I’ve recently been on two podcasts over the last month:
Across both conversations, a similar question kept coming up: Does EX actually deliver value and if so how? Greg put it another way: Does EX have teeth?
I was a little bit poorly, so if you can get through my mumbling (thanks Day & Night) you’ll probably find some useful insights. But thought I’d share my lens on this in the traditional format of written word…
Defining EX
If you ask five people what employee experience actually does, you’ll get 50 different answers. One will say surveys, another will say internal comms, someone will probably mention wellbeing, and before you know it, you’re running an all-hands event. This is all well and good if you want a function that’s expected to improve the experience of work without actually having much influence over it.
A pattern I’ve noticed is that many organisations have adopted the term “Employee Experience” (EX) without actually defining and agreeing on what it means, what it does and how it does it
Too often it’s a fragmentation of teams just doing stuff with good intentions.
One team looks after engagement, another team looks after comms, another’s doing some well-being stuff. These things are all useful, but often they’re working through different datasets, different priorities, and often different ideas. Then we wonder why the employee experience looks like spaghetti.
This usually results in problems getting missed, efforts getting duplicated, and friction often going unaddressed and new growth opportunities never getting identified.
As the saying goes, “If everyone owns it, nobody owns it.”
Two things tend to happen when we retrofit EX in the current system
Either it gets folded into another function like comms
We assume it’s something everyone should own.
The issue is, if you put EX into a team like comms, guess what? You get more comms. You put it into well-being, you get more well-being events, and so on.
Now a smart thing to say would be “everyone owns it,” and I can agree with this, but then who’s accountable? How is it getting measured? How is it improving value and creating value? What’s the weight of this in your day to day role come performance time? Who’s going to drive it forward versus just keeping things exactly as they are? All of a sudden, it starts to feel impossible for everyone to own it without radically changing the whole system it operates in.
What should EX actually do?
I believe EX should be defined by the value it creates for two internal customers: the employee and the business. My preference is for it to sit within the people and culture as a separate function. For ease of reading this article I will now call the employee and the business “internal customers”
At a high level, EX should help organisations understand how work is experienced, identify where value is being created and where Experience Leak is happening, and bring the right people together to improve it.
Experience Leak can show up as friction, duplication, or poor interactions by getting in the way of value for one or both internal customers. Then look at it across two buckets, if you like.
Friction Markets this is where these problems are driving unneeded effort, costing internal customers time, effort, and money. The role here is to elevate the experience by removing these frictions from the experience
Opportunity Markets these are unmet needs that lead to better experiences, products, services, and innovations for our internal customers. This is where EX should originate the thinking, originating new ways of working and offerings to our internal customers that creates value.
To create this, of course, you’re going to need a multidisciplinary team, one that brings together research, experience and service design, innovation, and an understanding of team dynamics and effectiveness. A team of what I call X shape people
EX doesn’t need to own everything that shapes the employee experience. But it does need the mandate to understand it, challenge it and help improve it. Ultimately, the test isn’t just whether we’re improving the experience of work. It’s whether those improvements help both our customer gain more value from it and thus for the external customer.
6 responsibilities for an EX team
When I think about what a progressive EX function should be, it comes down to six threaded responsibilities that drive compounding value for our internal customers.
1. Continuous listening and discovery
It starts with listening beyond a typical annual survey. I believe listening should be done at three levels, strategic, experience and situational (this is one for another newsletter) but really it means getting curious about our internal customer. Yes, using surveys has a place, but if you want to create a best in class EX function you need to get super close to the customer through interviews, focus groups, pop-up shops, observations, immersions, and spending time in the trenches with the teams and leaders for me.
Listening and discovery has two lenses.
Reactive response: responding to problems and signals that are already coming through the feedback and experience and operational data
Proactive response: this is looking into the future, spending more time with our internal customers and discovering what they might need next
Both approaches need to lead somewhere, often I come back to three questions
What are we hearing?
What are we doing about it?
What have we decided not to do, and why?
After that, the next biggest thing is closing the loop and showing employees that their input matters and that it leads to action, while also showing the business the cost of attention and the cost if we do nothing. This is often the most overlooked aspect of listening and discovery. After this, it’s about moving from looking wide to looking narrow that where the second responsibility, comes in
2. Team MRIs and effectiveness
A wide survey helps us see where to look. A Team MRI allows us to focus. The second responsibility is being able to identify and diagnose how a particular team or function is working and how effective it is. It’s here where I believe EX works with teams and their managers to understand where they’re performing well, where they’re misfiring and underperforming, and whether both the team and manager see the situation differently.
This diagnostic then lends itself to a more sleeves-rolled-up approach to practical changes such as new ways of working, behavioural experimentation, or just targeted support and coaching for managers. The important thing is that this gives employees a specific intervention that is shaped around their specific team needs and their lived day to day experience at work
3. Journey Design
The third responsibility is journey design bringing the disciplines of service and experience design to allow us to look at the portfolio of journeys that often stretches across several teams, functions, processes, and services.
What journey design helps EX see the wider journey, but also the parts and how they’re connected, and where friction may be causing a poor experience. It also allows us to see the front-stage experience (what someone actually experiences), but also the backstage experience (the workings and mechanics of what creates the experience in the first place) and ultimately what might be causing it to fail. Journey design allows us to identify duplication of work and smash silo thinking while also delivering a more coherent journey for our internal customers
4. Employee Valued Experience/Proposition
Every organisation has an employee value proposition (EVP). This is ultimately the promise it makes to its employees. Now, over my years of designing these, I’ve moved to what I call an Employee Valued Experience (EVE), because it starts with what employees actually value in the experience.
The difference isn’t just rename. An EVP often communicates an Instagram like promise of what its like to work somewhere. An EVE starts with the livid reality, warts and all, it asks what needs to change to make that promise true.
Moving to an EVE rather than an EVP can help a business do three things:
Exposes organisational rejection before it happens. By understanding how the organisation actually works, we can identify where its systems, behaviours, and ways of working might actually reject the very talent it’s trying to attract a bit like how the body can reject an organ (this is often seen when you hire progressive talent and then tell them not to do the thing you hired them for as it causes too much change)
Removes unicorn blinker, This often happens when the EVP is given to Comms and marketing, who create the image of this amazing unicorn organisation. Only for new talent to get there, and see what they thought was a unicorn organisation is actually a donkey with a party hat on. This isnt marketing and Comms fault they’re just doing their job… often too well
Helps a business understand the talent it really needs and reduce the cost of early attrition and repeated.
An EVE doesnt just sell the reality it also helps the organisation understand where that reality needs to change, while also making a strength of what already works. Don’t get me wrong, EX should still partner with the branding and use really good copywriting. That’s a given, but the EX function should really own it and make sure it’s built on truth and not glitter.
5. Experience Principles and capability building
People and culture functions are never short of activity, programmes, campaigns, platforms, and so on. The EX function should really help HR ask whether that activity is creating the value it was intended to create for our internal customers, and whether it aligns with the experience we’re trying to create, and how we could elevate what’s already in flight.
EX’s role here is to help the people teams move beyond programmes and apply a SPIES mindset, thinking in terms of subscriptions, products, Interactions, experiences, and services that change how teams design and what they challenge
What needs are we actually addressing?
What problems are we actually solving?
What needs sunsetting because its creating no value?
Is our offering creating value to keep our internal customer subscribed
Where do we passing effort on to our internal customers when we should be removing it from the experience or service
EX can give HR a set of design principles and a common language for understanding our internal customers needs at a deeper level
People and culture spend a lot of time building capability across the business, but who’s doing it for the people team? I believe EX can work alongside these teams on real problems, helping them get better at discovery: working out which problems are worth solving, testing assumptions, and designing services, products, and experiences that create value
6. People Innovation and Incubation
The final responsibility is helping the organisations move beyond Best Practice Blindness. A common failure in many organisations especially those that want to attract and keep hold of talent is they see another company doing something interesting, and then decide to copy it and see it fail. This blindness often happens when we copy the best practice, without realising the context of why it originally worked hasn’t travelled with it
The power of EX Incubation comes when we need to originate something new.
Let’s say performance management comes up time and time again. Employees and managers are both finding it exhausting, confusing, or just ultimately pointless. Now, simply copying another form of performance management and improving the technology might do very little to help. This is where I think the EX function should be fundamentally questioning the approach itself
EX should help the organisation take a people problem into an internal incubator, a space to co-develop and test new possibilities and ask, “What if we completely reimagine this thing?”
Now, some experiments will fall flat. They should thats the idea. The goal of experimentation is learning not instant success. Based on that learning, we can understand where it create value and then decide whether to adopt it, scale or stop it in record time…no more 12 month run times to roll out a recognition platform nobody uses.
What should your EX team take on?
I want to acknowledge that the shape of the EX function will ultimately depend on the starting point of the organisation. Sometimes things like comms and engagement may sit in this function sometimes not.
For me employee communications can sit inside EX when they’re treated as experiences to be designed, grounded in employees’ needs, and connected to the wider journey, and judged by whether they help people in their experience of work The same thinking applies to events, town halls, playbacks, and well-being events.
Workplace design, however, is firmly part of the EX for me. The spaces, how they feel, how people can find their way around, and how they support collaboration are all part of that workplace experience and that employee experience. It’s here where you’d be working with external vendors and providers to design and craft that space
Back to Greg’s question
I like to reframe this question. Rather than “Does it have teeth?”, the better question is “What gives EX teeth?”
The team responsible for delivering a system, a service, or a process should stay accountable for it. I am not saying that we need to reimagine the whole P&C function. EX should own the capability to understand and improve the experience across those teams, and it should sit within the people function as a strategic peer level function (such as L&D, talent, reward, and so on).
The importance is that the EX team has a remit to challenge how the people function thinks about and designs for value creation and experience. All this requires senior sponsorship, a progressive modern thinker in the Head of People / HR role along with access to decision makers, and the authority to bring teams together around insights.
At some organisations this could mean reporting directly to the CPO with a connection to the CEO
EX gets its teeth when it has the mandate, autonomy, and capability to challenge and redesign the experience of work and the value it creates. Without those, it risks becoming another nice to have function talking alot about holistic employee experience without the power to actually improve it
