What is Employee Experience (and why does it matter)?

Today’s frontier firms may have won their ground by putting the customer experience first, but Sam Gadd believes those of tomorrow will be the ones that prioritise the experience of employees.

“People don’t need organisations, but organisations need people. And so really for organisations to remain relevant and then survive into the future, they’re going to need to attract and retain the best people,” says Gadd.

The founder and co-CEO of Excellent, a platform for Employee Experience (EX) leaders, Gadd is a leading exponent of EX and one of the contributors to the EX Manifesto, which outlines what EX is and why it matters to organisations and employees.

So what is EX?

“How we define employee experience is the individual experience of work,” Gadd explains. “It’s your whole experience of work – it’s what goes on in your mind and your heart and the interactions that you have with people around you.”

While workplace culture is the collective experience of work and is company-centric, EX, she explains, is employee-centric.

Why does this matter? Says Gadd: “The gig economy is growing at three times the rate of the US workforce and it’s pretty obvious a lot of people are completely opting out of being a part of an organisation …because organisations’ value propositions aren’t appealing anymore. So organisations really need to think about if they want to attract and keep great people, they need to be learning about these people, figuring out what they need, and building [that] with them.“

Organisations can’t serve customers without employees. Employees serve customers, not organisations. So the only job for an organisation is to serve the employees. And then the employees’ job is to serve the customers. So it just doesn’t make sense to be anything but an employee first.”

While the idea of putting employees ahead of customers might be controversial (Gadd notes some pulled out of being named contributors to the manifesto because this conflicted with their company’s stated values) data is emerging on the business case for EX. She points to a recent HBR piece, which linked to research showing a company could increase revenues by up to 50 percent by improving the employee experience.

But it isn’t about table tennis and fruit baskets in the lunchroom.

“A lot of people think about employee experience in exactly that way; they think about the icing on the cake rather than the cake itself. But when we look at employee experience, we look at four types of experiences: purpose experiences, relationship experiences, enablement experiences and performance experiences. And all of these areas represent four massive buckets of different things.”

Enablement, for example, could encompass everything from the physical workspace and the tools, technology and processes used, to how jobs are organised and knowledge stored and managed.

To find the biggest opportunities, leaders need to embark on a process of research and discovery with employees to find where these lie and together co-design what the employee experience looks like for their organisation. For startups, she says, simple stay interviews can be a good place to kick off the discovery process. '

“But it really starts with the founder and the leaders believing that their employees have a perspective that’s worth hearing. It’s believing that the answers to a lot of the questions sit within our organisations and that they [leaders] don’t have to solve them. That mindset is critical for employee experience.”

‍What does EX look like on the ground?

Kirsti Grant is VP of People Experience (PX) at Auror, a retail crime intelligence and loss prevention platform that has a team of more than 130 working in Auckland, remotely around other New Zealand locations, and across hubs in Melbourne, Denver and London. Here she shares five ways the company brings EX to life.

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1. Get feedback – and act on it: Having a level of openness and transparency around

information is really important because people need to feel comfortable and safe to

share their perspectives. We use a tool called 15Five.

Every week our team fills out a weekly check-in that takes

them 15 minutes to complete, then it takes their manager five minutes to review. The

whole premise is to help managers have quality one-on-ones with their team members.

Using this tool we start to be able to see patterns and trends and we’re not waiting for an

annual engagement survey; we’re getting this feedback every single week so we’re

addressing things early.

A key thing is you have to be able to act on the feedback. The reason why the team

continues to give us the level of feedback and perspectives they do is because we do

something with it.

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2. Invest in a people leader early: Even if you have someone for just for a day a week,

building in those practices early changes the game with your retention and engagement.

You have people like Kimberley Gilmour from Sprinklr, who has just started up as part of

the Talent Army brand and has a team of people available to outsource as those

fractional people leaders.

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3. Be transparent: We’ve done things like build a company-wide progression framework,

so regardless of your role at Auror, you can see where you sit in that framework and

what you need to do to take it to that next level. Aligned to that, we launched transparent

salary bands. For every level and role group you can see what the salary band is, where

you sit in that band and what you need to do to get to the next one.

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We also share our financial position and performance every quarter with the team.

Giving that context to people helps them understand why we do what we do as well.

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4. Prioritise wellbeing: For people to do their best work, they have to be feeling good. We

launched shorter work weeks, so on a Friday afternoon everyone finishes early. There’s

a lot happening in a fast-paced tech company, so by us all having time off together each

week, nothing happens in your absence. When you’re enabling your team to have

happy, healthy, strong lives outside of work, they bring their best work.

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5. Develop leaders: Last year we put 40 of our people leaders through a leadership

development programme. That was a full 12-month period of both workshops and

coaching in smaller groups. We also talk to the team about how we believe anyone can

be a leader, so we had another 30 seats available for anyone else who was interested in

levelling up in that area – and all 30 seats were taken. To get everyone on the same

page around those leadership principles has been fantastic.

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As told to Caitlin Sykes

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