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 …

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 …

Employee experience design

Designing engaging employee experiences

Jason Lauritsen Employee experience, Engagement Leave a Comment

Over the past year or so, the phrase “employee experience” has barged its way into conversations about human resources and employee engagement. The more you see the phrase, the easier it is to dismiss as simply a new buzzword; repackaging the same old HR stuff under a new label. Don’t make that mistake. The employee’s experience of work drives their engagement and that engagement level drives their performance.  If we really want to find ways to sustain higher levels of employee engagement and performance, we need to design the work experience to be more engaging. The importance of employee experience design …

Millennials: not all bean bags and free lunches

The truth about millennials: it’s not all bean bags and free lunches

Jamie Finnegan Employee experience, Engagement 3 Comments

Welcome to the first article on millennial employee experience from finder.com.au Head of Talent Jamie Finnegan: part two coming soon! Millennials. I’m sure if you’re reading this you’ve heard all about them. They’re born between the early-1980s and mid-1990s and they account for a large proportion of the modern-day workforce. They struggle to get out of bed, make breakfast for themselves, and they’d rather eat avocado on toast than save for a mortgage… I’ve attended and spoken at a lot of events over the past year or so and millennials seem to be a fairly hot topic of discussion. The …

Response rate matters

Why response rate matters more than score

Michael Carden 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? …

Open source employee engagement

Open source employee engagement

Karen Rayner 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 …

Fairness is an employee experience thing

Fairness is an employee experience thing

Philip Carden Employee experience, Engagement, Rewards & recognition 3 Comments

Fairness is a thing. More of a thing than it used to be. A thing with the ability to upset elections and change voting patterns. Democracy has delivered a few well-deserved reminders of late that people really do care about fairness. Those people are voters and customers. They are also employees. The science of measuring of employee engagement and mood is well-established. And while it is straightforward to demonstrate the connection between engagement and enterprise value, it’s  difficult to translate better measurements into building a better employee experience. It often feels like we get tied up in theory and reporting …

The observer effect is not about cats in boxes

The observer effect:  the surprising role of structured questions

Philip Carden Employee experience, Engagement, Feedback, Motivation

How do we measure things like engagement and experience? We ask questions. But what if asking the question changes the very thing we are trying to measure? Here’s a newsflash: That’s exactly what happens. And it’s not a bad thing — in fact it’s a huge opportunity, because the questions themselves can be subtle but powerful change agents. The observer effect: simply observing a situation or phenomenon necessarily changes that phenomenon (a fact commonly cited in physics). We’re huge fans of open questions, but here are three good reasons why interactions should start with carefully chosen structured questions. Three good reasons that …

The anonymity paradox

The Anonymity Paradox

Michael Carden 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 …