EXJournal

In my inbox last week. “I always read your HR posts with interest. They are sometimes very entertaining. I do however struggle to relate them to my job, as all my working years, its been a cat and mouse game of avoiding being shouted at or sacked. I've never known an employer that gives the slightest rats arse about what employees might think.”

He was literally leaping up the stage stairs. “C’mon everyone, let’s get those energy levels back up!” Far too Tony Robins for this small event. “Everyone, stand up!”

I’d been trying to flesh out a collab story on employee experience (EX) with Laurie Ruettimann for weeks. This is as far as we got:

Employee experience is by definition experiential: it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Without someone to process it, it’s not a thing. If a tree falls in a forest, etc etc. More than that, we don’t all experience the same thing the same way. Our personalities, preferences and past experiences all play a role in how we interpret and react to the situations we find ourselves in.

Pop quiz! What’s going to be more useful to you in the long run: a high engagement survey score with a low response rate, or a low engagement score with a high response rate?

Communication is a spectrum. On the left is face to face. On the right is a YouTube comment section. In the middle are all manner of different ways of connecting. Bluetooth phone calls while driving. Group WhatsApp with those folk you met at a festival. Teleconferences where one dude is at an airport and only ever remembers to press mute before he starts talking. Each of these different ways of communicating has its own rules of acceptable behavior. There’s probably things you’d say in an email that you’d not say face to face. I’ve certainly found myself on written rants that would have evaporated in a instance in a corridor conversation.