The employee experience is not a static thing, it’s a moving target and in fact there is no single experience for every employee, there are many experiences. So how can organizations create this continuous cycle? The best way to think about designing employee experiences is as a never-ending infinity loop or a type of continuum that has four parts FIDE (but keep in mind they don’t have to follow this order). […]
In our personal lives we play many roles. We look after our homes, we make time for friends, we play sports, have hobbies, play some sort of family role, and much more. In other words we aren’t just one thing or one type of person. Unfortunately, many of our organizations are structured in a way that only allows employees to have one type of role and one type of function. Whether you are in marketing, sales, R&D, IT, or other function, oftentimes you get pigeonholed and tend to get stuck doing the same tasks for the same team. Over time employees get bored or burned out. This is not how humans are wired, in fact this is the perfect scenario for a robot! It’s also important to keep in mind that the employee-employer relationship has fundamentally changed. Pensions are virtually non-existent, tenure for employees it not what it used to be, technology makes it easy to poach employees, the overall war for talent is rather brutal, and talent professionals have to consider the freelancer economy. […]
I define “employee experience” as an organization creating a place where people want to show up instead of assuming that people need to show up. This shift from “need” to “want” is the fundamental change that organizations around the world are starting to experience. This is why we see so much investment in new offices spaces, health and well-being programs, maternity and paternity leave, healthy foods, workplace flexibility, and so much more. There are a lot of things that can go into creating an employee experience but the good news is that every single company regardless of their industry, geography, or size, only need to focus on three things. Every employee experience is comprised of three environments: the physical environment, the cultural environment, and the technological environment as seen inside this article. […]
Imagine a world where there are no employees. Instead everyone is an independent worker that moves around from company to company, project to project, and task to task. This is what most of the media and business publications are making it seem the future will look like, and they are wrong. While we will indeed see the trend towards independent workers increase, this trend will by no means reach the exorbitantly large levels that some are reporting. Still, it is true that we no longer need to rely on organizations as our only source of income. Today you can drive for Uber or Lyft, rent out your place on Airbnb, sell products directly on Etsy, or offer your services on Upwork.
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If you were to look up the word “work” in the dictionary, it would say something along the lines of, “to do something for someone else for pay.” Oftentimes synonyms for work include drudgery, daily grind, and struggle. It is this notion that we have built our organizations on top of for over the last 100 years. Do those synonyms still apply today? Work used to be one sided. Organizations provided jobs, and employees showed up to do them. It was a very transactional process. We are moving towards a world where work is about an experience, a relationship, and doing something with a sense of purpose. […]
I define “employee experience” as an organization creating a place where people want to show up instead of assuming that people need to show up. This shift from “need” to “want” is the fundamental change that organizations around the world are starting to experience. This is why we see so much investment in new offices spaces, health and well-being programs, maternity and paternity leave, healthy foods, workplace flexibility, and so much more. There are a lot of things that can go into creating an employee experience but the good news is that every single company regardless of their industry, geography, or size, only need to focus on three things. […]
We have all heard of corporate culture and the many ways to describe it. Some say “it’s what happens when the manager leaves the room,” others say culture stems from the values, attitudes, practices, and the mission of the organization, and some say culture is controlled by the CEO and the executives. Regardless of what you believe culture is or where it comes from, the one thing that is common is that culture is about feeling. If the physical environment is about the one that you can see, touch, taste, and breathe, then the cultural environment is the one that you feel; it’s the “vibe” you get when you walk in the door and it’s the mood and the tone that the workplace sets.[…]
This is part of a series of posts exploring the employee experience, that is, creating a place where employees actually want to show up, not where they need to show up. This series will explore what I define as the three employee experience environments that all organizations much focus on which are: physical, cultural, and technological. This is a growing area that I am extremely passionate about because it sees organizations shifting away from thinking of work as a utility to actually focusing on creating what Pat Wadors (the chief Human Resources Officer of LinkedIn) calls “beautiful experiences.” […]
This is part of a series of posts exploring the employee experience, that is, creating a place where employees actually want to show up, not where they need to show up. This series will explore what I define as the three employee experience environments that all organizations much focus on which are: physical, cultural, and technological. This is a growing area that I am extremely passionate about because it sees organizations shifting away from thinking of work as a utility to actually focusing on creating what Pat Wadors (the chief Human Resources Officer of Linkedin) calls “beautiful experiences.”
Over the past few years there have been many discussions around the death and disappearance of the office. Most believed that with co-working locations, the spread of Wi-Fi and mobility, and the rise of co-working locations that there would be no need for an office anymore. We would all work from anywhere and everywhere and this was of course a fair and reasonable prediction. But, it’s not entirely true. Our traditional idea of an office is in fact disappearing, that is the row of cubicles lined in a building that looks and smells like a hospital but the office itself is far from dead![…]
