Hello, or should I say Hola, as I am writing this in sunny Spain. As much as I would love to say am in fully holiday mode, am really not. In fact and helping my parent with their home renovation… DIY Dan here to help

Anyways…

Today’s Focus:

TL;DR: Five lenses that tell you what to fund first, what to fix, what to cut, and why your wow moments keep dying on arrival.

You've got an £800k employee experience budget. Your programmes are running, your team is sharp, your engagement scores sit somewhere between respectable and good.

The team proposes three SPIE’s (Services, Products, Interaction and Experience) A surprise recognition programme. A personalised work anniversary programme. Maybe you paint some car spaces purple for special moments. An HR systems upgrade.

You approve the recognition programme first. Highest emotional impact, best culture story. Then the anniversary programme. The HR systems upgrade gets partial funding.

I've watched this exact thing go down even at board level. The exciting thing wins first because it's the easiest to sell internally. The foundational, often structural, thing gets the scraps because nobody gets promoted for fixing payroll, right. Eight months later, the budget's spent but the return hasn't compounded.

Results review. Engagement scores are flat. HR queries about payroll errors are up 12% with tickets open for six weeks. While 0.0001% of employees are receiving personalised anniversary messages.

The SPIES were good. The sequence was wrong, and the return on that £800k is nothing but a pipe dream.

This is what happens when you treat every investment as if it sits on the same curve. The investment is fine, the sequence is what's killing the return. And there's a framework that shows exactly where.

The Five curves

The reality is not all SPIES are equal weight, even if our individual bias and solution seduction might say they are. They're not.

Our people and customers' needs operate on five fundamentally different satisfaction curves. No, I'm not talking about hierarchy of needs (thank the lord), however once you see them you will overnight start to validate the value and see the sequence of how it should work.

I use five lenses for this. Three tell you what kind of need you're investing in. Two tell you whether to keep it or change it.

Familiar Firsts: are the things employees expect to just work. Payroll, reliable equipment, psychological safety, clarity about what success looks like. Think about taps in a public bathroom. Nobody praises working taps. But non-working taps ruin everything downstream. When these are present, they don't increase satisfaction. They prevent its opposite. The moment payroll breaks, the punishment is immediate and total.

Brilliant Basics: are the next layer: taking those familiar things and making them faster, smoother, more predictable. The tap works, but the water takes five seconds to warm up and the spray is so weak you're basically rinsing one finger at a time. It technically works. You're still frustrated. More responsive HR support, faster onboarding, better quality feedback. More in, more out, up to a point. This is the lever most People teams pull first because it makes sense on a slide and it feels like progress. The problem is it feels like progress even when the familiar firsts underneath are falling apart.

Micro Wows: are the unexpected things above standard. The taps work great, the water's warm, and now there's a shelf above the splash zone where you can rest your phone. You didn't expect it. You didn't need it. But it made you smile. These are the surprise recognition moments, the gestures that cost little but mean a lot. They create the stories people tell at dinner. Which is exactly why they get funded first.

Here's where the sequence breaks down, even in organisations that are investing well. The employee feels the recognition, then hits a payroll error, and the delight is wiped out instantly. A purple car space means nothing when you can't trust the number on your payslip.

Each curve responds to investment differently, and treating all three identically is the reason most People budgets generate activity without the return compounding.

What happens over time

Micro Wows don't stay Micro Wows. They decay into Brilliant Basics, then into Familiar Firsts. This is what most organisations miss entirely.

Free hotel WiFi was a genuine Micro Wow in 2010. Now it's a Familiar First. If it's absent, you're furious. The curve changed completely, and most organisations never update their budgets to reflect the shift. They're still funding yesterday's wow at yesterday's prices while it quietly becomes an expectation that generates zero edge.

The same thing happens inside organisations. The flexible working policy that felt groundbreaking three years ago is now table stakes. The wellbeing app that wowed at launch is now expected infrastructure (to be fair it's probably still not being used). All of these are now a Familiar First, and removing them triggers fury. When did you last go wow when someone said you have access to Headspace? Offer them Netflix instead and you'll get a bigger wow moment. I remember a conversation with a CPO who said "why don't we give our people a swimming pool?" Because it'll be like your gym, a dead zone. Wow can be led with good intent but still not be wow.

This is the treadmill. You have to continuously innovate your Micro Wows because yesterday's wow becomes today's broken expectation. But you can't run a treadmill on a cracked foundation, because nothing compounds when the familiar firsts aren't solid.

Where the use actually is

Get Familiar Firsts wrong and nothing else lands. I've seen organisations pour millions into recognition platforms while their people can't get a straight answer about how their own pay and reward scheme works. As useful as a chocolate teapot.

Brilliant Basics are worth funding, after the familiar firsts pass the threshold. The mistake is treating them as the starting point rather than the second floor.

Micro Wows create the stories people tell at dinner. Worth designing for. They just can't carry the whole experience on their own.

The last two lenses are about what to cut and what to open up.

Feature or Flaw. Before your next budget cycle, audit every initiative with one question: is this actually improving the experience, or did we add it thinking it would? Think about a motion-sensor tap that only activates when you wave at it from the wrong angle. Someone designed it thinking it was an upgrade and a cost saving, and instead you're stood there flapping like a tasered pigeon only to give up and use the thing they want you to stop using, the paper towels. In EX terms, the mandatory engagement platform nobody asked for, the wellness initiative that creates more admin than relief. If it's not landing, strip it out. Run this check quarterly.

Pick on Purpose. When designing any programme, ask: are we giving people one route or a choice? One tap, one temperature, one pressure, everybody gets the same water whether they wanted warm or cold. Put a mixer tap in and the person controls the experience. Same cost, completely different outcome. Create choice. Not unlimited, but enough that people feel personalisation rather than compliance. Apply this at the design stage, not after launch.

The reality is, most HR budgets still go to Brilliant Basics and Micro Wows while Familiar Firsts are inconsistently met. Psychological safety differs wildly by team. Equipment doesn't work. What counts as success is ambiguous.

Where do people actually leave? They leave where they didn't feel safe, where pay was unfair, where they couldn't do their job with basic resources. Nobody has ever resigned because the anniversary card wasn't personalised enough. They leave because the taps didn't work this is where Experience Leak lives.

Here's how to sort any initiative into the right curve.

Here's the measurement problem, A 6/10 on a Familiar First is catastrophic, it means 40% of your people are experiencing broken 101 fundamentals.

A 7/10 on a Micro Wow is fine. The same number means completely different things, and most measurement systems can't tell the difference.

Map every SPIE to its curve. Run the removal question. If people would be angry because something they depend on just broke, that's a Familiar First. Fund it before anything else touches a slide deck.

Check for features that became flaws. Strip them. Build in choice where it matters. And stop funding yesterday's wow at today's prices.

A wow moment built on unreliable familiar firsts is just a very well-designed disappointment.

Every budget cycle is a sequencing decision. Get the sequence right and the return compounds. Get it wrong and you're decorating a building with dodgy plumbing.

Fix the taps first.