What is employee experience – rather what isn’t it?
What is employee experience?
Employee experience is the experience someone has of you from the moment they first consider you as an employee to the moment they leave… and way beyond. experience exists as a memory potentially long after someone has stopped working for you. Employee experience is by its nature subjective and involves emotions and feelings.
Recent research suggests there are 50 plus definitions of organisational culture. And it won’t be long before we hit the same sorts of levels with definitions of employee experience.
So rather than labouring over a definition, let’s look at what it’s not.
1. Perks and playthings
Yep, EX is not free-beer-Fridays, ping pong tables and swish offices (wow, remember them?) These are just, well, perks and playthings. Yes they might be nice, but when it comes to someone’s experience of you, they’re marginal. They are also horribly representative of one sort of employer – an employer of people who largely sit at desks. It’s our belief that everyone deserves a positive experience at work, whatever their workplace (or lack of) looks like.
2. Your employer brand
If your employer brand is doing a good job, it should be meaningfully capturing and expressing your intended EX. However, how you talk about the experience you deliver and how other people talk about it, is not the same thing as the experience itself. If you tackle EX like a branding challenge, you’re going to miss the mark. EX is about, well, experience, not what is made of that experience.. That said, your employer brand will impact employee expectations which will, in turn, impact experience. This is especially important if the reality of the experience you deliver doesn’t match the promise of your employer brand.
3. The employee lifecycle
Don’t get me started! I’m not a fan of the employee lifecycle model. Why? Because more often than not, lifecycle models are not about the employee at all. Rather they’re about everything you – the employer – are doing to them. Ie, recruiting, hiring, offboarding etc. They are also horribly linear – and life just isn’t. People leave and come back. If you’re not already encouraging returners, why not? And people don’t just grow and move up the ranks, they move sideways and hop around. If you’re not making it 1,000 times easier for an employee to find that perfect next role with you, rather than finding the same role elsewhere, why not?
4. What you think it is
Employee experience combines two thoughts – the person and the experience. So, firstly, the person is not you. Yes, you too have an employee experience, but it’s not the same as the next person’s. Because while there is an objective element to every experience, there's also a subjective component. For example, you turn up on your first day and meet with the team. This is the objective component of your first-day experience – it’s a fact, it happened. But different people will have different subjective experiences of that day depending on their individual mindset, their attitude, expectations, needs etc. In summary, our subjective experience is unique to us.
How to improve employee experience at work?
Improving employee experience at work is about understanding what experience people need to thrive in your organisation and then focusing on those points in the experience that matter the most to them. Experience is broader than the work itself and involves a wide range of factors,
You can’t simply dream up and hand over the ideal EX for your organisation and your people. Your intended EX should sit in the middle of the needs of your people, the organisation and the work. Defining it and realising it is a whole organisation challenge. It cannot sit with HR alone.
Talking about what EX is, almost always morphs into a conversation about ‘what our EX should be’. So take advantage of that conversation. Don’t scoop up someone else’s definition of EX. Spend time with your people and your leaders and explore what EX means to your organisation and what it should look like. And then use EX design to reach it.
