Employee experience - 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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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