Week 37, 2018
Employee Experience: Physical, Cultural, and Technical Environments
Each week I share three ideas for how to make work better. Last week, that ment showing how and why the Employee Experience supersedes both Engagement and Productivity. And this week, I address the three environments that Jacob Morgan (author of the Future of Work, amongst other things) suggest make up these experiences:
1. The Physical Environment
In “Where Good Ideas Come From”, author Samual B. Johnson connects innovation and creativity with physical space. And in their handbook Make Space, design consultancy IDEO explains how to design work spaces with innovation in mind. The physical environment constitutes everything we can see, touch, and taste, and smell; it’s the office floor plan, the people we work with, and and everything in between. And it can have a massive impact on the experiences we have at work.
2. The Cultural Environment
If the physical environment is everything you can see and touch, the cultural environment is everything you feel. Grounded in shared values, culture is readily visible in day-to-day practices, exemplified in the words of management, and actuated in the structure and processes that the organization observes. As Morgan puts it, it’s the “vibe” you get when you walk into the office. And while largely intangible, it can absolutely influence on the workplace experience.
3. The Technical Environment
The see, touch, think, and feel of the physical and cultural realms are expanded upon by the tools and processes with which we get stuff done. Included in this third environment are obvious technologies like hardware and software. But it also includes the less obvious “idea technologies” (a term I’ve borrowed from Barry Schwartz) that structure and guide our work. Here, I’m thinking of methodologies like Lean, Agile, SixSigma etc. — all of which can influence our work experience.
Get the Employee Experience right and Engagement and Productivity will follow. And to do so, we must consider that experience across the above three environments. This way, we’ll be able to get our bearings. But it won’t give is a complete picture. And so next week, we’ll consider an additional three dimensions of experience. These dimensions, coupled with the above environments, combine to form an framework that we can use to design great Employee Experiences.
