2020 - EX Journal

Can I use my CX system to measure EX?

Michael Carden October 19, 2020 Employee experience Leave a Comment

TLDR: No. Going to Disneyland and working at Disneyland are different. There is a growing number of providers combining employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) into the same platform. A very small handful of these providers have been trying to solve for the vexing issue of causation. They are working to tie employee engagement to customer outcomes. This is a problem worth solving. It’s also a super challenging problem, and we’ll come back to that… But. The majority of CX providers who are now stretching into EX are just looking for market expansion based on parallel tech. If you …

Removing the stress from feedback

Karen Rayner October 12, 2020 Feedback Leave a Comment

When our brain senses a threat, our body activates a threat response. It’ll go into some form of defensive behavior and lock down most functions that aren’t necessary for survival. It’s what we rely on to keep us alive when we’re confronted by an angry bear. And, as it turns out, when we have to deal with feedback at work. SCARF To illustrate how feedback constitutes a threat, we can take a look at the SCARF framework from David Rock. It lays out a range of things that can trigger a social threat and create stress: Status: talking to a person of higher …

A COVID Lesson in Change Management

Kai Crow September 28, 2020 Employee experience, Health & Safety, Wellness Leave a Comment

I was talking to my friend Jacinda recently, and a story she told me summed up so much about what is wrong with the way many businesses manage crucial changes. Her change management story starts, like many others, in 2020 with COVID-19 and its impacts on the business she works in: a large print company. Faced with a rapid decrease in demand, the company was forced to make some tough, fast decisions. Many of which turned out to be costly mistakes. Under sudden financial pressure, the company had to lay-off staff and same up with a plan that involved shutting …

The role of psychological safety in workplace Health & Safety

Karen Rayner September 15, 2020 Employee experience, Engagement, Feedback, Health & Safety Leave a Comment

For many, ‘safety’ means physical safety: PPE, hazard registers and accident prevention. But psychological safety at work is just as important. “Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.” – Amy Edmondson Psychological safety is what enables us to speak up, and to take calculated risks without the fear of reprimand. This matters to workplace Health & Safety initiatives for a number of reasons. Empowerment When people feel psychologically safe they are more comfortable making decisions for themselves. If there’s no policy or procedure for the …

Encouraging feedback from introverts

Karen Rayner September 1, 2020 Employee experience, Feedback Leave a Comment

Quiet doesn’t (always) mean disengaged. You may have team members you seldom hear from in meetings, or who don’t always step up with feedback or input. It doesn’t mean they don’t care, or that they have nothing to say; they may simply not be wired for speaking out. It’s easy to overlook the quiet workers, but it would be a mistake to think they have nothing to offer… You don’t want to get into the habit of only listening to the loud voices. Just because they’re loud doesn’t mean they’re right, or that their opinions are shared by everyone (or …

Practicing active listening in online conversations

Ruby Kolesky June 23, 2020 Employee experience, Feedback, Leadership Leave a Comment

I think of myself as a leader being placed somewhere on a value based spectrum, with efficiency on one end and empathy on the other. As an individual contributor, I started my career all the way on the efficiency end of the spectrum. I believed that talking to people about their feelings was a waste of time. Turns out, that’s not true at all. Leaders who value efficiency over empathy tend to sacrifice investing time in relationships with their team members. The result? Ironically, team efficiency is negatively impacted. Why? Because team members who don’t have close relationships with their …

Building resilience in the workplace

Karen Rayner June 10, 2020 Health & Safety, Leadership, Wellness Leave a Comment

Resilience is the ability to adapt and recover – to bounce back – following a challenge or problem. Resilient people respond well to a changing environment, deal with obstacles and move on quickly. Resilient companies do the same. As we work on ways to cope with the impact of Covid-19, it’s the perfect time to ask: how do we build resilience at work? Why is workplace resilience important? You can’t plan for everything. Take workplace health and safety as an example. The traditional approach is to analyse possible emergencies, threats and hazards, and to document the things people need to …

Celebrating culture together, alone

Karen Rayner April 22, 2020 Employee experience, Engagement, Organizational culture Leave a Comment

Like many workplaces, Joyous has had a few team milestones since we’ve been in lockdown. Team lunches, birthdays, customer wins, award nominations, anniversaries… and it’s obviously not as easy to come together and celebrate those as it once was. We’ve lunched together over Zoom, we live-Slacked the awards announcements, we play party games on Friday afternoon, but it’s not quite the same. We’ve had to put just a little bit more effort into making things work. Re-imagining milestone celebrations For the first couple of two-year anniversaries this year we were in the office. There were (amazing) animal balloons. Virtual balloons …

Launching in lockdown: Genesis

Karen Rayner April 16, 2020 Engagement, Feedback, Leadership, Wellness Leave a Comment

The world’s changed a lot since we first started working with Emma-Kate Greer and Tamara Sallis from Genesis, an energy company in New Zealand. Genesis has over 1,000 employees spread across the country in a wide range of roles including retail, wholesale operations, delivery and customer service. It’s an essential service provider, so work continues for the Genesis team even under lockdown conditions – the electricity must flow. This week Emma-Kate and Tamara launched Joyous across Genesis, and used the launch as an opportunity to send Covid-19 check-in questions to the entire team. So to see how well the launch …

The case for happiness

Michael Carden March 3, 2020 Employee experience, Engagement Leave a Comment

We have relegated employee happiness in favour of employee engagement. Are we missing something? History doesn’t care about happiness. It’s easy to find information on living conditions for peasants both before and after the French Revolution – but good luck finding anything on how much happier they were after revolting. And even though the US Declaration of Independence makes the pursuit of happiness a fundamental right, little has been done to measure the success of this objective. Turns out that happiness is hard to quantify. We even think about it in different ways. Thinking happy thoughts Biologists keep it simple. …

A simple approach to difficult conversations

Ruby Kolesky February 24, 2020 Employee experience, Feedback, Leadership Leave a Comment

About two years into my career as an engineering team leader I had to have a difficult conversation. The conversation was with Connor (not his real name), a junior engineer, who had recently joined our team. Connor was consistently arriving to work late, taking long lunches, and leaving early. As his team lead I knew that I needed to talk to him, so I arranged a meeting: difficult conversations should always take place in person. Not long before this, I had attended a leadership training course lead by Nick Reid, from Training for Change. So, I used the SCORE approach …

The end of heroes

Michael Carden February 12, 2020 Leadership Leave a Comment

Set a goal so big that your company cannot possibly achieve it alone. At Joyous our goal is to make life better for working people. Why? Firstly, because it’s important. People spend a huge part of their lives at work. The emotional and physical impact of work extends well outside of work hours. If you work in HR, and you want to solve the biggest problem in HR, solve that one. Make life better for working people. Secondly, it is a goal so big that we at Joyous cannot achieve it alone. Which is a very good thing, because it forces …