The reason I’m so bullish about the concept of employee experience design is that EX is proactively actionable, whereas traditional employee engagement practices are largely reactive. Organizations can intentionally design the employee experience to improve engagement and performance.
By using the design process of discover, define, develop and deliver, you can design and co-create an experience for your employees that will feel positive and affirming to them.
Over the past two months, I’ve been writing a series of posts titled How to Design the Employee Experience. If you have been wondering how to get started with employee experience, you should check it out. Here’s a quick overview.
1. The Impact of Experience
Any interaction related to work can be a moment of truth. These moments either exceed or fall short of the employee’s expectations. The key is to identify those moments of truth and intentionally shape them to exceed employee expectations and create positive emotions about work. The bottom line: an employee’s work experience drives their engagement. More.
2. Applying the Design Process
There isn’t a right kind of employee experience. There is only the right kind of experience for your employees and your organization. It’s easy to assume you know the kind of experience you are trying to create. Test yourself by writing it down and sharing it with others for feedback. Achieving clarity of intention is critical. More.
3. Getting Started with Discovery
Like the architect, when designing employee experience, you must start by getting to know more about the people who will live it each day. Without this foundation of knowledge, your chances of getting it right are next to zero. More.
4. Define Your Ideal Employee Experience
The objective of the “define” stage of design is to clearly articulate the type of experience that will help employees to unlock their best performance in a way that feels great to them and helps achieve the organization’s goals. In other words, what do employees need to have on a daily basis so they can do their best work? More.
5. Delivering a Great Employee Experience
By far the most potent way to identify and develop solutions to improve employee experience is to involve the employees in the process. Since they are living the experience every day, employees have a unique perspective. While it can feel daunting to involve employees in the process of designing possible solutions, the payoff in the end is always worth it. More.
6. Using Technology to Enhance the Employee Experience
If you are going to go to the trouble of creating a great experience for your employees, you should measure the impact to ensure it’s working. Collecting and evaluating feedback is critical to ensuring that you are delivering an experience to employees that’s working. More.
I hope you enjoy the content and find it useful. My new book, Unlocking High Performance, will dive even further into this when it’s available in October.