Michael Carden, Author at 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 …

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. …

The end of heroes

Michael Carden February 12, 2020 Leadership Leave a Comment

Set a goal so big that your company cannot possibly achieve it alone. At Joyous our goal is to make life better for working people. Why? Firstly, because it’s important. People spend a huge part of their lives at work. The emotional and physical impact of work extends well outside of work hours. If you work in HR, and you want to solve the biggest problem in HR, solve that one. Make life better for working people. Secondly, it is a goal so big that we at Joyous cannot achieve it alone. Which is a very good thing, because it forces …

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 …

Using Voice of the Employee to improve customer experience

Michael Carden February 27, 2019 Employee experience, Engagement, Feedback 1 Comment

Most companies understand the value of Voice of the Customer surveys. If you want to know how customers feel and what aspects of customer experience you can improve, you ask them. Makes sense. Voice of the Employee follows a similar philosophy. You ask employees how they feel and what you can improve. They’re most likely going to have some feedback on their employee experience that you can do something with. In the case of front-line staff, they’re also going to hook you up with some information on customers that you wouldn’t otherwise have. Which means VoE is not only good …

It’s called work, not awesome

Michael Carden October 2, 2018 Employee experience 1 Comment

In my inbox last week. “I always read your HR posts with interest. They are sometimes very entertaining. I do however struggle to relate them to my job, as all my working years, its been a cat and mouse game of avoiding being shouted at or sacked. I’ve never known an employer that gives the slightest rats arse about what employees might think.” For many, worklife is bleak. Later that week, visiting a clearly still bemused new HR Director of SoMa* start-up. “It’s like the Wizard of Oz. You’re not in Kansas any more when the biggest HR challenge is …

Diversity is completely wrong

Michael Carden August 14, 2018 Employee experience 2 Comments

He was literally leaping up the stage stairs. “C’mon everyone, let’s get those energy levels back up!” Far too Tony Robins for this small event. “Everyone, stand up!” Could I just ignore this? I reluctantly stood. I’d eaten too much buffet lunch. Who even was this guy again? I looked in the program while being exalted to tell the stranger next to me something that we had in common. He was from a heavy manufacturing company that had won a small town best places to work award. The speaker that is. The woman next to me was a real estate …

No-one comes to work to do a bad job

Michael Carden July 18, 2018 Employee experience 1 Comment

I’d been trying to flesh out a collab story on employee experience (EX) with Laurie Ruettimann for weeks. This is as far as we got: “I’m not sure if I buy into the whole concept of EX. Now, I’m an idiot. But if we keep asking employers to solve problems, we perpetuate a system that always lets employees down. When do we say that it’s up to employees to own their EX, and that the best companies will listen?” For those who don’t know Laurie, she’s the original HR disruptor. When I first met her, I think she just wanted …

Better never means better for everyone

Michael Carden June 19, 2018 Employee experience 1 Comment

Employee experience is by definition experiential: it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Without someone to process it, it’s not a thing. If a tree falls in a forest, etc etc. More than that, we don’t all experience the same thing the same way. Our personalities, preferences and past experiences all play a role in how we interpret and react to the situations we find ourselves in. So when we talk about employee experience, it’s a bit of a misnomer. There’s no one employee experience; there’s exactly as many experiences as there are employees, and we need to start considering experience …

Why response rate matters more than score

Michael Carden May 16, 2018 Engagement Leave a Comment

Pop quiz! What’s going to be more useful to you in the long run: a high engagement survey score with a low response rate, or a low engagement score with a high response rate? High engagement is good, right? Low is bad? You want to know if you have a highly engaged workforce, so you need as many survey responses as you can get. Ideally 100%. Definitely more than the 10-15% you can expect from surveying complete strangers. Response rate matters. Surveys are an average of opinions… of those who bother responding When do you leave a hotel review online? …

The Anonymity Paradox

Michael Carden April 3, 2018 Employee experience, Engagement, Feedback 1 Comment

Communication is a spectrum. On the left is face to face. On the right is a YouTube comment section. In the middle are all manner of different ways of connecting. Bluetooth phone calls while driving. Group WhatsApp with those folk you met at a festival. Teleconferences where one dude is at an airport and only ever remembers to press mute before he starts talking. Each of these different ways of communicating has its own rules of acceptable behavior. There’s probably things you’d say in an email that you’d not say face to face. I’ve certainly found myself on written rants …