Employee experience is nothing new, employees have always had experiences at work, good, bad and sometimes downright ugly. The difference is we are now purposefully thinking about how employees experience organisations and designing ways to make these experiences better.
Jacob Morgan talks about the evolution of EX in the following way:
- Initially the focus was on utility, providing employees with the tools they need to do the job and seeing them as nothing more than a cog in a machine
- Next came productivity, focusing on what employees needed to work better and faster
- Then came engagement, a radical new concept which for the first time took a more employee-centric approach, asking what employees need to be their best at work
- And finally we are now in the era of EX, which involves purposefully designing experiences from the viewpoint of our employee
But here’s the rub…
Employee Experience must be more than simply re-naming the HR function and using an employee-life-cycle model to consider the experience your people have. Organisations that are getting employee experience right have adopted a shift in their mindset. They are approaching EX with the same rigour and dedication afforded to their customer experience. But what does this look like in practice?
When we set about writing our book -Employee Experience by Design – our aim was to demystify EX and provide a simple, user-friendly framework with which to design great experiences for your people. And we were fortunate enough to work with talented EX practitioners from around the world to shine a light on great practice, which we included in the book.
After the book had launched though we were keen to keep the conversation going with the practitioners we had met along the way, so we set up the ‘Employee Experience Design Club’. The EX-Design Club came together to collaborate and move EX thinking and practice forwards. And the first question we explored together was how do different organisations develop and execute on employee experience goals?
And we’re delighted to share the EX-Maturity Path, which is the output from our first collaboration. Together we created a visualisation of how organisations develop and execute on employee experience goals, and their level of EX maturity, moving from forming, to performing and finally transforming. The EX-Maturity Path enables you to see where your organisation is on your EX-journey and understand what needs to change to develop your approach.
At each of the levels the EX-Maturity Path outlines:
- What’s happening for employees
- What’s happening behind the scenes
- The current focus for EX
- The mindset and language used
- The levels of involvement and finally
- The impact EX has on the business
You can download a copy of the EX-Maturity Path here. And coming soon is our EX-Maturity Diagnostic which will enable you to better plot where you currently are. We’d love to hear what you think about the EX-Maturity Path.
