August 2018 - EX Journal

Superior Employee Experiences: why reinvent the wheel?

Serge van Dam August 28, 2018 Employee experience Leave a Comment

Judging by the literature being published on the information-super-highway, the new titles being bandied about on LinkedIn and the real competition for talent, it seems that Employee Experience is a ‘thing’. Maybe even ‘the thing’ if you’re of an HR bent. As the great Steve Jobs used to say, and with good reason: “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. So as someone who is passionate about using frameworks to help leaders communicate and bring about change more efficiently, I think HR practitioners should ‘steal’ the great work of the User Experience (UX) community and design thinkers around the world to …

Fairness – what is it, and how should it be measured?

Laura-Jane Booker August 21, 2018 Employee experience, Engagement, Rewards & recognition 2 Comments

Fairness is widely studied within academic literature, where it is known as Organisational Justice. However, it is not commonly measured within organisations themselves. Perhaps because organisations don’t fully understand its importance and relationship to business outcomes. In the literature, Organisational Justice is defined as “the extent to which employees perceive workplace procedures, interactions, and outcomes to be fair in nature” (Baldwin, 2004). It is typically broken down into three factors: Distributive Justice – the perceived fairness of the distribution of rewards based on work input. It is important to note that employees perceive fairness by comparing their rewards to that …

Is employee experience really all about your manager?

Tim Sackett August 15, 2018 Employee experience, Engagement 3 Comments

“Employees don’t leave companies. Employees leave managers.” How often have you heard this over the past decade? A hundred times? A thousand times? We love saying this in the HR, management consulting, leadership training world. We use it for employee engagement and employee experience, to almost anything where we want to blame bad managers and take the focus off all the other crap we get wrong in our companies. The fact is, the quote above is mostly bullshit. Employees actually care about other things more The truth is, employees actually leave organizations more often over money than anything else. We …

Diversity is completely wrong

Michael Carden August 14, 2018 Employee experience 2 Comments

He was literally leaping up the stage stairs. “C’mon everyone, let’s get those energy levels back up!” Far too Tony Robins for this small event. “Everyone, stand up!” Could I just ignore this? I reluctantly stood. I’d eaten too much buffet lunch. Who even was this guy again? I looked in the program while being exalted to tell the stranger next to me something that we had in common. He was from a heavy manufacturing company that had won a small town best places to work award. The speaker that is. The woman next to me was a real estate …

The ROI of employee experience

Matt Johns August 8, 2018 Employee experience 3 Comments

All too often we hear business and public-sector leaders talk about how important their people are to their respective organisations. In fact, I suspect most who read this article would have heard phrases like “our greatest asset is our people”. Then why is it that so few choose to invest in creating truly great employee experiences? The answer, more often than not, is that this kind of investment is never seen as urgent, and more importantly, the ROI of employee experience is challenging to calculate. The reality is investing in your employee experience is likely to be one of the …

Getting started with employee experience design

Jason Lauritsen August 7, 2018 Employee experience Leave a Comment

The reason I’m so bullish about the concept of employee experience design is that EX is proactively actionable, whereas traditional employee engagement practices are largely reactive. Organizations can intentionally design the employee experience to improve engagement and performance. By using the design process of discover, define, develop and deliver, you can design and co-create an experience for your employees that will feel positive and affirming to them. Over the past two months, I’ve been writing a series of posts titled How to Design the Employee Experience. If you have been wondering how to get started with employee experience, you should …

Your 12 step program for organizational culture change

Sandy Burgham August 1, 2018 Diversity & inclusion, Employee experience, Organizational culture Leave a Comment

I was curious when approached to contribute to EX Journal as usually I am banging on about Diversity and Inclusion. Yes, remember that? Or was that “soooo last year”? Certainly I detect that it’s a lot more fun hanging with the cheery folk chatting about EX. It feels, well, a tad more millennial. I mean, all this obsessing over diversity statistics has lead to nothing but the jaw-dropping climactic revelation by the WE Forum earlier this year that it will take 217 years for the global gender gap to close. Gosh, what do we do now? Keep talking, shut up, …