Lightspeed Graphics #EX18

#EX18 Initiative of the Year: Lightspeed Graphics

Samantha Gadd Employee experience, Leadership, Wellness Leave a Comment

“The benefit of entering the awards is that it’s like a disciplined review – it enables you to pause and reflect on the programme with your team on how it’s all working.” Steve Martin, Lightspeed Graphics Lightspeed Graphics’ Operations Director, Steve Martin, said they were ‘over the moon’ when they first heard their name announced as winners of the EX Initiative of the Year at the Humankind Employee Experience Awards, EX18, in November.  Because they are a relatively young company (they’re just about to celebrate their 2nd birthday), and they are in a highly competitive industry, winning an award like …

Video is the killer app for EX

Why video is the killer app for creating compelling employee experiences

Serge van Dam Employee experience, Engagement Leave a Comment

Video is eating the world. It’s as true for companies as it is for consumers – and yes, this includes yours. Consumers and businesses are all responsible for the massive growth of online video. Consumer video traffic will be 84% of consumer traffic this year, up from 75% in 2014. And business video traffic will be 63% of traffic this year, up from 36% So it’s no surprise that more businesses are turning to video for HR processes; particularly those that are trying to transform the employee experience (EX) for the better. Employee Experience Objectives If we apply the lens of any contemporary human …

Voice of the Employee

Using Voice of the Employee to improve customer experience

Michael Carden 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 …

Employee experience resolutions

Employee experience isn’t just another New Year’s resolution

Sean Holdmeyer and Zach Babbe Employee experience Leave a Comment

We see it every year. Swarms of people create their New Year’s resolutions with the intention of changing their lives for good. These efforts start out with high hopes and strong intentions, yet ~90% of them fail. Forrester projects that 85% of EX measurement efforts – the first and most important step of improving EX – will also fail in 2019. What do New Year’s resolutions and EX improvement efforts have in common? And why do the majority of efforts result in failure? Avoid these seven common New Year’s resolution pitfalls 1. Short-term focus Most resolutions have a near-term scope. …

The EX Genome Project

The Employee Experience Genome Project

Karen Rayner 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 …

eNPS employee engagement

Using eNPS as an indicator of engagement

Kai Crow Employee experience, Engagement, Feedback, Leadership Leave a Comment

Employee NPS (eNPS) is based on Net Promoter Score® (NPS™) by Bain & Company, Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. It’s commonly used as a quick indicator of employee engagement because engaged (and loyal) employees are more likely to recommend their workplace. NPS recap NPS measures customer loyalty by asking: ‘How likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or relative?’ The idea is that loyal customers believe so strongly in the company they’re recommending that they’re willing to put their reputation on the line for it. Friends and relatives are typically the people we feel most strongly …

Effective Leadership Styles

[Infographic] 6 effective leadership styles

Laura-Jane Booker Employee experience, Engagement, Leadership, Motivation Leave a Comment

Leadership style can make or break the success of an organisation, team, or project. While different leadership styles suit different situations, effective styles share one common trait – emotional intelligence (EQ). Daniel Goleman (an EQ expert) proposed that there are 6 effective leadership styles, each stemming from 4 key EQ competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and social skills. Coercive/Commanding Lead by force Climate influence: This style has a negative impact on the climate and demotivates employees as it eliminates the opportunity for new ideas, reduces accountability for performance, and destroys the rewards system. Of the 6 styles, coercive is the …

Confessions of a flex worker

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

Donna Jones 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 …

Comprehensive EX

The importance of a comprehensive approach to EX

Sean Holdmeyer and Zach Babbe Employee experience Leave a Comment

“EX is employee surveys!” “EX is employee engagement!” “EX is my org’s new ping-pong table!” Many leaders are doing their best to take advantage of the employee experience movement early on by attempting to prioritize and improve EX within their organizations. Unfortunately many are focused on the wrong things due to a general misunderstanding of the concept. As a leader, the first and most important part of improving your organization’s EX is understanding what it actually is. Understanding EX Employee experience (EX) is defined as the comprehensive set of interactions and observations an employee has within an organization. And it’s …

How effective leaders get results

How effective leaders get results

Laura-Jane Booker Employee experience, Engagement, Leadership Leave a Comment

Leaders need to get results: whether revenue growth, return on sales, efficiency, profitability, employee satisfaction, or employee engagement. Quite the task! So how on earth do leaders do it? One way is by influencing the organisation’s climate, which can account for a third of an organisation’s financial performance. How? Glad you asked! Six ways leaders can influence organisational climate Permit Flexibility – give employees the freedom to experiment and take calculated risks to achieve goals without unnecessary restrictions and micromanaging. Flexibility promotes creativity, innovation, and accountability over one’s work. Create Responsibility – give employees control over their own work to …

It's called work not awesome

It’s called work, not awesome

Michael Carden 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 …

The business case for measuring and managing employee mental wellbeing

Laura-Jane Booker 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. …

Finder - medals of honour

The truth about millennials: global connectivity creates EX equality

Jamie Finnegan Employee experience, Organizational culture, Rewards & recognition 1 Comment

Create a global employee experience where everyone is equal, no matter which office they’re in. Remember when there was no easy way to access the internet and we couldn’t do our job effectively from anywhere other than our place of work? Me neither! Like many millennials, I was born around the same time as the world wide web, in the late 1980s. Although I still dimly remember the struggles of dial-up internet and a world where mobile phones were rare, for most of my professional life I’ve enjoyed robust internet connectivity. This huge advance in technology leads to a frequent …

Is your employee experience Theory X or Theory Y?

Robin Schooling Employee experience, Motivation Leave a Comment

Sixty years ago Douglas McGregor from the MIT Sloan School of Management presented two theories of workforce motivation he named “Theory X” and “Theory Y.” Over the intervening decades these theories have been used by leadership teams, HR professionals and OD folks as they craft and create HR policies, performance management programs, rewards and recognition, and work space design. If it’s been some time since you gave much thought to McGregor’s work, here’s a refresher: Employee experience Theory X vs Theory Y Theory X assumes that: people dislike work people want to avoid work (i.e. “people are inherently lazy”) people …