You have to be the force that pumps information, drives communication, and maintains the culture across your teams.
—GENERAL STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL1
The word experience has become one of the defining business words of my generation because it takes into account every interaction you have with a person, place, product, or company. As a customer, the type of experience you have with a company will determine where you fall on the continuum between highly loyal, unpaid brand evangelist and toxic customer who goes to great lengths to slam the brand wherever and whenever possible. For employees, there’s a similar continuum—one that ranges from loyal, productive workers who stay with you for years to disloyal, unproductive, destructive workers who undermine your team and your company. Where employees fall on that continuum is largely dictated by the employee experience you create for your team.
That experience is more complex than you might think, which is why I’m going to walk you through every aspect of it and how to improve it. Because it involves the physical, social, and cultural elements of your workplace as well as every touch point you have with your employees, creating a positive employee experience is going to take a lot of thought, plenty of creativity, and consistent effort.
In previous chapters, I have discussed many of the components that contribute to the employee experience. Now it’s time to see how all those pieces work together. But rather than rehash them individually, I’ve come up with five rules to consider when thinking about the employee experience.
Rule 1. Be consistent in the way you treat your employees. If they see a colleague getting special treatment or having a unique experience with you, they’ll feel left out and unappreciated.
Rule 2. Put effort into creating a culture that can be maintained even if you’re not present. Don’t expect your employees to blindly buy into your existing culture.
Rule 3. Strive to understand what makes them tick and how you can support them as individuals, not just as team members. Don’t assume that your employees’ needs are being met.
Rule 4. Empower employees to be part of the creation process and to foster the same experience for others. Don’t try to take full responsibility for their experience.
Rule 5. Rely less on devices, platforms, and robotics. They remove the human touch that makes work personal and serves your employees’ physiological needs. Don’t trust technology to do the work for you.
Following these five rules will give you a better sense of what to avoid as well as where to focus your efforts. Remember, the employee experience you create is all encompassing and incorporates everything from the moment someone sends you a résumé all the way through their last day on the job. Let’s take a closer look at the entire employee experience life cycle.
To create the best experience possible, you need to understand things from your employees’ points of view, not just your own. There are six distinct periods in the employee experience life cycle that you need to pay attention to, covered in the following chart. In any major project with big milestones, different employees will need different amounts of your attention at different stages.
Employee Perspective: Joining
Employer Perspective: Recruiting
How to Handle: During interviews, help candidates understand your values and culture. Ask questions about the type of people they work best with and the experience they want to have at work every day. Think about how their personalities would mesh with the rest of the team, and if possible, let each team member meet each candidate before making a hiring decision. Most important, make sure you ask about their plans for the future. Before making a hiring decision, it’s essential to make sure that the candidates’ expectations align with the reality of the workplace and culture.
Employee Perspective: Familiarity
Employer Perspective: Onboarding
How to Handle: Get your new hires acquainted with the culture of the organization by arranging team lunches or meetings with smaller groups. Teach them the basics of their daily tasks and make sure they have the tools to get their daily work done. Assign a senior team member to mentor the newbies until they’re able to stand on their own.
Employee Perspective: Learning
Employer Perspective: Development
How to Handle: Create a shared learning environment that encourages employees to help one another when they need it most. Have informal conversations with each employee. Besides making them feel special, that will also help you ascertain what their individual learning style is so you can maximize learning experiences and opportunities.
Employee Perspective: Performing
Employer Perspective: Performance management
How to Handle: Keep tabs on how employees perform and intervene when necessary to ensure that they’re always on the right track and feel confident about the work they’re producing. Collect and distribute feedback regularly so they know where they stand, how to improve, and how to always be a solid team player.
Employee Perspective: Growing
Employer Perspective: Career advancement
How to Handle: After evaluating your employees, ensure that they have the necessary skills, leadership ability, and confidence to advance to the next level. Support and encourage them along the way. Understand their ambitions and what growth and advancement mean to them.
Employee Perspective: Leaving
Employer Perspective: Offboarding
How to Handle: You want departing employees to leave on a positive note and to speak highly of you, your team, and your company. And who knows, they may also return, or “boomerang,” at some point in the future if they (and you) realize that you want to work together again.
The employee experience is the sum of all the interactions that affect employees’ cognition, behaviors, and feelings. Their experience includes conversations with their teammates, the physical space they occupy every day, the nature of the work they do, and their observations throughout their journey at your company. It’s how they feel about their workplace, their jobs, their teammates, and their bosses.
Creating the right employee experience is not about selecting a random assortment of perks, like Ping-Pong tables and free snacks, and sitting back in your office waiting for the magic to happen. Those perks sound cool, but they are addressing only short-term desires and don’t play much of a role in the long-term employee life cycle. They don’t engage your employees, help them become better at their jobs, or make them want to hang around at your company longer. Unfortunately, creating an optimal employee experience doesn’t happen overnight. You must take a long, hard look at the entire life cycle and improve one facet at a time.
When thinking about the different touch points we have with our teammates, we need to focus on three dimensions. You can control various levers in each dimension in a way that will affect how your employees feel, but over time things must be set up to run without your having to be involved. Let’s take a detailed look at each dimension.
These are the unwritten rules of how teammates work together to accomplish goals and the glue that creates a cohesive, well-oiled team. Culture is made up of many elements, including core values, empathy, community, work ethic, language, symbols, systems, ethics, and rituals. It’s the corporate version of a cult. When I was working at a big company, I’d use language that made no sense to my friends, parents, or even peers at other companies. Yes, that “secret” language made us feel a little cult-like, but it also brought everyone closer together because it was something exclusive that we all shared.
Stephanie Bixler, vice president of technology at Scholastic, told me about how one of her former bosses used the cult approach to motivate his team to succeed. “He decided to name his team GSD (Get Sh*t Done). He made us hats with this acronym and put up large signage around our team’s space at work. He drilled the acronym into everyone’s everyday language around the company [so] that it became its own brand at work,” she says. “He positioned us as the elite, can-do group at the company; no problem was too difficult or big for us to solve. It gave us a sense of belonging and pride in what we were doing. Humans are wired for competition. And this type of branding and team building reinforces those basic instincts.”
How important is culture? Researchers at the University of Southern California studied 759 firms in seventeen countries and found that the biggest driver of innovation wasn’t salary or government policies; it was a strong corporate culture supported by the people who work there.2
Leaders who don’t empower their employees—who act like taskmasters instead of orchestra conductors, who treat their employees like numbers instead of individuals—end up creating dysfunctional or failed cultures. When employees feel powerless to make decisions, don’t receive feedback on their work, or aren’t told how what they’re working on fits into the bigger picture, they become less committed to achieving high standards of success. When departments don’t communicate with one another or employees undermine their teammates, the organization begins to fail, and the culture becomes toxic.
This is a critical part of employee experience because people connect emotionally with other humans much more than they do with a logo, a brand, or a product. If you treat your employees unfairly or you have a toxic employee who aggravates everyone else, the good people on your team are going to leave—and you shouldn’t blame them. The best leaders and companies are the ones that create a family-like environment. They know that when you care about others’ success, you create a strong emotional connection.
I had a conversation with Peter W. Schutz, the former CEO of Porsche, about his greatest challenge as a leader in the early 1980s, which was to “restore a dying organization, which was losing money, to growth and profitability.” Faced with that problem, a lot of CEOs would have started by cutting costs, developing new products or services, inventing new marketing concepts, or coming up with clever advertising. But Schutz decided to start by rebuilding the culture, putting his employees’ experience first. He believed that if all his employees—from the mailroom staff to the engineers and salespeople—felt like family and strove for shared success, Porsche would improve the quality of its products and start winning major races again.3 He was right. With better engines, racing success followed, and worldwide sales grew from twenty-eight thousand to fifty-three thousand units per year from 1980 to 1986.4 Corporate profitability increased as well.
Leaving a job is easy, but leaving a family is a lot harder. My managers at the two corporate jobs I had immediately before I started my own company cried when I transitioned.
Employees who feel like family are likely to socialize with one another, and that promotes and improves teamwork. In one study of twenty thousand employees, researchers found that those who knew three or more people at their company were likely to stay there longer.5 A lot of this socializing and relationship building is your responsibility. In a separate study, the same researchers gathered data from fourteen hundred supervisors and thirty thousand employees and discovered that an employee’s first manager had the biggest impact on their performance years later.6 By maintaining a strong relationship with your employees, you can see their performance accelerate every year. I talk a bit more about your role in relationship building below.
Space is your employees’ physical environment, the place where their senses are being put to work touching, tasting, seeing, and smelling everything from the cafeteria food to their office environment to the holiday decorations. The age of the people they work with, the office layout, and the lighting all matter to employees, even if they never mention these things. Physical space is key to creativity, collaboration, and wellness at work. If you don’t get space right, another company will. Employees want to be comfortable and want their individual work preferences accounted for. One employee may prefer a cubicle, whereas another might prefer to work in a lounge, and these preferences can change regularly. At DELL EMC, leaders worked with their building teams to modernize their office spaces with new technologies, Adam Miller, product marketing manager at the company, told me. This included “standing desk options, informal meeting spaces, and more. These enhancements gave employees more flexibility to work in ways that are productive for them.” And at Cisco, the new CEO allowed employees to bring their dogs to work, says Caroline Guenther, integrated business planning manager at the company. Giving your employees options lets them select the environment that will make them more productive and more creative.
Despite the increasingly mobile—and remote—workforce, space still plays a key role in how we experience culture, cultivate relationships, and solve business issues. Researchers Craig Knight and Alex Haslam gave forty-seven office workers in London the option to arrange their office with as many plants and pictures as they wanted.7 Those workers were 32 percent more productive and were more committed to their team’s success than a control group of workers who didn’t get to decorate their offices. In a different study, about half of those polled said that an office redesign would increase productivity, make them better organized, and increase their job satisfaction levels.8 And a study by the American Society of Interior Designers found employees who like their office environment are 31 percent more likely to be satisfied with their jobs.9
On the other hand, employees who are bombarded with loud noise throughout the day, have bad lighting or air quality, or work in a technologically outdated office or in a building that’s isolated from parks or pleasant outdoor spaces are less likely to be excited about their jobs, less willing to work longer hours, and less likely to produce for you. Space influences our mood, behaviors, and overall impression of whom we work for.
When it comes to space, we need to provide flexibility and options and encourage our employees to be honest about how we can improve it. And since you’re wondering, I’m still not talking about Ping-Pong tables, free snacks, and brightly colored slides between floors. Those are accessories that can make a good thing better, but they won’t be enough to keep employees from jumping ship if their overall physical environment is poor.
Space enforces and reinforces your culture every single day. Although your company controls the light switches and layout, employees should be able to decide how to personalize their cubicles or offices. If you’re nice about it, you may be able to influence them to make changes (e.g., you might point out that their productivity and health could be negatively affected by having a cluttered desk or nonergonomic screen or keyboard placement), but ultimately, it’s up to them to make decisions for their own benefit.
Instead of creating an employee experience in isolation or from the top down, why not encourage and empower your employees to be part of the creation process? If you let your team give you feedback and share ideas about the experience they desire, it’ll be much easier to meet those expectations. For Erin Yang, vice president of technology product management at Workday, one of the ways her team members’ experience was improved was by giving them the opportunity to participate in defining it. “I was nominated to be on a steering committee that helped design a new floor in our San Francisco office,” she said. “We were able to customize the floor to be optimal for the way product management and development teams worked. I in turn looped in my own team by asking them to contribute office ideas on a shared Pinterest board. This made us much more engaged in the new space that was created.”
Aside from letting your employees define their workspace, let them have a hand in other areas of their work experience. Erin told me that she sees this happening in other aspects of Workday, such as their snack program. “Our Employee Programs group regularly polls employees on what snacks they would like, and importantly, they actually make changes based on the feedback. This is something I see that people appreciate.”
The most effective way to empower your teammates to help create an experience that meets their needs and expectations is to simply give them a seat at the table. Make sure they know that their opinions and thoughts impact change because, as I mentioned in chapter 1, people intrinsically have to feel that their work matters. Regardless of their title or tenure, including your employees in important discussions makes them feel important, while it simultaneously ensures diverse ideas.
“In moments where I haven’t been confident enough to ask for a seat at the table, my director pulls out a chair for me—both literally and metaphorically—and invites me to sit down,” says Katie Lucas, senior manager of digital content at HBO. “He looks for opportunities to elevate me and empower my work.” By giving your teammates a (literal or metaphorical) seat at the table, you’re involving them in the decisions that will ultimately influence their employee experience.
As with anything that affects the workplace, we need to be able to justify focusing on improving the employee experience. Fortunately we’ve been able to measure the business benefits companies receive when they give their employees a positive, memorable experience throughout their life cycle: they’ll stay with you longer, perform better while they’re there, and serve as unofficial brand ambassadors who can help with your recruiting. When we surveyed executives, more than 80 percent said that employee experience is either important or very important to their organization’s success, versus a mere 1 percent who said it isn’t important.10 I predict that 1 percent will be looking for new jobs soon. In a separate study, Deloitte not only confirmed our data but also discovered that only 22 percent of companies were excellent at building a differentiated employee experience.11
IBM and Globoforce have been able to link various aspects of work to an employee’s overall experience.12 They found that positive experiences are associated with better performance, lower turnover, higher levels of social relatedness, and better teamwork. For instance, when employees feel their ideas are heard, more than 80 percent report a more positive experience.
The following exercise will help you identify areas in which you can improve the employee experience. These are based on the feedback you’ve received, the daily behavior of your teammates, and the actions that have or haven’t been taken to make the workplace better.
Now that I’ve covered why employee experience is so critical to your company’s success and you know where you need to improve, it’s time to talk about some key strategies. In our research, HR leaders from around the country told us that the top three ways to enhance employee experience are to
1. invest in training and development,
2. improve employees’ workspace, and
3. give more recognition.13
This makes perfect sense, right? When employees have the necessary courses and resources to hone their skills, they’re going to be more confident in meetings and more likely to share their knowledge with the team. The workspace, as already discussed, is crucial because we spend so much time there. And recognition makes employees feel good about themselves and creates a culture in which they see and appreciate the positive qualities and accomplishments of others.
Trying to improve your employee experience without having measured it first is a waste of time. To get the most accurate measurements of the experience itself, you need to see how well it matches the expectations of people who currently work for you or want to.
Outside your company, there’s a lot of information available from review websites and professional networks where you can get uncensored and anonymous feedback concerning how job seekers and employees have been treated. Every weak point you identify is an opportunity to close a gap. For instance, if an employee feels that what they were hired to do didn’t turn out to be what they’d actually been doing and they quit, you clearly need to update your job descriptions and tweak your onboarding. If you see multiple comments from former employees about how management didn’t support them, you might need to take a course yourself or alter the management-training curriculum you run your team through. This feedback is quite common because employees leave poor management more than they leave jobs.
Inside your company, look at every aspect of the employee experience life cycle from when employees join to when they eventually leave. The easiest way to get the most current information is to use your team as a focus group at least once a month and ask them for their candid feedback on how to improve the work environment. “We did a wonderful exercise where people could put Post-its up in designated spaces in the office with feedback on changes they’d like to see,” says Sarah Unger, vice president of marketing strategy, trends, and insights at Viacom. “But the key thing is—the changes were actually listened to.”
You should also collect information from job candidates during onboarding and from employees who are leaving during offboarding. Together, these before, during, and after data points will give you a more complete picture of the experience they’ve had. If someone started their job with great enthusiasm but ended it with frustration, you need to find out why so it doesn’t happen again. Compare happy and unhappy candidates and employees to understand where the gaps are and how to fill them.
You can have the most amazing workspace, but without strong relationships between management and employees, you will fail. Guaranteed. That’s why you need to both become a better leader and encourage or train others to do the same. Managers have an astronomical impact on their employees’ experience because they’re constantly interacting with them, from asking for advice to assigning new projects. By having a transformational leadership style, being open to—and welcoming—feedback, and encouraging the best in everyone, you’ll be more appealing to them, and they’ll work harder for you.
I’ve heard people say that good managers are born, not made, but in my experience good management can be taught to anyone who’s willing to put in the time to learn the key skills required to do it. We need to stop promoting managers simply because they have tenure or work hard or because we’re afraid of losing them. Giving mediocre or poor managers even more power is an excellent way to undermine the employee experience.
When it comes to creating a powerful and exciting experience for your employees, seemingly trivial things matter. One of the best ways to foster strong team relationships is to think outside the corporate walls and plan social outings and events for your employees. Dinners to show your appreciation, celebrate a birthday, or highlight a milestone can really bring your team together. Sadly, most companies are so focused on the bottom line that they don’t see strong employee relationships as a key component for generating higher revenue. In one study, placement giant Robert Half found that 80 percent of companies don’t hold annual gatherings.14 A simple, public “thank-you,” a party, a gift card, tickets to a sporting event, or a free dinner can go a long way. You may not think it’s a big deal, but to your employees it is—especially when they don’t expect it.
When your employees see that you support outside-the-office socialization, they’ll start to do the same. If they don’t, openly encourage them to do so. When employees behave in a friendly way toward others on their team, they’re creating a community that they’ll want to stay in for the long haul. When communities have a strong social bond, in which employees trust one another and care about one another beyond simply finishing the latest project, companies thrive. Strong empathetic gestures, such as visiting a team member who’s in the hospital, have a major impact on employees’ livelihood and help them see you not only as their manager, but as a friend who genuinely cares about them. When coworkers are playing on a company sports team or are part of a resource group to help other employees (for women, young professionals, Latinos, etc.), you know that they’re building and growing their relationships—and their team—without having been forced.
Keep in mind that outside-the-office socializing is only one of many components of the overall employee experience. “Fun, social stuff is amazing and funny but when bosses rely on that over tone of the work environment it feels like the wrong priority to me,” says Amanda Pacitti, VP of learning and development at Time, Inc. “I don’t think anyone has ever said, ‘Wow, my boss took me bowling, I love my job!’ ever.” Amanda Zaydman, brand manager at Nestle Purina, adds that “people want to be inspired, feel valued, and believe in the work they’re doing. Sometimes that means taking the time to throw [a] surprise baby shower or pick up cupcakes for a birthday, but I think what you do day to day has a greater impact. Being honest and transparent. Listening. Advocating for talented employees to get the assignments and promotions they want and deserve. It’s not anything revolutionary, but it’s easy to forget as a manager.”
Aside from celebrating with your teammates, you want to get to know them on a personal level. We may all have similar basic needs and desires, but as individuals we also have unique motivations and dreams. As you’re getting to know each of your employees, write down their biggest drivers, interests, and aspirations so that you can consciously work toward meeting their needs.
Face time with leaders can play a critical role in influencing the workplace experience. Lindsay Weddle, land manager at ConocoPhillips, had an experience with a leader in her company whom she greatly admired but had never worked for. What he did influenced her managerial style later. “At some point during a meeting, I told him my daughter’s name. Months later he walked into an elevator and said, ‘Hey! How’s Abigail?’ Quite frankly, I was stunned. I was so impressed he remembered something personal about me and took the time to talk to me about my daughter,” she told me. “He was no doubt one of the busiest people in the company, but that moment of thoughtfulness has stuck with me years later. It is the reason I make a conscious effort to memorize spouse and kids’ names and ask by name how they are doing.”
The following guidelines will help you support employees, who each have their own set of motivations and interests at work.
Employee Motivations and Interests: Flexibility
How to Support Them: Give employees permission to come into work later or telecommute at least one day per week.
Employee Motivations and Interests: Pay
How to Support Them: As long as they’re performing well and driving business results, make sure they get a pay increase at least once a year.
Employee Motivations and Interests: Friendships
How to Support Them: Introduce them to people inside and outside your team and invite them to social events.
Employee Motivations and Interests: Sports
How to Support Them: In addition to a pay bonus, give them two tickets to a sporting event you know they’ll love.
Employee Motivations and Interests: Travel
How to Support Them: If you have offices in multiple cities, allow them to work from one of those offices. Or if there’s an industry conference, let them attend so they can learn and travel simultaneously.
Getting to know your employees isn’t a one-way street. “I’ve improved the experience employees have at work by getting to know them on a personal level, and allowing them to know me on this same level in return,” says Amanda Healy, senior marketing manager at TIBCO Software. “Being a different person at work versus at home is exhausting—for me, what you see is what you get. I’ll talk about my husband, I’ll send along a song I’m jamming to, I’ll share photos of my cats. Personal details are the connective tissue that drives myself, and my business, forward.”
When it comes to building positive employee experience, the biggest mistake I see managers make is to not set realistic expectations during new hires’ first ninety days. It’s important to let them know what they’ll be learning, establish goals, and set the agenda for their job responsibilities moving forward. Make them feel it’s not just a job but part of their long-term careers. No one wants to feel like a robot or a mindless cog on an assembly line; people want to know how their jobs factor into making the company successful. “Key for me is making people understand that their contribution is appreciated, and it makes a difference, whether it’s people working for me or not,” says John Mwangi, vice president of information governance, law, and franchise integrity at Mastercard. “Knowing that your work matters significantly improves a person’s experience and they view you as a partner in their professional development.”
Map out employees’ training plans with them, including specifics on the skills they’ll need to move ahead, suggested courses to complete, and an explanation of how this will help them perform better. Doing this will help you reduce the stress and anxiety that people naturally have when they start something new.
As much as you’d like to control your employees’ experience, you can’t—at least not all the time. Just as with consumerism, in which people have some control over the brand through word of mouth, your employees can either talk up or talk down their experience to others. That’s why it’s so important to empower your employees to own their experience by providing them the right tools and a dedicated support system. The more autonomy you give them (assuming they can handle the responsibility), the less pressure there will be on you.
Vivek Raval, head of performance management at Facebook, does a nice job of summing it all up. “The best leaders I have worked with took a personal interest in my development and growth,” he says. “They asked about my objectives, offered new ideas on how I could develop and grow, spent time to understand my working style, and most importantly took actions throughout their time with me to put me in positions to learn and succeed.”