What is Employee Experience? Employee experience is what an employee experiences: employees’ perceptions about how well their employer supports their intended outcomes. Employee experience is measured by employees’ realities vs. their expectations.

See also: Employee Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: Foundational, Intermediate, Ongoing.
6. Apply ongoing wisdom with your whole department in the Experience Value Exchange.

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Employee value proposition is what’s promised to employees (in terms of their working environment, job role, compensation, benefits, and overall experience to be expected with the employer’s ecosystem) in return for the employee’s commitment (in terms of time, personal expenses, and energy).

What is a Good Employee Experience? A good employee experience is a 1-to-1 ratio for what an employee experiences versus the employee’s expectations.

Expectations are based on an employees’ intended outcomes as an employee: earnings, lifestyle, sense of purpose, professional growth, and so on. Good employee experience is ease of work, where ease means minimizing negatives related to employees’ intended outcomes.

How Does Employee Experience Impact Customer Experience? There is a symbiotic relationship between good customer experience and good employee experience. Salaries, budgets, and profit-sharing are funded by revenue from customers. If customers stop buying, jobs aren’t needed.

Accordingly, employees should be selected, onboarded, developed, advanced, rewarded, and compensated within the context of what’s expected by the employer’s core-growth customers. Good employee experience is ease of work and good customer experience is ease of doing business, where ease means minimizing negatives related to intended outcomes.

What is Employee Experience Management? Employee experience management is what an employer does to react to or be proactive for employee experience, to (a) retain employees, (b) increase employee productivity, or (c) engage employees as brand allies to attract new talent.

Note that these objectives are employer’s objectives rather than employees’ objectives.

Why Employee Experience Matters? Employee experience matters because you rely on employees to create and deliver value to customers, who are the source of budgets, salaries, and dividends. The cost of poor employee experience is staggering: low productivity, low morale affecting brand reputation and customer experience, disruption of business processes and organizational knowledge as employees leave, high costs of attracting and onboarding replacement employees with their delayed time to productivity, and so on.

What is Employee Experience Leadership? Employee experience leadership is alignment between what the employer provides and what the employee expected. It elevates employee experience management by being more employee-centric than employer-centric.

A prerequisite is company-wide alignment between what’s promised to customers and what customers experience. This is because waste with customers translates to waste with employees, and vice versa.

What is Employee Engagement? Employee engagement is active involvement of an employee based on their passion for their employer and job. Employers want to engage employees in fulfilling the full potential of their job, lengthening tenure, and advocating for new hires to join the firm. Ideally, employee engagement is motivated and measured by making a difference for customers as the source of jobs. If so, everyone wins: customers have less burden, profit margin increases, employees transition from trouble-shooting to value-creating efforts, and so on.

Best Ways for Measuring Employee Experience? World-class Voice of Employee (VoE) discovers and closes gaps between what’s promised and what’s delivered, from employees’ perspective, and gaps between what’s important to customers and what’s important to employees.

1) Allow employees to give feedback anytime, anywhere, any way they prefer.

a) Make it safe for employees to share their concerns, complaints, suggestions, and experiences.
b) Enable employees to give feedback in any format: photo, video, verbal, written, or ratings.
c) Invest in text-mining and similar software capabilities to make the greatest use of almost-free VoE.

2) Emphasize transparency, respect, urgency, and cross-organizational collaboration in acting on VoE.

a) Educate all managers in your company of their performance standards based on employee expectations.
b) Prevent recurrence of prevalent employee issues.
c) Check employee acknowledgement of issue prevention trends you’re tracking.

Mature VoE (a) operationalizes the closure of these gaps by hooking into existing managerial routines, (b) aligns employee insight to each management group’s language and routines, (c) aligns each management group’s decisions and actions with employee insight, and (d) embeds employee experience criteria into managerial routines (e.g. reviews, approvals, development).

Typical VoE is a combination of employee onboarding surveys, climate surveys (opinions and satisfaction about the organization), culture surveys (reality-check of corporate values), engagement surveys (commitment, motivation, sense of purpose, passion for work and the organization), employee advisory councils, and suggestion boxes (online and offline).

What is Employee Centric Culture? Employee-centric culture is the degree to which employees are respected in managers’ decision-making and actions.

(Culture is a group’s ways of thinking and doing, and centric means what’s at the center of their attention.)

Ideally, employees are at the center of managers’ attention within the context of meeting or exceeding customers’ needs.

This makes sense since customers are the source of salaries, budgets, and dividends.

For example, HCL Technologies’ CEO inverted the organizational pyramid to emphasize the necessity of every group across the company to support employees meeting customer needs. By implementing this, the company transformed from a struggling existence to fastest-growing in their industry within 5 years.

What is Employee Experience Strategy? Employee experience strategy is executives’ shared vision on how employee-oriented management will maximize value.

1) Start with your high-potential employees’ expectations as your company’s EX goal.

2) Reality-check your corporate objectives, values, structure, cap-ex criteria, and so on relative to the EX goal.

3) Reality-check your reviews, agendas, development objectives, recognition criteria, and so on relative to the EX goal.

4) Plan how you will bring to life and make these a way of life throughout your company: voice of employees, employee intelligence, employee lifetime value, employee experience improvement, design, and innovation, employee engagement, and EX performance metrics.

How Can You Improve Employee Experience? There are 3 levels of employee experience improvement: resolve the instance, prevent recurrence, and prevent occurrence. Driving urgent, enduring change is your goal for employee experience improvement.

1. 1) Listen to employees. What is costing them the most worry, time, and resources?
    
   • These are your top improvement priorities.
      
   • Ensure your listening is focused on your employees’ care-abouts. This is as important — or more important — than your company’s care-abouts.
      
2. 2) For greater clarity, ask employees to rate various aspects of their realities, plus an overall loyalty question.
    
   • Then conduct a correlation analysis to identify which EX aspect is strongly correlated with overall loyalty.
      
   • Next, conduct a Pareto analysis to identify which subthemes of that EX aspect are the vital few contributors to employees’ grief.
      
   • Then conduct a 5-why’s analysis to identify the root cause of the vital few subthemes. Make a plan to prevent the root cause!
      
   • Maintain high visibility of each action plan: review in staff meetings, ops reviews, senior execs’ preparation for analyst calls, etc.

You may find this recipe sufficient for driving significant changes and EX ROI. Journey mapping is optional, not required.

What is Customer Centric Culture? Customer-centricity is the degree to which customers are the central focus. Since culture is a group’s ways of thinking and doing, customer-centric culture is the degree to which customers are respected in a group’s decision-making and actions.

How to Build a Customer Centric Culture? Customer-centric culture starts at the top, engages everyone, and continually creates value. Remember that culture is the way a group thinks and acts. Therefore, anything you do that influences thinking or decision criteria, as well as actions or handoffs, can influence culture. For staying power, hook these influences into managers’ and employees’ existing routines. This is known as embedding customer-centricity into your culture.

1) Align from the Top:

a) Focus the company on the goals of your primary customer segments. This is called Intentional Customer Experience and your company’s North Star.
b) Synchronize vision, mission, values, objectives, structure, policies, and rituals¹ with these customers’ goals.
c) Coordinate all the roles that manage any part of the customer experience and establish them as facilitators and influencers of the rest of the company.
d) Be consistent, straightforward, humble, brave, and generous with customers, employees, suppliers and partners of all kinds.

2 All Hands On-Deck:

a) Each executive who reports to the CEO plays a mission-critical role in customer-centricity DNA.
b) Their respective organizations must be attuned to the voice-of-the-customer and its implications for their discipline’s role.
c) All functional areas must incorporate these three elements into their daily work: (1) anticipate customers’ reactions to their decisions, (2) prevent recurrence of issues for the whole customer base, and (3) continually create mutual value across the end-to-end customer life cycle.
d) Cross-organizational collaboration is necessary, with rewards for making a difference for customers at-large.
e) Connect cause-and-effect metrics with high visibility and a holistic view.

3) Maximize Value Attainment:

a) Establish systematic cycles for company-wide attention on root causes of customers’ chronic issues, to prevent recurrence.
b) Empower all employees to be creative in generating new value that customers will reward.
c) Simplify employees’ work to enable their efficiency and effectiveness toward making customers successful.
d) Cultivate customer-centered capabilities for all employees and partners. 

See also: Customer Experience Playbook