Employee experience (EX) requires much more than HR can do alone. Re-branding HR as EX simply won’t cut it. Building more positive workplaces requires a lot of different skills and areas of expertise.
At People Lab we want to make work a more positive experience for everyone. We do this by inspiring organisations to treat people better, and empowering leaders to make positive change. We do it by encouraging everyone to fight back against the status quo of toxic workplaces. But we know that the challenge of improving EX can be overwhelming; experiences exist at different levels, are diverse in nature, and can be both planned and unplanned.
So we developed our ‘EX Landscape” model to help practitioners make sense of EX, and understand where they can contribute and who else they might need to work with to improve EX.
For example you, could be an HR practitioner, responsible for re-designing the EX of a specific process such as your performance development.
Or maybe you’re an HR Director looking at your employee value proposition and how to use this as a blueprint for the overall experience your employees have.
Perhaps you’re a head of internal comms looking at how the experience of your people supports your company values (or not in many cases!).
Or you might be an L&D professional who has recognised that leaders make a big difference to your EX and you want to understand how your development programmes can support them to facilitate a great experience with their teams.
You could be an employee engagement professional who needs to understand which experiences have the biggest impact on engagement to enable you to focus on the right things.
The purpose of this model is to help practitioners understand the different types of EX and where they have the opportunity to contribute. At one end of the landscape are those experiences which are intentional and designed. This is the obvious home of EX Design, and most often what we think of when talking about EX. This could involve hygiene experiences such as ensuring employees get paid on time and that they have the right tools for the job. Hygiene experiences may or may not be organisation specific, for example every employer takes steps to ensure employees get paid, and have the tools needed for their job. Typically these types of experiences are owned by a team somewhere in the business.
We then have what we call ‘life-cycle’ experiences which are intentional, designed experiences such as induction, performance management, exit and more. These experiences are more likely to be organisation specific, and align with company culture and values. Again these experiences will be designed and managed by different teams within the organisation depending on the specific experience.
Then there is the everyday EX, which is where we find practitioners designing experiences that bring to life the company culture, brand and values. For example the way we are led and managed each day will have an impact on how we experience the organisation. Whilst there are specific teams who will take ownership of the design and implementation of everyday experiences, these experiences are much more than this. For example the way a colleague replies to an email, the greeting we receive from the receptionist each morning, being able find information we need for our job. These small micro experiences add up to form our overall EX and some of the responsibility for everyday EX lies with employees themselves.
And finally we often forget to look at the role of our mindset in how we experience our world, and this can have a profound effect on our overall experience. For example the impact of a negative experience on an optimist may be different to a pessimist.
The principles and frameworks we share at our EX by Design courses work at all of these levels, for all of these experiences, for whichever element of the EX you are focusing on. If you’d like to find out more about our upcoming courses take a look here
