Ethan is the CEO of Integral, an award-winning employee activation agency. He’s a lecturer at Columbia and Trustee of the Institute for PR.
Employee experience is not a piece of equipment or software you can buy, install and just let run. The most effective leaders carefully plan and cultivate employee experiences aligned with business strategy. Your employees are influential—and getting more so. Think your customers occupy the center of your business success? Maybe. But who delivers that customer experience?
Business outcomes depend on empowered, motivated and engaged employees. A Salesforce study found employees who feel a sense of belonging are 5.3 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work.
When I consider the employee experience, I’m talking about the most complex thing in the world: human behavior. The unpredictable combination of people at work is a messy, mercurial mixture of mindsets, values, statuses, ideas, systems and expectations.
Crafting intentional and strategic employee experiences can lead organizations to overcome barriers to organizational success. Like any successful journey, you need to prepare to discover and adapt your employee experience. Based on my team’s observations and depth of experience, we formulated an equation for an Employee Experience that delivers value all around the stakeholder table.
These elements combined together a thoughtful employee journey: Strategic Intent + Content + Interactions = Employee Experience.
Strategic Intent
Every company has a variety of strategies at play at any given time. Some correlate directly to well-planned content and interactions for employees. Others are more distant.
Whether or not you intentionally create an employee experience, your employees will have an experience. But it may not be one that results in desirable business results. For instance, if your company’s strategic intent is to enter a new market, you would need to create specific—and focused—content and interactions to enable employees to innovate. Or if your intent is to lower the total cost of labor, that would require quite a different approach to content and interactions.
Rewarding and recognizing your employees in service of collaboration looks very different from rewarding and recognizing them to motivate competition. Neither is better than the other, but it’s critical to bring strategic intention to these choices. For example, publishing an intranet leaderboard of the highest sales figures fosters competition on a sales team—that can be great. But if cross-selling is your strategic intent, you might want to recognize employees who have partnered together to develop a multiproduct solution for a customer.
When your organization does not intentionally and strategically design employee experience in service of business goals, the employee experience risks devolving into a detrimental factor. You degrade your employee experience each time you distribute a bad piece of content. What is bad content? Dull. Unoriginal. Unclear. In my opinion, you diminish your employee experience each time you carelessly put together interactions that aren’t encouraging or compelling.
Content
For the past two years, my company has conducted a study in which one of the standout findings is that shared values in the workplace are crucial to employee engagement and activation.
When employees’ values align with their employers’ values, individuals are twice as likely to take positive actions such as completing mandatory training on time, mentoring others, defending the company if it were faced with a crisis and more.
Communicating organizational values starts with content. That is, your business strategy, brand positioning and voice; your mission, core messaging and purpose. It is your company’s narrative—how you define and express your culture—through the stories you tell yourself and others. Think about how your organization names everything from conference rooms, boardrooms to bathrooms. Even something as subtle as naming conventions for departments, teams, intranet or publications are part of this content.
Executive communications, the words your senior leaders use and your employee value proposition—these are all content. Be conscious of the content included (and not included) in your employee handbook, intranet, newsletter, social media presence. Your product announcements and information carry these values and priorities. Be sure to align what you tell your employees and what you tell your customers.
Interactions
Almost any workplace interaction can define an employee’s experience—from small exchanges when a team comes together casually to bigger engagements when someone is promoted or praised from the stage of a town hall by the CEO. When invited to join management, is that moment imbued with a sense of purpose and accountability? Or will being a manager feel like the paperwork tax on productivity?
How employees interact depends on how you work together—whether your organization has mission-driven teams or the composition of working groups is prescribed, the model makes a difference. The structures of performance management; rewards and recognition; and training, professional development and mentorship build in layers that comprise employee experience. Your organization’s rituals for ways of working, for collaborating, for information-sharing and for leadership make up these defining interactions between your employees. Inspect the overall effectiveness of these interactions and how they fit together.
One not-so-simple way to find out if the interactions within your organization lead to the employee experience you have in mind is to ask employees directly. Surveys can be helpful here, but it’s critical to get the full picture through qualitative feedback (facilitated retrospectives, interviews, roundtables, focus groups). Another way to understand which interactions are most (or least) effective is observing them firsthand, or getting a third party to do so for you. It’s incredible what you can learn about employee experience by sitting in a sales meeting, a pre-shift standup or an interdepartmental social event.
Conclusion
If you design your content and interactions with strategic intent to create a positive employee experience, your organization stands a very good chance of gaining an advantage—no matter how the labor market might be at that moment. Create an effective workplace by cultivating trusting, clear and motivating experiences for the workforce.
An effective employee experience can catalyze positive outcomes such as employees advocating for their brand, pride in their work and their organization, and committing even when the going gets rough. A strategically aligned employee experience can bring into being that nebulous thing you get when people care and sweat the details. Call it a vibe, call it the culture, call it workforce optimization, call it whatever you like—but you know it when you feel it, and you’ll see the results in the bottom line.
This equation of clear, purposeful content, thoughtful interactions and strategic intent equates to a compelling employee experience that drives business results. Believe me when I say, it all adds up.
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