Creating the Best Employee Experience

Get ready for employee experience.

Employee experience is the number one topic that executives discuss when talking about their workforce. It’s not culture. It’s not passion. It’s not purpose or meaning.

Why employee experience? At their best, leaders want to be the change and dramatically alter the way you feel about your job. At their worst, they see themselves as smarter than you, and they operate as guardians of your activity at the office.

Whatever the reason, I am 100% down with a focus on employee experience because it’s an opportunity to remind ourselves of a few central truths about work.

It’s time to enhance your hiring practices. You can’t create the best employee experience if your workforce is full of dicks. An employee journey will always have bumps along the way; however, instead of screening for cultural fit, it’s time to start testing recruits for manners and adult-like behavior. Some assessments can help you select candidates who score high for respect, appreciation, gratitude, and patience. Even your biggest go-getters and sharks can be kind and thoughtful human beings.

It’s time to improve salaries. An employee experience doesn’t matter if workers can’t pay their bills. More and more people have side hustles and second jobs, which leaves them feeling run down and exhausted. Nobody has a good experience when they’re sleep-deprived.

It’s time to use technology for good, not evil. An employee experience that comes with a seven-pound laptop and a mobile phone also comes with a ball and chain around your ankle. Professional workers don’t need massive devices sitting on a workstation and a thousand apps on their phone. They need to collaborate with their colleagues, have meaningful conversations, spend some quiet time reflecting on those interactions, and then go back and use technology to drive change with the lightest touch. It’s where design thinking meets management practices, and this is one of the exciting places you can explore if you work in HR and are intrigued by enhancing the employee experience.

It’s super cool to move away from a decade of “culture” at work and start talking about something new. But, to keep the employee experience from moving into a rote and faddish trend, begin with the end in mind.

Want people to stay? Learn? Grow? Improve the bottom line at your organization? Treat them like individuals who deserve to be compensated for their knowledge, hire adults to do adult work, and don’t saddle them with early 2000s tech to do jobs that move your company to 2020 and beyond.