Using CX tools for EX

Can I use my CX system to measure EX?

Michael Carden 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 …

A Covid lesson in change management

A COVID Lesson in Change Management

Kai Crow Employee experience, Health & Safety, Wellness Leave a Comment

I was talking to my friend Jacinda recently, and a story she told me summed up so much about what is wrong with the way many businesses manage crucial changes. Her change management story starts, like many others, in 2020 with COVID-19 and its impacts on the business she works in: a large print company. Faced with a rapid decrease in demand, the company was forced to make some tough, fast decisions. Many of which turned out to be costly mistakes. Under sudden financial pressure, the company had to lay-off staff and same up with a plan that involved shutting …

Building resilience in the workplace

Building resilience in the workplace

Karen Rayner Health & Safety, Leadership, Wellness Leave a Comment

Resilience is the ability to adapt and recover – to bounce back – following a challenge or problem. Resilient people respond well to a changing environment, deal with obstacles and move on quickly. Resilient companies do the same. As we work on ways to cope with the impact of Covid-19, it’s the perfect time to ask: how do we build resilience at work? Why is workplace resilience important? You can’t plan for everything.  Take workplace health and safety as an example. The traditional approach is to analyse possible emergencies, threats and hazards, and to document the things people need to …

The Case for Happiness

The case for happiness

Michael Carden 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. …

LGBTQ+ D&I - thanks for the rainbow logo

LGBTQ+ D&I? Thanks for the rainbow logo… but let’s do better.

Leah Chaney Diversity & inclusion, Employee experience Leave a Comment

I’ve spent the last decade of my leadership career and my entire professional career being an out lesbian, and along the way, I’ve experienced a range of responses to who I identified as as a person. I’ve worked on teams where I was respected as an individual, and others where I felt like a check on a diversity and inclusion checklist. I’ve learned along the way how to understand what it looks like to support the LGBTQ+ community — what a true advocate and champion looks like — and how to weed out imposters. Does the company do what it …

Employee feedback - getting started

Employee experience feedback: a quick guide to getting started

Karen Rayner Employee experience, Feedback Leave a Comment

Quick recap: employee experience is everything people perceive, think, feel, do or encounter at work. If this experience is negative it can lead to poor performance, low engagement and unfavorable business results. So you really want EX to be positive, and to make sure, you need to ask employees for their feedback. Getting started with EX feedback Talking to people is one of the best ways to understand what’s going on in your teams. So, don’t worry about investing in tech when you’re first starting your EX journey; just get talking! You can build from there. Talk it out Collecting …

Employee engagement: we need better answers

Employee Engagement: it’s time to demand better answers

Jason Lauritsen Engagement 1 Comment

One of the things that makes me crazy about the work of employee engagement is the sloppiness we allow around how we define and approach it. As I talk to leaders within organizations who are currently spending enormous sums of money on measuring and attempting to improve engagement, they struggle with basic questions like “How do you define employee engagement?” and “How does employee engagement drive your organization’s success?” If we can’t clearly define this work and why it matters, how can we ever expect to make a huge impact, let alone be taken seriously? We have to do better. …

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 …

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 …

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 …