5 Employee Experience Principles
The concept of creating an experience for employees was born out of the design thinking movement in the mid-2010s* which focused on how users interacted with products. Forward-thinking people leaders embraced these principles and - recognising the shift towards culture becoming a hiring advantage - applied the same approach to employees.
Designing and implementing an Employee Value Proposition (or EVP) has now become an organisation-wide priority, rather than an HR ‘nice to have’. For larger organisations it’s someone's job to maintain and evolve this.
As a culture constant, helping organisations to be deliberate about creating this employee experience is one of my key focus areas. We want to ensure that we intentionally build a safe culture that people want to be part of, but also to ensure that it continues to positively evolve to meet the challenges and needs of today, not a one-off, tick-box ‘we’ve done culture’ activity.
When I do this I employ five principles, which are as follows:
Design deliberately. You get the culture that you choose to build. Therefore, employee experience isn't something that just happens to you whilst you're busy making other plans. Nor can you throw disparate activities together in the hope that they’re cohesive in practice. It requires intentional design, much like crafting a customer journey. The CEO should care about this as much as they do about other measurable activity
Make work easy, not complicated. If your employees spend more time wrestling with systems, confused by priorities or distracted by technology than actually working, you've already lost. Create platforms, processes and priorities that are simple to follow and use. This is especially important if you plan to leverage AI to increase the value that you offer
Listen constantly, not annually. Most annual surveys are about as useful as a chocolate teapot. By the time you’ve asked for the feedback the moment to implement change has gone. Not only that, but reports containing endless comments don’t inspire change, they prevent it. Use pulse surveys instead, to capture the micro-frustrations before they become macro-disasters
Bust the silos. Employee experience isn't HR's problem to solve, it's everyone's opportunity to leverage. Educate leaders and managers to ensure that they have the skills and language to work seamlessly together, because silos create terrible experiences. This should also take into account different working environments, locations and the fact that different people are employed in different roles.
Create personas that reflect reality. Building on the point above your workforce isn't homogeneous, so stop treating them like they are. There are more than four personas, there may well be as many as 50. Take the time to understand your people and recognise that a software engineer's needs differ vastly from those on the front line
When these five principles work in harmony, employee experience transforms from a cost centre into a competitive advantage in the ever growing war for talent. Organisations that master this intentionally design cultures where people don't just show up; they lean in and contribute to improving the experience for everyone.
*For a history of employee experience as a concept I highly recommend this blog from Josh Bersin.
