

After the conversations, we summarized the suggestions mentioned in both sessions and have displayed them in this visual map below (use your mouse to move around within the map; you can also download it).

Some key takeaways

One of the suggestions that resonated the most with us was the idea of a coronavirus taskforce, which was shared by someone at a global consulting firm. This group aligns and coordinates efforts, leveraging medical doctors and other relevant experts to help structure and clarify the firm’s response to the crisis. However – and this is key – responsibility and accountability for taking actions is distributed throughout the organization. So, this is not a command and control structure, but rather an alignment and enablement approach.

Building on that, the concept of shared accountability was reinforced throughout the conversation. Organizations are providing people with significant autonomy and ability to get things done as and when it makes sense. If there ever was a time to trust employees and managers to do the right thing, it is now. Yet, as was mentioned several times, it's critical to support them during these times. Provide managers with suggestions on how to best support employees. Provide data when you can that will help everyone perform better.

As mentioned above, there's a lot of finding the good in this challenging moment. For example, one person mentioned because everyone is now remote, communication must be much more explicit. As a result, unexpectedly, this is making productivity skyrocket, because everyone is much clearer on what must get done. Another person mentioned that within organizations there can be subcultures that may have values not aligned to the organization’s larger cultural values. However, remote work was breaking up those subcultures and providing an opportunity to realign folks to the bigger culture. And yet another person mentioned how everyone is so much more open to experimentation, which is providing them with a lot of new ideas they did not have before.

Throughout the session, several resources were shared. We have added those – plus what we had before – to the end of this article (see Appendix 1).

For your viewing pleasure: The 2 sessions

If our summary in the mindmap and above wasn’t enough, you're welcome to listen to the recordings of the calls or review the slides (with hastily written notes) below:

• Session 1 (Moderated by Stacia Garr / Priyanka Mehrotra)
• Session 2 (Moderated by Dani Johnson / Karina Freitag)

Preserving Your Employee Experience During The Crazy from Stacia Sherman Garr

These sessions wouldn't have been possible without the active, thoughtful participation of the folks who joined. To each of you, THANK YOU. You both helped the folks on the call this morning, but also anyone who accesses these resources. Thank you for helping make our community smarter and stronger.

We would welcome the opportunity to continue to be of service to our community. What else can we do that would provide value to you and your organization? Let us know in the comments or via direct email at [email protected].

Appendix 1: Resources

Coronavirus support

• Harvard Business Publishing: Resources to Effectively Lead Amid COVID-19
• Qualtrics: Here to Help
• Limeade: Care in Crisis
• Pluralsight: The Remote Work Guide
• Lars Schmidt: Coronavirus HR Comms & Resources Guide
• Gartner: Respond, Manage and Prepare for the Impact of Coronavirus
• i4CP: The Coronavirus Employer Resource Center
• meQuilibrium: Coronavirus Uncertainty- Respond with Resilience
• Cornerstone: Cornerstone Cares
• Skillsoft / Sumtotal: Business Continuity Learning Center

Articles on coronavirus

• Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID19 mortality and healthcare demand (Imperial College, London)
• Why Outbreaks like the coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to flatten the curve (Washington Post)
• Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now (Medium)
• How Bad Is the Coronavirus? Let’s Run the Numbers (Bloomberg)

Articles on working remotely

• The Challenges of Managing a Remote Team (LinkedIn)
• Five Mistakes to Avoid When Managing Remote Teams (Forbes)
• How to Collaborate Effectively If Your Team is Remote (Harvard Business Review)
• Remote Team Building in the Age of Virtual Collaboration (Forbes)

Earlier this year, we began to explore the concept of employee experience. Since then, we talked to more than 20 organizations to understand their approach to employee experience and identify leading practices. Now, this is the 3rd in a series of 4 articles highlighting our findings.

Throughout our research, we identified 4 levers of employee experience to create sustainable results. This article focuses on one of the employee experience levers – articulated accountability – and is just an excerpt from the main report, The Four Levers of Employee Experience to Create Sustainable Results.

Who's Responsible for Employee Experience?

We wanted to find out, once and for all: Who's responsible for employee experience? Is it HR, marketing, operations, or technology?

In our quest to understand who’s accountable, we found a wide variety of opinions. Some people think HR is responsible because it concerns people. Others think it’s a coordinated effort across organizational functions.

Even though organizations hold differing opinions as to who is responsible for employee experience, one thing is true in progressive organizations: HR still holds many of the cards when it comes to employee experience.

Hands down, most of the people we talked to believe that, because HR is already privy to employee feedback and talent management practices, it should serve as the hub for employee experience. This means that, as a hub, it serves as a speaker of the house of representatives, like in government. And as an employee experience speaker of the house, it acts as a leader: It upholds standards, coordinates efforts, maintains order, and tracks progress.

So, this isn't much of a surprise, given that HR has historically taken on the people-advocate role. But what’s interesting is that, in progressive organizations, accountability doesn’t just begin and end with HR. Instead, they define accountability as being either distributed across functions or centralized to a specific manager or team – and they further define what that means for the employee experience.

“As a company, we have 6 company level objectives. And one of them is around employees and enabling them to do their best work every day. Our goal is to ensure that at least 85% of our employees are having a level 4 or 5 employee experience.”

Greg Pryor, VP of People and Performance Evangelist, Workday

Distributed accountability: Leaders are responsible for strategy & large-scale issues

In distributed accountability, leaders are responsible for the employee experience strategy and vision. This is a plan of action designed to achieve the best and most appropriate experience for the organization. It also includes organizationwide interventions, which are often necessary to address employee feedback.

In progressive organizations, we often found that senior leaders in HR, and especially those in executive positions, play a key role in tackling these macrolevel aspects of employee experience.

Leaders in HR – working closely with leaders across functions – hold a powerful role in developing a strategic vision for employee experience. They are responsible for understanding the big picture of employee experience and developing a coherent strategy at the upper echelons of the organization. This isn't to say that they operate in a top-down manner. If you recall the speaker of the house example, these senior leaders uphold standards, coordinate efforts, maintain order, and track progress. They also play a key role in conveying the strategy’s value to the organization and setting the overall tone.

Senior leaders, especially those in VP positions or higher from a wide variety of functions (not just HR), are also responsible for addressing large-scale issues quickly and effectively (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Distributed Accountability for Large-Scale Employee Experience Issues | Source: RedThread Research, 2019.

To do so, senior leaders uphold the employee experience strategy while seeking to understand employee and customer feedback. They collaborate with other leaders across functions to successfully address large-scale employee experience issues. They also establish and communicate clear escalation procedures for employee and customer feedback.

In progressive organizations, cross-functional senior leaders hold a special place in employee experience because they have the power to successfully address any organizationwide issues pertaining to their areas of expertise. Thus, having clear escalation procedures – in which people know which issues to escalate, how to communicate them, and to whom – for any organizational issues that arise at the local level is crucial.

“It’s important to detail the business rules to make your VOC program actionable and impactful. For example, if you get a detractor, how fast do you need to respond? Who needs to respond? When does it get escalated? Addressing a detractor quickly – while you still have a chance to fix the situation – is very important.”

Chris Hummel, Chief Marketing Officer, United Rentals

Centralized accountability: Individual contributors & direct managers are responsible for feedback

In centralized accountability, individual contributors and junior leaders – more specifically frontline or direct managers – play a significant role in sharing and responding to feedback (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Centralized Accountability for Experience Feedback | Source: RedThread Research, 2019.

For experience efforts to work, individual contributors, especially those on the frontlines, must share meaningful feedback. In fact, individual contributors in progressive organizations share feedback frequently and effectively in a variety of ways (e.g., surveys, team huddles, one-on-one conversations). They also serve as mediators of information between what they hear from customers and the organization. They shed light on what truly matters to customers and to them as employees.

“The relationship between frontline facing employees and customers is so important. I call it contagious: how they feel and how they show up translates to the customer experience.”

Chris Albertson, SVP Client Feedback and Experience, LPL Financial

We also found that feedback (from both employees and customers) plays a key role in experience if direct managers do something about it. Thus, direct managers are also accountable at the local level. In progressive organizations, they're highly responsive to both employee and customer feedback. Responsive managers actively seek to understand feedback, and react quickly and effectively to it. They enjoy ample decision-making rights to address issues as they come up. They also have the authority to rally employees and make decisions.

For more on this and other levers of employee experience – and examples of how companies have brought them to life – we encourage you to download and read the full report by clicking the image below.

Earlier this year, we began to explore the concept of employee experience. Since then, we talked to more than 20 organizations to understand their approach to employee experience and identify leading practices. Now, this is the 2nd in a series of 4 articles highlighting our findings.

However, we wanted to uncover the nuances of what a supportive culture means for employee experience, and in our pursuit, we identified 2 components. Supportive cultures that have values, beliefs, and assumptions anchored in employee experience drive core behaviors throughout the organization.

“We have open door policies. Our CEO and I don’t have secretaries. You can dial us directly and we’re extremely approachable. We care about what our employees have to say and love to hear their feedback. They make us better every day and are critical to our success. It’s about having a transparent and collaborative conversation.”

Vivian Maza, Chief Culture Officer, Ultimate Software

We mentioned that a supportive culture is anchored in employee experience. But what does that mean exactly? In practice, progressive organizations have people – up and down the ranks – who accept the value of employee experience and model behaviors that reinforce it. Organizational climate, internal policies, and leadership – all constructs of organizational culture – contribute significantly to employee experience.⁴

“We have a very collaborative culture. So for us, it was very important that we bring people together to talk about the desired employee experience, then make recommendations and decisions.”

Kate Miller, Director of Employee Experience, Robert Half

Supportive culture anchored to employee experience: Values, beliefs & assumptions

A supportive organization weaves employee experience into its cultural fabric: It does so by clearly anchoring its values, beliefs, and assumptions to experience and accepting it as fundamental to success. Figure 1 shows what progressive organizations with a culture anchored in employee experience value, believe, and assume.

Figure 1: Values, Beliefs & Assumptions of a Supportive Culture | Source: RedThread Research, 2019.

“Our first belief, and we think about our values in that order, is that happy employees enable happy customers. Happy customers want to innovate with us. The ability to have great innovation allows us to attract happy employees and do really interesting work, and that creates a virtuous cycle.”

Greg Pryor, VP of People and Performance Evangelist, Workday

5 essential behaviors of a supportive organizational culture

A supportive organizational culture also fosters an experience mentality that encourages people to adopt, at a minimum, 5 essential behaviors:

• Collaboration
• Transparency
• Psychological safety
• Alignment
• Feedback-sharing

While there may be other relevant ones in a supportive culture, we found that these 5 behaviors are tablestakes. We heard them mentioned over and over in our various conversations with organizational leaders. They also underscore the importance of employee experience as a fundamental priority to the wider organization.

In a culture that supports employee experience, everyone – from senior leaders and direct managers to individual contributors – plays a key role. Although the 5 essential behaviors may apply to everyone across levels, we found that, in highly supportive cultures, senior leaders and direct managers often demonstrate collaboration, transparency, psychological safety, and alignment. Individual contributors are also adamant about sharing meaningful feedback. Essentially, how leaders behave paves the way for employees to frequently share meaningful feedback about themselves and about customers. This creates a supportive and reciprocal environment rooted in employee experience.

“Autodesk has figured out how employee behavior and practices align to the culture we care to cultivate. The business and senior leadership fully support The Culture Code we’ve developed and encourage healthy behavior within our system of business practices. The CEO’s consistent reinforcement of The Code has reinforced the work our team does and helped us maintain the momentum for our most recent, successful business transformation.”

Andrea Robb, VP Talent, Culture, and Diversity, Autodesk

For more on this and other levers of employee experience – and examples of how companies have brought them to life – we encourage you to download and read the full report by clicking the image below.

Over the course of our research, it became clear that the most progressive organizations have a very clear philosophy of employee experience – who it's for, what it is, and how it differs from employee engagement. This philosophy then guides all other decisions organizations make with regard to employee experience.

Target audience: Focus of experience efforts

Before we could get into the weeds of precisely defining employee experience, we first had to figure out who it's for. When it comes to employee experience efforts, there are 3 viewpoints that organizations tend to focus on: employees, customers, or both.

We found that a lot of organizations focus on the 2 far ends of the spectrum. Only a few consider what both employees and customers want in an integrated fashion. But those that use a blended focus tend to see some of the most desirable employee and customer outcomes.

“HR people are used to working in waterfall, slow, 18-month release cycle models when it comes to process and technology, and that’s not how employee experience works. If I see that 80% of my workforce is breaking down in a process or not being engaged at any given moment, I don’t wait a year to deal with it like in old employee engagement surveys. I want to deal with it today.”

Jason Averbook, CEO and co-founder, Leapgen

Clear definition: What employee experience is

• “Designing an organization where people want to show up by focusing on the cultural, technological, and physical environments.”¹
• “The extent to which employees of an organization are enabled or constrained by its adaptive work environment and collective work habits to do their jobs today and reimagine their jobs of tomorrow.”²
• “The combination of organizational culture, technological environment, processes, and physical environment that determines how employees perform and feel about their job.”³
• “Employees’ holistic perceptions of the relationship with his/her employing organization derived from all the encounters at touchpoints along the employee’s journey.”⁴

While we found these definitions adequate as they capture important aspects of employee experience, we also found them lengthy and convoluted.

Therefore, we developed our own concise definition of employee experience:

Employees’ collective perceptions of their ongoing interactions with the organization.

Another important point to call out is that employee experience is fluid. It involves constant dynamic human interactions and, as such, it's an ever-evolving target. To adapt to its fluid nature, progressive organizations adopt an iterative stance. They ask, listen, and act on employee and customer feedback in a frequent, swift, and repetitive manner. Thus, they leverage real-time opportunities to capture, process, and address experience feedback.

Relationship to engagement: How experience & engagement are related

Now that we’ve clearly established our definition of employee experience, let’s distinguish it from employee engagement. It's important to do this for a few reasons. First, many people use the two terms interchangeably – and they are actually quite different. Second, the historical legacy of employee engagement has influenced how people approach employee experience. Having a clear understanding of the differences between the 2 enables us to chart a clearer path forward for developing a strong and compelling employee experience.

All that said, we define employee engagement as:

A measure of energy, involvement, and concentration that's exhibited in work attitudes and behaviors.

Employee engagement is fundamentally different from employee experience (see Figure 1). It's a measurement of what employees do – their “exhibited work attitudes and behaviors” – versus what they perceive. There are other differences as well. For example, in engagement, organizations use a top-down process to develop strategies and implement activities that impact engagement scores. In employee experience, organizations use a bottom-up process to develop strategies and implement activities that impact employees’ perceptions.

Figure 1: Summary of the Differences Between Employee Experience and Employee Engagement | Source: RedThread Research, 2019.

For more on this and other levers of employee experience – and examples of how companies have brought them to life – we encourage you to download and read the full report by clicking the image below.

The term “employee experience” is hot – in a global 2018 study of five hundred CHROs, 83% of organizational leaders emphasized a positive employee experience as crucial to organizational success.¹ There is also evidence that organizations with a strong employee experience have twice the innovation and customer satisfaction and higher profits than organizations with a weaker employee experience.²

However, despite this enthusiasm, there is not a lot of clarity on what the term means and what exactly organizations should do to improve it. We, therefore, began a study of this topic earlier this year. In this new report, The Four Levers of Employee Experience to Create Sustainable Results, sponsored by Medallia, we focused on one primary question:

How should organizations create a compelling, delighting, and sustainable employee experience that results in high-performing, satisfied employees and loyal customers?

Some of the Myths and Realities We Uncovered

Over the course of our investigation, we encountered some very strong perspectives on employee experience. Some of the “myths” we identified early on in the research are below – as well as the counter-balancing reality we discovered through our reading and interviews (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Myths and Realities of Employee Experience | Source: RedThread Research, 2019.

So, given the realities of employee experience, what should organizations do? Our research identified some very actionable steps organizations can take.

The Four Levers of Employee Experience

After analyzing the breadth of what we learned, we identified four critical levers of employee experience: a clear philosophy, a supportive culture, articulated accountability, and an aligned measurement approach (see Figure 2). When combined together, these four levers can have a powerful impact on employee experience.

Figure 2: The Four Levers of Employee Experience | Source: RedThread Research, 2019.

 

• A clear philosophy: Identifies a target audience and clearly defines employee experience and its relationship to employee engagement.
• A supportive culture: Anchors employee experience to the culture via employee-centric values, beliefs, and assumptions that reinforce five essential behaviors: collaboration, transparency, psychological safety, alignment, and feedback-sharing.
• Articulated accountability: Distributes responsibility for employee experience strategy and large-scale issues among senior leaders. It also centralizes responsibility among individual contributors for sharing meaningful feedback and among mid-level leaders for effectively responding to it.
• An aligned measurement approach: Takes into consideration an organization’s data analytics maturity and a clear data analytics strategy aligned to key business metrics.

The most progressive organizations we interviewed were able to use these four levers effectively to create a clear and compelling employee experience.

Within the report, we provide details on how organizations can approach each lever and provide numerous quotes and examples of organizations who have done each one well. While interviewed organizations’ outcomes varied based on what they were trying to influence, the below quote from Greg Pryor at Workday sums up nicely many of the themes we heard:

“Our first belief, and we think about our values in that order, is that happy employees enable happy customers. Happy customers want to innovate with us. The ability to have great innovation allows us to attract happy employees and do really interesting work, and that creates a virtuous cycle.”

Greg Pryor, senior VP of people and performance evangelist at Workday

For more on each lever – and examples of how companies have brought them to life – we encourage you to download and read the full report. You can also join us at Workday Rising, where we will share the full results of this research for the first time.

How should organizations create a compelling, delighting, and sustainable employee experience?

Our latest study, The Four Levers of Employee Experience to Create Sustainable Results, highlights what we learned from progressive organizations and how they create an experience that results in highly satisfied, engaged, and loyal employees and customers.

RedThread Research would like to thank Medallia, our sponsor that made this research possible!

Get insights on:

• A clear and concise definition of employee experience and its relationship to employee engagement
• 4 levers for a holistic employee experience approach
• Leading employee experience practices from progressive organizations
• Specific behaviors and actions to foster a thriving employee experience environment

Why is employee experience so sizzling?

Employee experience (EX) is hot. Don’t believe us? Just check out how it has trended on Google over the last decade.

While the term “EX” just sounds smart and snappy, there are more substantive reasons for the increased focus on employee experience, such as changing demographics,¹ a hypercompetitive talent market,² and business’ ravenous need for innovation.³ The heightened emphasis on EX is such that, in a global 2018 study of five hundred CHROs, 83% of organizational leaders emphasized a positive employee experience as crucial to organizational success.⁴

All this EX talk led us to some “burning” questions like, what exactly is this secret “employee experience” hot sauce? And if your organization chooses to focus on it, how do you approach it? And will it live up to all the hype?

To get our answers, we read the most relevant published works on employee experience, ranging from as early as 2011 to as recently as a few months ago (though the bulk of the articles were from the past three years). We also looked at related topics, such as employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and technology. In all, we examined over 60 scholarly and business articles, reports, blogs, and books.

This article gives you the highlights of what we learned and suggests publications for further reading. Here’s what you’ll find below:

• What we saw
• What caught our attention
• Additional literature we recommend

What we saw:

We identified six primary themes within the literature we reviewed:

1. Employee experience: A combination of employees’ perceptions and interactions
2. Employee experience and engagement: Related but different
3. Symbiosis: At the heart of employee experience
4. Multi-method listening: Key to understanding employee experience
5. HR: Not the only one responsible for employee experience
6. Technology: Clarifying and enhancing employee experience

1. Employee experience: A combination of employees’ perceptions and interactions

It turns out, lots of folks have different employee experience “recipes” – meaning there’s no universal definition for employee experience. Instead, we found a range of definitions, such as:

• How difficult it is to get work done and how people are expected to behave⁵
• How the work environment and work habits enable employees to perform their jobs⁶
• How employees interact with the physical environment, social connections, and work tasks⁷

We found the most convincing definitions, though, to be those that took a macro-level perspective and argued that employee experience originates in employees’ perceptions and interactions.^{8, 9} These perceptions are subjective interpretations of what employees encounter, observe, or feel in their interactions with the organization.¹⁰ Interactions are further described as the intersection of cultural, technological, and physical elements of the work environment with employees’ expectations, needs, and wants.¹¹

2. Employee experience and engagement: Related but different

Employee experience and engagement are often used as synonyms, but our review of research-based articles underscores that these are different (though related) concepts.

For example, engagement and employee experience differ in their top-down vs. bottom-up approach.^{12, 13} Employee engagement is seen as a top-down concept because organizational leaders choose strategies that impact engagement scores. On the other hand, employee experience is seen as a bottom-up concept because it focuses on those perceptions and interactions employees have – not just on the measured engagement score.

Another difference between employee experience and employee engagement is that experience is described as the cause, whereas engagement is described as the effect.¹⁴ The combination of what organizations do, say, and give (experience) influences what employees see, feel, and hear (engagement).

These perspectives bring the employee front and center. They highlight the influential role that organizations play in how employees behave and approach their work.

3. Symbiosis: At the heart of employee experience

Just like honeybees and flowers, a positive employee experience results in a mutually beneficial relationship for both employees and organizations. This relationship is based on the impact that a positive employee experience has on engagement:

• Organizations with transformational leaders and a supportive work environment – both aspects of employee experience – have better employee engagement, based on a comprehensive review of 214 studies.¹⁵
• Employees with a high level of engagement are healthier and feel an overall sense of wellbeing. In contrast, employees with a low level of engagement experience more illnesses, stress, and burnout.

While this is great news for employees, they are not the only ones that benefit. While there is plenty of research that indicates a positive relationship between employee engagement and business outcomes, there is also research that indicates organizations receive business value directly from a positive employee experience. Specifically, companies with a strong employee experience have twice the innovation and customer satisfaction and have higher profits than organizations with a weaker employee experience.¹⁶

4. Multi-method listening: Key to understanding employee experience

More organizations are starting to recognize the dynamic nature of employee experience and the need to account for spontaneous and deliberate interactions.¹⁷ A dynamic employee experience evolves when employees interact with the organization in organic ways or through specific touchpoints.

To view the entire employee experience picture, organizational leaders increasingly want effective ways to measure both constant and sporadic interactions. Thus, a multi-method listening approach is gaining popularity.¹⁸ In addition to pulse or touch-point triggered surveys, organizations are also exploring the use of wearable technology devices and social networking applications to collect frequent data from various sources.^{19, 20}

5. HR: Not the only one responsible for employee experience

Employee experience is often viewed as the primary responsibility of human resources or talent management functions. However, that viewpoint is changing.

HR does not own most aspects of employee experience, whether you measure it via “touchpoints” (42%) or “moments of truth” (78%).²¹ Instead, business managers or other non-HR support functions own them.

Thus, some authors recommend building a cross-functional coalition where members can approach employee experience from different, yet complementary angles based on their expertise.²² This cross-functional coalition includes shared accountability across HR, marketing, IT, finance, and facilities to design a positive employee experience.

6. Technology: Clarifying and enhancing employee experience

Technology provides an opportunity to better understand employee experience. It clarifies what employees want, value, and need. In fact, most CHROs (57%) believe that technology enables them to prioritize budget and time investments on employee experience.²³

Organizational leaders also recognize that technology enables them to analyze, automate, and collaborate when designing a positive employee experience. For example, more technology vendors are offering artificial intelligence capabilities that provide a deeper view of employee experience than ever before.²⁴

There is also an increased focus on providing a personalized digital experience that resembles what employees encounter as consumers. Employees want technology that enables them to communicate and connect with others in the organization.²⁵ They also want technology that anticipates their needs and streamlines administrative processes. A large global survey highlights that most workers prefer digital as opposed to personal interactions to handle HR tasks.²⁶

But there is a large gap between the technology that employees encounter at work and the one they encounter as consumers. To address it, organizations want to offer digital solutions that enable collaboration, anticipate employees’ needs, and appeal to individual preferences.

What caught our attention:

Of the literature we reviewed, we found the articles below particularly intriguing and useful. We learned from their perspectives and encourage you to do the same.

Maximizing the Employee Experience: How Changing Workforce Dynamics are Impacting Today’s Workplace

Dr. Brad Harrington

"Taking a systems-oriented approach as the foundation of an organization’s people strategy will require more cross-functional collaboration with HR’s various functions and much greater alignment and integration with organizational leaders."

Highlights:

• Summarizes the significant workplace trends that influence organizations trying to positively impact employees' experience.
• Describes the importance of developing and establishing an integrated people strategy that considers the organization’s mission, values, and workforce expectations.
• Suggests that using a seven-step change management model may help in maximizing a positive employee experience.

Building Business Value with Employee Experience

Kristine Dery and Ina Sebastian

“In our research, companies with great employee experience  (i.e., low work complexity, and strong behavioral norms for collaboration, creativity, and empowerment) were more innovative and profitable and had higher levels of customer satisfaction.”

Highlights:

• Discusses findings from MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research’s recent global survey on employee experience.
• Defines employee experience according to work complexity and behavioral norms.
• Connects a positive employee experience to innovation, customer satisfaction, and profitability.
• Provides recommendations on how to build a positive employee experience through digital capabilities and leadership.

Employee Experience vs. Engagement, and 3 Things You Should Start Thinking About Now

David Sturt and Todd Nordstrom

“As leaders, employee experience is something we all should start looking at seriously… because, like it nor not, there’s a silent revolution taking place with employees all over the world. And, if we do our best, we will see those engagement scores move in the right direction.”

Highlights:

• Discusses differences between employee experience and employee engagement.
• Provides examples of ways in which organizations have tried to foster a positive employee experience.
• Offers suggestions to build a positive employee experience by focusing on organizational culture, flexibility, and storytelling.

With CX, Engaged Employees Mean Everything

Bruce Temkin

“In companies that lead in CX, 75% of employees are highly or moderately engaged.”

Highlights:

• Connects customer experience to organizational culture and internal processes.
• Substantiates the notion that a positive customer experience is linked to highly or moderately engaged employees.
• Recommends specific actions to increase engagement via the “Five I’s of Employee Engagement.”

Designing Employee Experience: How a Unifying Approach Can Enhance Engagement and Productivity

Eric Lesser, Janet Mertens, Maria-Paz Barrientos, and Meredith Singer

"Applying a holistic, iterative design approach to change can help ensure that employees see improvements relevant to their work and can set their expectations for continuous intervention."

Highlights:

• Identifies factors that shape employee experience such as work-based relationships, the design of employees’ physical work environment, and the tools employees use in their work-related activities.
• Emphasizes the importance of personalization, transparency, simplification, authenticity, and organizational responsiveness as ways for organizations to enhance employee experience.
• Offers suggestions to design a positive employee experience through using analytics, understanding and investing in crucial touchpoints, and building a coalition.

How AI Can Help Redesign The Employee Experience

Forbes Insights

“The hope isn’t simply for AI to ensure smarter, faster hiring, but to improve the entire lifecycle of the employee experience, from job application to exit interview. In other words, can AI make workers happier?”

Highlights:

• Identifies ways in which AI can create a positive employee experience.
• Mentions specific tech vendors that gather data and provide insights into an organization’s employee engagement, manager effectiveness, communication, talent development, and organizational culture.
• Describes how AI technologies can provide a “consumerized” employee experience to address HR needs.

Additional Recommended Reads:

1. “The Employee Experience in 2019,” Charong Chow, SocialChorus, 2019.
2. “The Heart of the Matter: Emotions in the Employee Experience,” Christina Zurek, ITA Group, 2019.
3. “Employee Experience: Enabling Your Future Workforce Strategy,” Kristine Dery, Nick van der Meulen, Ina Sebastian, MIT Center for Information Systems Research, 2018.
4. “The New CHRO Agenda: Employee Experiences Drive Business Value,” Pat Wadors, ServiceNow, 2019.
5. “Employee Experience Reimagined,” Michael Liley, Patricia Feliciano, and Alex Laurs, Accenture, 2017.
6. “2018 Employee Experience Report,” Toluna Group & Udemy, 2018.

While we have identified the articles above as being the most crucial for readers to review, we read many others. If you’d like a full list of the articles we covered, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected].

Footnotes

 

Did you know that employee experience can affect the experience of your customers? The following slides highlight initial findings from our Employee Experience / Customer Experience study.

Red threadresearch excx_medallia experience_final from Dani Johnson

Why we care:

It seems like everywhere we look folks are talking about employee experience (EX). In fact, a global 2018 study of five hundred CHROs, found that 83 percent of organizational leaders believe a positive employee experience is crucial to the organization’s success.¹

Why is this the case? Some folks mention the hyper-competitive talent market and the expanding need for innovation. However, an equally critical reason is financial: many believe there is a clear connection between employee experience and customer experience (which should then drive revenue).

While this makes sense intuitively, there are still many unanswered questions:

1. What, exactly, comprises employee experience?
2. What is the relationship between employee experience and employee engagement?
3. How does employee experience impact customer experience (CX)?²
4. What is the measurable impact of employee experience on customer experience?

Understanding the answers to these questions will allow leaders to make much more strategic employee experience investments.

This is why we are launching a new research initiative, sponsored by Medallia, focused on these questions. We have already begun our analysis of existing literature and are actively looking to interview organizational leaders (is that you? Email us!) who can share their stories (the good, the bad, and the ugly) of how they have used employee experience to impact customer experience.

Hypotheses:

There is not a clear definition of employee experience. For example, some believe that employee experience is the result of connection, meaning, impact, and appreciation that employees find in their jobs – and builds on the foundations of culture and engagement³. Others see employee experience as being more akin to customer experience – using technology to make employee life more personal, predictive, and seamless⁴.

Though neither of those definitions of employee experience are aligned, they are different from employee engagement, which itself does not necessarily have a clear definition. For example, some⁵ defined employee engagement as the harnessing of organization member’s selves to their work roles. Others,⁶ stated it is a positive fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption. And, yet another academic⁷ defined it as an “employee’s willingness and ability to contribute to company success by freely giving the extra effort on an ongoing basis.”

Finding clarity on the differences and similarities of employee experience and engagement is our starting point.

Despite the competing definitions, research^8,9 indicates that both employee engagement and experience influence customer experience and satisfaction, but the way they do that may be different. To better understand where and how organizations should invest, we need to have a framework for thinking about all of these concepts.

In addition, we believe there are insights that can be drawn from the customer experience world,¹⁰ such as thinking about experience as both static (e.g., a specific point-in-time or interaction) and dynamic (developing collectively over time), that can be applied to our understanding of employee experience.

Finally, we believe that organizations where employees can take action on employee experience and engagement insights tend to see better customer experience. To create a culture that enables these actions, organizations need to consider desired behaviors, leadership activities, information sharing protocols, decision-making rights, incentives and technology.

This Project:

Some of the ideas this research project will explore include:

Please take a few moments to share your comments with us!