International HR Day: The rise of the employee experience
Mon, May 20, 2024
Monday 20th May 2024, marks International HR Day. Today, we wanted to share the views of Nick Holmes, an Employee Experience (EX) activist and workplace imaginer to hopefully engage and inspire our network of HR professionals.
As part of our 2024 HR Insights Report, we spoke to Nick Holmes, speaker, thought leader, executive coach and currently the VP of Employee Experience at Avalere Health, who just last week was recognised as one of the 10 most influential HR tech leaders to follow in 2024 by CIO Business World. Nick’s purpose on this planet is to transform the way we think and feel about work, because after sleep, work is the thing we do most in our life, and for that reason alone, it can’t suck! Here, we share a snippet of Nick’s views on why he is so passionate about rethinking the world of work, what businesses and HR teams can do to build a strong employee experience and what his vision is for the future talent experience.
Why do you think the importance of employee experience is increasing, and how is it different from employee engagement?
The experience of what we feel at work has been transformed as we have started to re-evaluate what we want from our lives. Data from London Business School suggests people who have recently graduated into the workforce are working a lot less now than we have done previously. That’s down to a few factors - we have changed what we want from a career; we value different things to what we did 5/10/15 years ago; we want travel, we want experiences, and experiences are what drives fulfilment.
There's a study on experience and happiness which says the more experiences you have – going out for dinner, bungee jumping or visiting a new city etc – gives you about five times more experience than getting material things like a new phone. That is an interesting point to take back into the workplace. If we look at change, our change readiness or acceptance is completely down to what we experience. If the change agenda in the workplace is focused on the experience of us as humans, when we're brought into the conversation early, we're allowed space to express our views and opinions and give our feedback. If this is used to mould the outcome or it’s explained why that might not happen this time, we're more likely to adopt that change.
It's experience that drives the emotiveness in us as human beings, which carries our energy forward. When we talk about creating better experiences of work, we talk about everything - everything we interact with IS the employee experience. It's how we think and feel about the things we do. From the moment we turn on our laptop or clock in, when we walk into a physical space, the interaction we have with colleagues, how we're learning, how we're moving through the organisation, how our expectations are set, how our career is managed or how we're promoted.
The difference between employee experience and employee engagement is that engagement is very much an output of those experiences. If we have a terrible experience at work, there's no real holistic experience. Similarly, if we're working for a firm that mandates us to come in three days a week and we're not really sure why: our commuting bill has gone up 30-40% versus what they were this time last year and everyone we speak to is on a Teams call in the office so we might as well just do this at home. The only good thing is we maybe get free coffee! That's our experience. Our output is engagement.
The challenge that organisations face is whether they want to become a mandate organisation or a magnet organisation. A mandate organisation puts rules in place and mandates things such as a return to the office or core hours or something like that. But the minute an autonomous adult is given a rule like that, they will associate the rest of their work with that ‘rule follower’ mindset. The last thing we need when we're trying to innovate, grow or break out of a situation is more rules.
We need more people who are going to think about ‘how do I want this person to feel when they interact with me and our organisation?’. I want to be clear, my vision for work isn't just pay everyone anything they want, and everyone gets a Tesla - this isn't it. We must build a sustainable way of working, but we can set our expectations and have honest conversations. We're not doing either of those things well at the minute. Think about employees as a whole person; how do we value them? It goes beyond just a job that someone does.
What can businesses do to build a strong employee experience, and where do they start?
It can feel like we're paddling in a canoe into a giant ocean and have no idea where to go. The first thing we need to do is design our intervention into three bubbles or three pillars. The EX-design principles:
Employee voice
This is the data point. Get data and get listening data from key moments in your employee lifecycle. Start at the beginning of the employment relationship. Why are people joining you? Why aren't people joining you? Why are they rejecting you? Then talk to those employees that are here. Why are they here? What was their onboarding experience like? Gauge their experience at work through an engagement survey. Then understand why people are leaving. Now you've got a data set so you can understand what's working, what's not.
Organisational purpose
You need to define it. Make it clear as day. Simplicity is beautiful. What is your organisation here to do on this planet? For what reason? It doesn't matter if you're in healthcare, retail, recruitment, or a tech start-up. What problems are you solving for people? Bringing it to life gives people the sense of deeper purpose. Purpose is so important for many reasons. Research has shown that people who feel they have purpose in their life are two times less likely to suffer from dementia later on in life.
Future of work
Look at the workforce now and where it is going. Look at how the world is working and where it is going. Ensure whatever design is put in place stands the test of time. Whether that's a tech platform, a leadership development platform, an initiative around wellness or well-being. It needs to work for the next two to five years. Don't keep starting again. Key to this is tech. It moves very quickly, so make sure to partner with people who think like that, who are ready to pivot and be agile. Be in that mindset of continuous improvement and iteration to make a difference. Going back to ‘where do we start?’. Do one thing.
Get one piece of data. Whether it's speaking to one demographic of people and asking what they are liking, what they aren’t. How do we improve this for them? Then change one thing, then one more thing. We want to change the culture, so we change it through drum beats, not lightning bolts. It is the small things that build up gradually. We have to keep putting the repetition in.
As people teams, we are guilty of implementing something and thinking this will make a huge difference. We're right that it might. But no matter how big or flashy that might look, that is only one drum beat and we've have got to continuously be thinking about how we can design it. Take Disney, for example. Disney is 100 years old and a well-established organisation in the world of entertainment. It has a role called the ‘Imagineer’, whose function is to continuously challenge and change the way that things are done to reimagine it. The people function is hell-bent on excuses. We've always done things this way. It's nonsense. Break the shackles and the chains. We need this to progress.
To read the full article, download our 2024 HR Insights Report.
