Employee Experiences, not Experience

We all know a great employee experience leads to improved engagement and performance but I’ve often thought the concept of employee experience feels abstract and hard to conceptualise into practical application. My background is engineering and I do like to break things down into components. Yes, there are many EX Models and Frameworks out there - do a Google search and select images!

At first glance, these frameworks seem to make sense. They sound logical, feel aspirational and list all the right words - meaningful work, supportive managers, positive environment etc. etc. But how does this translate to everyday work? What does it ACTUALLY mean? And how can we create such an experience?

We’re fortunate to work with a number of organisations that ‘do’ employee experience incredibly well, and lately I’ve been observing and unpacking how these organisations approach EX.Something that struck me, is they bring a different mindset. Whether it's conscious or not, they think in terms of experiences, not a singular employee experience. We’re talking an onboarding experience, an exit experience, a goal-setting experience, a performance experience, a change-of-role experience, a career development experience, etc. etc.This mindset immediately makes the abstract concept of employee experience more tangible and real, something that I can lay my engineering hands on!

We can now take stock of the different experiences in any organisation, prioritise the order of which experiences to work on, and get focused on what it means at a practical level.I’ve already got some exciting tips for how to tackle this process and I’ll be sharing more on this as we focus in on experiences, not experience.