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 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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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. …