Karen Rayner, Author at EX Journal

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

We need to have a conversation about engagement

Karen Rayner September 4, 2018 Employee experience, Engagement, Feedback Leave a Comment

Numbers are easy*. Anyone can take an employee survey and make something of it: response rate is obvious, unhappy and engaged answers easily coded. We can chart results and turn them into reports and pretty infographics with a bare minimum of effort. 77% of employees hate the food in the cafeteria! 31% of millennials in Townsville stay for the beanbags! Numbers, saving us from too much thinking since forever. Unfortunately, numbers are also simple. Surveys in particular condense a whole heap of potentially mind-blowing information into a single, easily digestible figure. Say I discover that only 31% of employees think …

EX18: NZ’s First EVER Employee Experience Awards

Karen Rayner May 7, 2018 Employee experience, Joyous Labs 1 Comment

Do your people love what they do and do what they love? Are you keen to showcase and celebrate what an awesome workplace you are? If so, read on! The awesome guys at Humankind will be launching New Zealand’s first ever Employee Experience Awards in 2018 in partnership with Joyous. The EX18 Awards, which celebrate organisations throughout New Zealand who are leading the way delivering exceptional experiences to their people and therefore known as the best employers in the country, will be launching 3rd June, with the overall winners announced 8th November. Founder of Humankind, Samantha Gadd, is passionate about …

Employee Experience 101

Karen Rayner May 1, 2018 Employee experience Leave a Comment

Employee experience is kind of a big deal, and we all know it. It might not be the future of HR (though it probably is), but it’s something everyone needs to pay attention to. And while it might sound like the sort of thing that involves catered breakfasts and foosball tables, it’s significantly more complex. So, for the uninitiated, what exactly is employee experience? And what isn’t it? Employee experience defined There’s no single universally accepted definition of employee experience, but everyone’s on pretty much the same page. Basically everything about work that makes employees think or act a certain …

Open source employee engagement

Karen Rayner April 3, 2018 Employee experience, Engagement, Joyous Labs, Open source Leave a Comment

Employee engagement has become an industry centered around surveys. Companies compete on who has the best, the biggest, the most comprehensive solution – despite the fact there’s not much difference between any of them. After all, there’s only so many ways to ask employees how engaged they are in their work… Because survey companies are competing on proprietary knowledge, a couple of things are going to happen. Firstly they need to find a special something that sets them apart from the competition, which requires R&D. Then they need to hire sales and marketing guys to tell everyone what that difference …