culture Archives - EX Journal

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 …

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 …

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 …

Confessions of a flex worker: leading the way to culture change

Donna Jones November 20, 2018 Diversity & inclusion, Employee experience, Organizational culture Leave a Comment

It’s 6:30 on a Sunday morning and I’ve just tiptoed downstairs, made a coffee and sat down to write. I am Donna Jones and I flex all of the time. I know the business case for flexible working – higher engagement, greater attraction and diversity of applicants, greater employee wellbeing, productivity and safety outcomes etc. From a retention perspective, workers value their personalised flexible working arrangements over salary increases; women are more loyal when they have this invaluable agreement in place. All of this sounds great! But why are we, the transport industry, still designing staff rosters around the sole …

The business case for measuring and managing employee mental wellbeing

Laura-Jane Booker September 19, 2018 Employee experience, Organizational culture, Wellness Leave a Comment

This is the second part in our employee mental wellbeing series. If you haven’t read it yet, check out part one: Encouraging employees to flourish. Here’s a quick recap. Employee mental wellbeing Mental wellbeing is a continuum. At the positive end you have flourishers. At the negative end you have languishers. The goal of any organisation is to enable all of their employees to be flourishers. Why? Because flourishers drive positive business outcomes such as engagement, productivity, organisational commitment, and organisational citizenship behaviours. Flourishers also take fewer sick days, are more resilient, and are less likely to seek employment elsewhere. …

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, …

The truth about millennials: shared values

Jamie Finnegan July 2, 2018 Employee experience 2 Comments

A strong set of shared company and personal values is important to millennials. Company values are often confused with company culture, but the idea that they’re the same thing is a common misconception. While a company’s culture is fluid and shifts over time, its values do not. Company values are often renamed and tweaked over the years but they tend to define the principles and beliefs outlined by the founders and early crew. This is also true of a person’s values: the beliefs and ideals may change form but the substance remains the same. As a millennial I value technology, …