2019 - EX Journal

Hi Kelly. We need to talk about your anonymous feedback.

Michael Carden July 18, 2019 Employee experience, Feedback Leave a Comment

If you can figure out whose feedback you’re reading from what it says, how it’s said, or by applying basic data filters, then guess what? Your feedback isn’t anonymous. Cautionary tale 1: anonymous feedback is the enemy of specificity Ken’s had a rough month dealing with issues in the very specialised reports that he owns. So he has a choice to make at feedback time. Does he: a) give open and honest feedback on the reporting problems in the hopes that this feedback leads to changes in the process and less frustration in future, or b) not say anything about …

A hard truth about employee engagement

Jason Lauritsen July 16, 2019 Employee experience, Engagement, Leadership 1 Comment

There was a point in my career, probably 18 or 20 years or so ago, that I would have argued vehemently that creating a workplace culture that engages employees was vital to sustaining a profitable business. I believed in my heart that it was an imperative. At the time, I was an HR leader working at an organization where my CEO really believed (and invested) in the value of people not only as employees but as human beings with lives beyond work. For me, it was the perfect place to practice HR. While my CEO was pragmatic in how he …

Want more engaging comms? Go mobile.

Karen Rayner July 10, 2019 Diversity & inclusion, Employee experience Leave a Comment

Want to be able to talk to all of your employees? Prepare to go mobile. Most adults own a cell phone, so it follows that most workers will have a mobile device of some kind. And we always have them close at hand. The average person checks their phone 110 times a day, and frontline workers use messaging apps up to six times a day. Great news, right? We can just use mobile channels to communicate with workers and get a read on engagement. Not so fast. Communication in companies isn’t fabulous to begin with: 80% of US employees feel …

CQ: finding culturally intelligent leaders

Laura-Jane Booker July 3, 2019 Diversity & inclusion, Leadership Leave a Comment

For a brief introduction to Cultural Intelligence (CQ) please read the first article in this series: Leading diverse teams: the importance of cultural intelligence. Given the growing multi-cultural nature of today’s global business world, it is crucial to develop culturally intelligent leaders. These are leaders who capitalise on the differing opinions, ideas, and tactics that diverse people and teams offer. It is one thing to have a diverse team with differing backgrounds and experiences, but actually using those differences effectively is another thing entirely. Where do you find high CQ leaders? You’ll be delighted to know that CQ is a …

LGBTQ+ D&I? Thanks for the rainbow logo… but let’s do better.

Leah Chaney July 2, 2019 Diversity & inclusion, Employee experience Leave a Comment

I’ve spent the last decade of my leadership career and my entire professional career being an out lesbian, and along the way, I’ve experienced a range of responses to who I identified as as a person. I’ve worked on teams where I was respected as an individual, and others where I felt like a check on a diversity and inclusion checklist. I’ve learned along the way how to understand what it looks like to support the LGBTQ+ community — what a true advocate and champion looks like — and how to weed out imposters. Does the company do what it …

A Very Short History of Workplace Safety

Philip Carden June 19, 2019 Health & Safety Leave a Comment

If your notion of safety is an absence of incidents then it follows that you will focus on hazards, near-misses, and accidents. Each is an opportunity for improvement – you can analyze the root cause, make sure you understand the likelihood of recurrence and manage risk by amending procedures and ensuring appropriate training. This notion of safety might be described as ‘traditional’. It assumes that the situations workers will face can be anticipated and that the right course of action can be determined in advance, informed by assessment of past events. In some cases that might be true. But we …

Employee experience feedback: a quick guide to getting started

Karen Rayner May 22, 2019 Employee experience, Feedback Leave a Comment

Quick recap: employee experience is everything people perceive, think, feel, do or encounter at work. If this experience is negative it can lead to poor performance, low engagement and unfavorable business results. So you really want EX to be positive, and to make sure, you need to ask employees for their feedback. Getting started with EX feedback Talking to people is one of the best ways to understand what’s going on in your teams. So, don’t worry about investing in tech when you’re first starting your EX journey; just get talking! You can build from there. Talk it out Collecting …

Employee engagement: we need better answers

Employee Engagement: it’s time to demand better answers

Jason Lauritsen May 14, 2019 Engagement 1 Comment

One of the things that makes me crazy about the work of employee engagement is the sloppiness we allow around how we define and approach it. As I talk to leaders within organizations who are currently spending enormous sums of money on measuring and attempting to improve engagement, they struggle with basic questions like “How do you define employee engagement?” and “How does employee engagement drive your organization’s success?” If we can’t clearly define this work and why it matters, how can we ever expect to make a huge impact, let alone be taken seriously? We have to do better. …

Engaging invisible employees

Karen Rayner April 10, 2019 Employee experience, Engagement Leave a Comment

You can’t be inclusive if you’re exclusive We’re all striving for an inclusive organizational culture. We want work to be a place where everyone feels heard, and valued, and everyone has the chance to contribute. But when we say ‘everyone’, do we really mean everyone? All people are included, but some are more included than others. A retail chain has a lot of moving parts. There’s head office, with HR and marketing and accounting staff. There are stores, with sales associates and security and inventory managers. There are warehouses, with stock handlers, forklift operators and truck drivers. There are people …

#EX18 Initiative of the Year: Lightspeed Graphics

Samantha Gadd March 18, 2019 Employee experience, Leadership, Wellness Leave a Comment

“The benefit of entering the awards is that it’s like a disciplined review – it enables you to pause and reflect on the programme with your team on how it’s all working.” Steve Martin, Lightspeed Graphics Lightspeed Graphics’ Operations Director, Steve Martin, said they were ‘over the moon’ when they first heard their name announced as winners of the EX Initiative of the Year at the Humankind Employee Experience Awards, EX18, in November. Because they are a relatively young company (they’re just about to celebrate their 2nd birthday), and they are in a highly competitive industry, winning an award like …

Why video is the killer app for creating compelling employee experiences

Serge van Dam March 12, 2019 Employee experience, Engagement Leave a Comment

Video is eating the world. It’s as true for companies as it is for consumers – and yes, this includes yours. Consumers and businesses are all responsible for the massive growth of online video. Consumer video traffic will be 84% of consumer traffic this year, up from 75% in 2014. And business video traffic will be 63% of traffic this year, up from 36% So it’s no surprise that more businesses are turning to video for HR processes; particularly those that are trying to transform the employee experience (EX) for the better. Employee Experience Objectives If we apply the lens of any contemporary human …

Using Voice of the Employee to improve customer experience

Michael Carden February 27, 2019 Employee experience, Engagement, Feedback 1 Comment

Most companies understand the value of Voice of the Customer surveys. If you want to know how customers feel and what aspects of customer experience you can improve, you ask them. Makes sense. Voice of the Employee follows a similar philosophy. You ask employees how they feel and what you can improve. They’re most likely going to have some feedback on their employee experience that you can do something with. In the case of front-line staff, they’re also going to hook you up with some information on customers that you wouldn’t otherwise have. Which means VoE is not only good …

Employee experience isn’t just another New Year’s resolution

Sean Holdmeyer and Zach Babbe January 29, 2019 Employee experience Leave a Comment

We see it every year. Swarms of people create their New Year’s resolutions with the intention of changing their lives for good. These efforts start out with high hopes and strong intentions, yet ~90% of them fail. Forrester projects that 85% of EX measurement efforts – the first and most important step of improving EX – will also fail in 2019. What do New Year’s resolutions and EX improvement efforts have in common? And why do the majority of efforts result in failure? Avoid these seven common New Year’s resolution pitfalls 1. Short-term focus Most resolutions have a near-term scope. …

The Employee Experience Genome Project

Karen Rayner January 16, 2019 Employee experience Leave a Comment

In December 2018 we launched a little something that’s really going to help companies measure and manage employee experience and engagement. It’s quite exciting. It’s definitely comprehensive. But before we get into it, a bit of background on why it was so necessary. A little history of the employee survey industry In engineering terms, a black box is a device defined only by its input and output; you don’t need to know what’s going on inside it. This is how the employee survey industry has historically worked. You put in a long list of employee questions, and out of it …