Improving Employee Experiences
First thing’s first
This is not an article about the importance of employee experience.
If you’re not yet convinced on the business benefits, there are plenty of statistics proving that great employee experience leads to more engaged employees, which leads to happier customers and in turn, heftier bottom lines, all of which can be Googled far quicker than reading this article. Truly, I say this with love: if you’re still at this stage, you’re falling behind.
And, if you’re not yet convinced on the moral question of whether people deserve to feel empowered by the labor we spend the majority of our waking hours performing as our livelihoods, the rest of this article probably won’t appeal to you either.
Now that we have that out of the way, accepting as given that employee experience is important for reasons both economic and humane, let’s skip ahead to the real stuff.
And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life — is anything more basic than that?
— Ursula K Le Guin, The Dispossessed
The kairos is coming from inside the house
Why is employee experience on the minds (and roadmaps) of so many organizations right now? Among the many nuanced reasons, there are two worth highlighting for the ways they’ve combined into a reinforcing feedback loop:
- The last few years <insert knowing look> have made it harder than ever to engage, motivate, and retain employees, whose participation in our globally shared existential polycrisis has, quite understandably, depleted most people’s patience for the type of spiritual suffering described by Le Guin above.
- An entire generation of organizational leadership that embraced human centered design and now enjoys the benefits of its impact on customer experiences, is starting to recognize the applicability of those same practices to employee experiences — and with similar impact, provided they acknowledge employees, like customers, are actually human.
The common thread is experience design; it both illuminates the problem and suggests the solution.
Experience problems call for experience design
So, to all the HR, IT, L&D, People Ops, and Workplace Strategy leaders trying to improve employee experience in your companies, I say:
Congrats, and welcome! You are now experience designers.
Experience designers (and strategists and researchers and whatever other titles we might conjure to fill out the experience zoo), create products, services, and environments that give rise to human experiences. Through active listening and co-creation, we identify unmet needs and advocate for solutions informed by the expertise of an audience’s lived experiences. If you’re committed to offering great employee experiences, you’ll need to do the same, designing with care and attention to both the material stuff and the intangible conditions that make up employee experience.
Sometimes, design happens in completely new contexts or wildly unpredictable domains where little is known about human behavior or expectations… but, employment isn’t one of those domains. Humans have been exchanging labor for compensation for millennia… and there are some very well understood foundational practices that every organization has the power to address, and to build on; you aren’t starting from scratch.
A brief interlude: you have to pay people. None of what follows will make an ounce of difference if an employee isn’t paid fairly for the value they’re creating. While some folks will take a pay cut for a more satisfying role, even the world’s best employee experience isn’t edible. It can’t offset the shrinking power of the dollar when inflation (and profit margins and CEO-to-worker salary ratios) continue to rise. If your organization is focusing on employee experience as a distraction from the uncomfortable fact that it might need to pay its employees more, stop here. Do not pass go. Do not collect your shareholder dividends. Come back when you’ve figured out how to dream bigger than the short term horizons of corporate growth targets, toward the long term potential in marrying human ingenuity with compassion and community.
The puzzle pieces of a great employee experience
There are lots of surveys claiming to have uncovered what employees want, as if “employee” were a universal monolith of an identity. Pick your favorite consultant report from the Google results, or, better yet, skip the noise and consider that all of them wind up generating variations on the following themes, which I have found to be far more actionable for most companies:
Tools + Information + Motivation
Think of it like the car, the map, and the fuel to get you where you need to go. Or, the paintbrush, the paint, and the inspiration to craft the work of art. Or perhaps the utensils, the food science, and the appetite to create the meal. Whichever metaphor serves you best, start there and consider:
Tools
No one will deny that employees need the right tools to do good work. But how do you know what the right tools are? Hint: it’s not always the cheapest or most operationally efficient tools; cost savings in one part of the organizational system can easily translate into more time consuming workflows (and frustration) in another. The choices a company makes about the technology, spaces, and other “stuff” it provides to its employees impacts not only the quality of the work (and value) they can deliver for the business, but also the quality of the experience those employees will have in the work, (along with its cousins: engagement, productivity, retention).
Information
So many organizations separate people from the information they need, often based on misplaced instincts around efficiency, or, worse, mistrust. The issue is usually less about the literal availability of data to individual employees, and more about the way that information is permitted, and even encouraged, to flow throughout an organization. In most (read: complex) business environments, the need-to-know dynamic is counterintuitively counterproductive; organizations will actually enjoy more innovation and resilience through disintermediation: reducing the barriers between the information needed to act and the people who act on it.
Motivation
Motivation is tough. When it’s missing, we can easily misinterpret its absence as laziness, skills gaps, or mismatched values.
When it’s present, we don’t always understand what’s driving it or how to encourage more of it.
Most of us recognize that motivation is highly subjective, and we sense that the more intrinsically motivated we are, the more sustainable the behavior in question will be. In fact, the behavioral science framework known as Self-Determination Theory illuminates the more nuanced differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and outlines the types of dynamics that lead to more self determined, intrinsic motivation.
Even better, Self Determination Theory outlines the relationship between self determined motivation and three key components of experience that contribute to it, called basic psychological needs. Think of them as psychological analogs to basic physical needs, like sleep, food, and movement. Essentially, if these psychological needs are well met, people are more likely to be intrinsically motivated.
Autonomy
Autonomy is the feeling that one has agency and can willingly engage in behaviors of one’s choice. Organizations can support autonomy by empowering more distributed decision making and upholding norms that discourage micromanagement. Consider the dynamics that best enable employees to learn from safe-to-fail experiments and exercise flexibility via strategies like job crafting; encourage these dynamics to scale across the organization.
Competence
Competence is the feeling of mastery and self- efficacy. Organizations can support competence by both empowering its development, and recognizing it when it’s present. Help employees identify growth and development goals that are not only relevant for the business but also personally meaningful to the employee; provide them with the necessary resources and trust to learn and grow; and share ample recognition when it’s achieved.
Relatedness
Relatedness is feeling connected and belonging with others. Organizations can support relatedness by cultivating and protecting inclusive values among their teams. Many leaders understand that diversity — including not only gender and ethnicity, but also age, neurocognition, and everyday perspectives— has proven benefits for organizational innovation and learning, but not everyone recognizes the difference between cultivating real belonging and merely inviting more types of people to fit in. As Brene Brown puts it, “fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be in order to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.”
Missing purpose
Close readers will notice the absence of the word purpose, which is easy to conflate with motivation. Employees don’t necessarily need their employer to provide deeply meaningful purpose in order to have a good experience at work or to deliver great outcomes for customers, but they do need to feel motivated.
Yes, purpose is an incredibly important component of wellbeing, but it’s also incredibly personal, and, frankly, for an employer to believe it plays a deciding role in whether an employee’s experience is purposeful, is naive at best, insulting at worst. Individual purpose is constructed by people as an integration of highly unique variables such as values, cultural norms, mental models, and other social ingredients that no company has a right, let alone access, to govern. Instead, companies can operate with their own emergent organizational purpose, and if done with integrity, can successfully attract and hire people whose personal values resonate with said purpose; this will make it easier to support their basic psychological needs.
Focus on employees’ motivation, provide them appropriate tools, and trust them with information; purpose will take care of itself.
How to put the puzzle pieces together
Understanding the strategic what of employee experience is necessary, but not sufficient. Organizations also need the tactics of how. The good news is that it’ll look familiar to teams that already embrace experience design, and it’s entirely attainable for those who don’t.
Regardless of the experience design process diagram you like best, you’ll want to aim for three key practices:
Start with understanding
Learn about your employees. Talk to them. Listen to them. Find out what tools and information they really need. Find out what stands between them and higher expressions of their autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Surveys and listening programs and DEX platforms can be valuable here, but nothing beats the power of narrative sense making: asking employees to share stories of their own past experiences that uncover the intangibles that surveys will miss… and engaging them to craft the stories they want to be part of in the future. Narrative sense making seeks to answer the question, “How do I make sense of the world so I can act in it?” by empowering people to interpret and give meaning to their own experiences, which in turn informs decision making to answer the question of “How do I know enough to decide which action to take?”
Put things in context
With a solid foundation of insights shared from, and interpreted by, employees, you can zoom out, in both space and time, to better understand the connections between components of the system and the flows of information, influence, and value between them.
Visualizing both the chronological (e.g. journey maps, service blueprints) and contextual (e.g. ecosystem maps, stakeholder diagrams) aspects of employee experience can highlight the places in an organizational ecosystem where small interventions might have meaningful impacts.
The goal of zooming out isn’t to forsake the trees for the forest, but to temporarily get the bird’s eye view so that you can gain meaningful perspective about the individual components. Employee experience is almost always mediated by the dynamics of a complex adaptive system (i.e. the team, organization, and wider industry). But the task of improving employee experience is often siloed into local territories such as HR or People Ops, who aren’t necessarily operating across the whole system. When you widen your lens to include the intangible web of influences around employees, you do so not to change the system as a whole, but to better recognize the opportunities to intervene in ways that either directly improve individual experiences, or teach you how to do so.
Try small interventions
Just as Tip O’Neill quipped that “all politics is local,” the same could be said of experience design. While we seek to gain a systems level appreciation of the dynamics at play, that sense making eventually needs to inform concrete decision making — and designing experiences inside complex systems is best achieved by implementing small interventions in relatively low stakes scenarios as a collection of safe-to-fail experiments that inform next steps. (Only then can you eventually scale from small pilots to organization-wide interventions).
Essentially, by understanding the gaps between employee-told stories of the present with those of a desirable future, and zooming in and out in both space and time, the specific tools, information, or psychological needs that require attention will make themselves known. All that’s left to do is… do something about it, which usually boils down to one or more of three potential tactics, each of which can be explored through any number of test-and-learn scenarios:
- Provide the needed thing directly
- Co-create the enabling conditions for said thing to emerge
- Remove the barriers preventing the thing from emerging
Easier said than done, but the process is so beautifully unique to each organizational ecosystem that it also means these three tactics manifest in ways that are similarly unique, and most relevant, to your organizational culture and its rituals, norms, and values. That’s a good thing.
Effective organizations are communities of human beings, not collections of human resources.
— Henry Mintzberg
TL;DR
For the skimming types, here’s your cheat sheet:
Great employee experience is built around:
Tools | Information | Motivation: Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness
Figuring out how to meet these needs requires that you:
Start with understanding. Put things in context. Try small interventions.
Rinse, repeat.
