Celebrating culture

Celebrating culture together, alone

Karen Rayner 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 …

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 …

The alpha female

The plight of the alpha female: why women say they prefer working for men

Sandy Burgham Diversity & inclusion, Leadership, Organizational culture 3 Comments

Recently a colleague was relaying a conversation she’d had with another woman regarding how they both prefer working for male CEOs. She and her friend had both experienced working for male and female bosses. “We were just saying that female CEOs are always having to prove themselves… the trouble with alpha females …… they have something to prove …and they show their insecurity” she bemoaned. While I like to think I am a good listening ear, I cut her short. In fact, to be honest, I might have even talked over her and started womansplaining what was going on. Over …

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 …

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, …