Encourage employees to flourish

The business case for employee mental wellbeing: encouraging employees to flourish

Laura-Jane Booker Employee experience, Wellness 1 Comment

People tend to associate the term mental wellbeing with illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia, and bi-polar disorder. As a result, organisations tend to think it’s not relevant to everyone and shy away from addressing employee mental wellbeing. But what if I were to talk about stress, anxiety, and burnout? Suddenly, mental well-being becomes highly relevant because these are common work-related terms and issues that affect many employees. The languishing-flourishing continuum If employee mental wellbeing is a spectrum, at the positive end we have employees at their peak mental state – or flourishing. An employee who is flourishing is filled with …

We need to have a conversation about engagement

Karen Rayner 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 …

Superior EX why reinvent the wheel

Superior Employee Experiences: why reinvent the wheel?

Serge van Dam Employee experience Leave a Comment

Judging by the literature being published on the information-super-highway, the new titles being bandied about on LinkedIn and the real competition for talent, it seems that Employee Experience is a ‘thing’. Maybe even ‘the thing’ if you’re of an HR bent. As the great Steve Jobs used to say, and with good reason: “Good artists copy, great artists steal”.  So as someone who is passionate about using frameworks to help leaders communicate and bring about change more efficiently, I think HR practitioners should ‘steal’ the great work of the User Experience (UX) community and design thinkers around the world to …

Fairness: the same for everyone

Fairness – what is it, and how should it be measured?

Laura-Jane Booker Employee experience, Engagement, Rewards & recognition 2 Comments

Fairness is widely studied within academic literature, where it is known as Organisational Justice. However, it is not commonly measured within organisations themselves. Perhaps because organisations don’t fully understand its importance and relationship to business outcomes. In the literature, Organisational Justice is defined as “the extent to which employees perceive workplace procedures, interactions, and outcomes to be fair in nature” (Baldwin, 2004). It is typically broken down into three factors: Distributive Justice – the perceived fairness of the distribution of rewards based on work input. It is important to note that employees perceive fairness by comparing their rewards to that …

Like a boss

Is employee experience really all about your manager?

Tim Sackett Employee experience, Engagement 3 Comments

“Employees don’t leave companies. Employees leave managers.”  How often have you heard this over the past decade? A hundred times? A thousand times? We love saying this in the HR, management consulting, leadership training world. We use it for employee engagement and employee experience, to almost anything where we want to blame bad managers and take the focus off all the other crap we get wrong in our companies. The fact is, the quote above is mostly bullshit. Employees actually care about other things more The truth is, employees actually leave organizations more often over money than anything else. We …

Diversity is completely wrong

Diversity is completely wrong

Michael Carden 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 …

ROI of EX

The ROI of employee experience

Matt Johns Employee experience 3 Comments

All too often we hear business and public-sector leaders talk about how important their people are to their respective organisations. In fact, I suspect most who read this article would have heard phrases like “our greatest asset is our people”. Then why is it that so few choose to invest in creating truly great employee experiences? The answer, more often than not, is that this kind of investment is never seen as urgent, and more importantly, the ROI of employee experience is challenging to calculate. The reality is investing in your employee experience is likely to be one of the …

Guide to designing employee experience

Getting started with employee experience design

Jason Lauritsen Employee experience Leave a Comment

The reason I’m so bullish about the concept of employee experience design is that EX is proactively actionable, whereas traditional employee engagement practices are largely reactive. Organizations can intentionally design the employee experience to improve engagement and performance. By using the design process of discover, define, develop and deliver, you can design and co-create an experience for your employees that will feel positive and affirming to them. Over the past two months, I’ve been writing a series of posts titled How to Design the Employee Experience. If you have been wondering how to get started with employee experience, you should …

12 Step Program for Culture Change

Your 12 step program for organizational culture change

Sandy Burgham Diversity & inclusion, Employee experience, Organizational culture Leave a Comment

I was curious when approached to contribute to EX Journal as usually I am banging on about Diversity and Inclusion. Yes, remember that? Or was that “soooo last year”?  Certainly I detect that it’s a lot more fun hanging with the cheery folk chatting about EX. It feels, well, a tad more millennial. I mean, all this obsessing over diversity statistics has lead to nothing but the jaw-dropping climactic revelation by the WE Forum earlier this year that it will take 217 years for the global gender gap to close. Gosh, what do we do now? Keep talking, shut up, …

Happy Branding

The truth about employer branding

Robin Schooling Employee experience Leave a Comment

We can talk all day about employer branding – and we often do. My friend Lars Schmidt has a definition that I like (and shamelessly use): “Your employer brand, at its core, is the shared values and employee experiences of your organization.” The important part of that definition, in my estimation, is “employee experiences”: the most critical and often overlooked part of the equation. Branding is often the sparkly part of HR. There are keynote speakers talking about it, talent acquisition experts in charge of Employer Branding departments, and loyal devotees acting like evangelical preachers while rolling out EB initiatives …

No-one comes to work to do a bad job

Michael Carden 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 …

Meaningful work

The meaning of meaningful work

Tim Sackett Employee experience, Engagement 3 Comments

There is this widely held belief by a great number of HR pros that to have true employee engagement, your employees must feel like they have meaningful work. I don’t necessarily disagree with that thought process. The problem is, well-meaning HR pros have taken this concept and started to cram social platforms down their employees’ throats. They misinterpret ‘meaningful’ as meaning ‘as an employer we must support social causes so our employees see we are giving back’. What about those companies that put big money and volunteer hours towards things like Habitat for Humanity?  Great cause, right?  I worked for …

Shared values for millennials

The truth about millennials: shared values

Jamie Finnegan Employee experience 2 Comments

A strong set of shared company and personal values is important to millennials. Company values are often confused with company culture, but the idea that they’re the same thing is a common misconception. While a company’s culture is fluid and shifts over time, its values do not. Company values are often renamed and tweaked over the years but they tend to define the principles and beliefs outlined by the founders and early crew. This is also true of a person’s values: the beliefs and ideals may change form but the substance remains the same. As a millennial I value technology, …

The Humankind Employee Experience Model

The Humankind Employee Experience Model

Samantha Gadd Employee experience Leave a Comment

Over the last five years Humankind has worked with over 400 businesses and learnt a lot about what it takes to grow. We know the ability to attract and retain the best talent underpins success. We believe the best workplaces in the world have the best employee experiences in the world, and we know successful organisations understand that employee experience drives customer experience and therefore better commercial outcomes. For these reasons, we are excited to share our views on what employee experience is, and more importantly what you can focus on to improve your employee experience and achieve business success. …