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This article emphasizes the importance of the employee experience. It inspired us to pick this topic as the subject of our pitch, so we can inform other HR-students about this trending subject.

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I'm betting BIG on the concept of the employee experience which I believe is the next evolution of HR and people related functions inside of our organizations. We are already seeing employee experience related roles and executive titles emerge and the very concept of Human Resources if morphing into something else (a topic for another post). Everything around people analytics, workplace design, compensation, engagement, well-being, etc is all tied to this concept of creating an environment where people actually want to show up, not where they need to show up. To help explain what the employee experience actually is I created the visual below which shows what I like to call The Employee Experience Equation. This is: culture + technology + physical space = employee experience.

I've written quite extensively about this in the past. Here are several articles you can take a look at:
The Three Environments That Create Every Employee Experience What Type Of Company Do You Work For? Engaged, Empowered, Enabled Or Experiential?
Oftentimes when I speak with business leaders they emphasize wanting to focus on one of these areas. For example the conversation might focus around digital transformation, creating a more collaborative workspace, or evolving the corporate culture. All of these things are great, however, what many people fail to realize is that we now live in a world where organizations cannot just focus one of the above environments and expect to achieve any kind of impact. You can't just have a great corporate culture while ignoring technology and the physical space, you can't have a great physical environment while ignoring culture and technology, and you can't have the latest and greatest tools while ignoring culture and the physical environment.

A few years ago a large organization asked me to come visit their corporate headquarters. They were trying to create a more collaborative and communicative environment and had rolled out a series of modern technology platforms. The challenge was that none of the employees were using these technologies despite management's best efforts. So I showed up to their offices and noticed that everyone was wearing a suit a tie (keep in mind these were non customer facing roles), the floor plan consisted of many hundreds of people sitting in tall walled off cubicles, and it was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop. Their idea of "casual Friday" was not having to wear a tie and no, I'm not joking. When I asked why things were the way they were the response I received was, "the CEO said it was like this when he got here and it will be like this the day he leaves."

It was no wonder that employees weren't using the technologies that the company was deploying. This was a classic example of an organization that was simply focusing on one of the three environments required to create a meaningful employee experience. You can't focus on digital transformation or collaboration from a purely technology standpoint if the physical space (and culture) doesn't emulate the behavior you are trying to encourage.

Going forward if organizations want to win the war on talent they are absolutely going to have to focus on the physical environment, the technological environment, and the cultural environment. This is the winning formula for creating and designing employee experiences. This is what will allow organizations to attract and retain top talent in the future of work.

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The Employee Experience Equation | Jacob Morgan

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I'm betting BIG on the concept of the employee experience which I believe is the next evolution of HR and people related functions inside of our organizations. We are already seeing employee experience related roles and executive titles emerge and the very concept of Human Resources if morphing into something else (a topic for another ...

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This article explains the three enviroments that create every employee experience

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I define "employee experience" as an organization creating a place where people want to show up instead of assuming that people need to show up. This shift from "need" to "want" is the fundamental change that organizations around the world are starting to experience. This is why we see so much investment in new offices spaces, health and well-being programs, maternity and paternity leave, healthy foods, workplace flexibility, and so much more. There are a lot of things that can go into creating an employee experience but the good news is that every single company regardless of their industry, geography, or size, only need to focus on three things. Every employee experience is comprised of three environments: the physical environment, the cultural environment, and the technological environment as seen below.
Cultural Environment
We have all heard of corporate culture and the many ways to describe it. Some say "it's what happens when the manager leaves the room," others say culture stems from the values, attitudes, practices, and the mission of the organization, and some say culture is controlled by the CEO and the executives. Regardless of what you believe culture is or where it comes from, the one thing that is common is that culture is about feeling. If the physical environment is about the one that you can see, touch, taste, and breathe, then the cultural environment is the one that you feel; it's the "vibe" you get when you walk in the door and it's the mood and the tone that the workplace sets. It's the leadership style, the sense of purpose your employees feel, the organizational structure, and the people that make up your organization. It's not written and it's not stated yet it is one of the most important elements of creating and designing the employee experience. Typically corporate culture is what energizes us or drains us, it motivates us or discourages us, it empowers us or it suffocates us. We all experience the corporate culture of our organizations every single day, whether it be positive or negative.
Physical Environment
The physical workspace is the one we can see, touch, and taste, and smell. It's the art that hangs on the walls, the office floor plan, the demographics of the people we work with (old, young, diversity, etc), and any physical perks we might get such as catered meals in a beautiful cafeteria, an on-site gym, or a lounge area that employees can use to unwind a bit. Before reading on think for a minute about your physical workspace and how it makes you feel. Do you get excited and energized or do you feel as if you are walking into a hospital or doctor's office?

As a work futurist part of my job is to tour offices at organizations all around the world to see how they are designed and perhaps more importantly why they are designed in certain ways. Many people believe the offices are actually are going to become exciting but I am seeing the exact opposite trend: " The Office Space Isn't Dead, It's Making A Comeback."
Technological Environment
The technological environment of the organization refers to the tools employees use to get their jobs done. This includes everything from the internal social network your company might use to the mobile devices that are approved to the laptops, desktops, and video conferencing solutions that employees have access to. This also includes any apps, software, e-learning tools, and user experience and design elements that impact how employees use these various tools. Technology is the central nervous system of the organization and most concepts and themes related to the future of work are not possible without technology.

It's not hard to see why technology is such a big part of the employee experience. If you show up to work and are forced to use technologies that were considered "cool" in the 90s then clearly you're going to be a bit frustrated with getting your job done. Using outdated and poorly designed technologies will: make it harder for your to communicate and collaborate with employees, drastically increase the amount of time it takes you to get your job done, and create an environment that sees you being frustrated, angry, and unproductive instead of being engaged, happy, and productive.

The future of work is all about the employee experience and this is something that organizations around the world are realizing and investing in. What kind of an experience are you creating for your employees and how are you doing it?
Jacob Morgan is a keynote speaker, author, and futurist. You can invite Jacob to keynote your next conference, subscribe to his videos on Youtube, check our his podcast, or subscribe to his newsletter!

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The Three Environments That Create Every Employee Experience | Jacob Morgan

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I define "employee experience" as an organization creating a place where people want to show up instead of assuming that people need to show up. This shift from "need" to "want" is the fundamental change that organizations around the world are starting to experience.

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This article shows the focus points of the employee experience as well as possible returns on the investment.

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Employee experience is the latest trend taking over the world of HR. In fact, we've even seen new roles emerge around this trend, such as global chief employee experience officer or head of employee experience. But is this just a short-lived change in job titles and descriptions or is there something deeper going on here? My latest book, The Employee Experience Advantage: How to Win the War for Talent by Giving Employees the Workspaces they Want, the Tools they Need, and a Culture they Can Celebrate (Wiley, 2017), analyzes more than 250 global organizations to determine how they create environments that make people genuinely want to show up to work.

Here are the three things you need to know about employee experience:
Experience and Engagement Are Not the Same Thing
Over the past few decades, organizations have made considerable investments in employee engagement programs, yet scores remain at their lowest levels. Something doesn't make sense here. Unfortunately, employee engagement has become an adrenaline shot that most organizations use to temporarily boost scores. Usually, this is done in the form of perks such as free food, a new floor plan design and perhaps a work-from-home program. While these things are great, they don't achieve the intended results for either employees or the organization. Employee experience, on the other hand, involves a complete redesign of the organization that puts employees at the center. In other words, instead of trying to force people to fit into outdated workplace practices, organizations must redesign their workplace practices to fit with their people.
Experience Is a Combination of Three Factors
The good news is that there are only three things that shape all employee experiences at every organization around the world:

We have all heard of corporate culture and the many ways to describe it. Some say it's what happens when the manager leaves the room. Others say culture stems from the values, attitudes, practices and mission of the organization. Still others say culture is controlled by the CEO and other executives. Regardless of what you believe culture is or where it comes from, it is clear that culture is about feeling. It's the "vibe" you get when you walk in the door, and it's the mood and the tone that the workplace sets. It's the leadership style, the sense of purpose your employees feel, the organizational structure and the people that make up your organization. It's not written and it's not stated, yet it is one of the most important elements of creating and designing the employee experience. Typically, corporate culture is what energizes or drains us, motivates or discourages us, and empowers or suffocates us. We all experience the corporate culture of our organizations every single day, whether it be positive or negative.
Technology
The technological environment of the organization refers to the tools employees use to get work done. This includes everything from the internal social network to the mobile devices that employees have access to. This also includes any apps, software, e-learning tools, and user experience and design elements that impact how employees use these various tools. Technology is the central nervous system of an organization, and most concepts and themes related to the future of work are not possible without technology. Creating a great cultural environment requires having tools that focus on employees' needs instead of business requirements and making sure the tools are consumer grade.
Physical workspace
The physical workspace is the one we can see, touch, taste and smell. It's the art on the walls; the office floor plan; the demographics of the people we work with (old, young, diverse and so forth); and any physical perks workers might get, such as catered meals in a beautiful cafeteria, an onsite gym, or a lounge area where employees can unwind. Workplace flexibility, autonomy and access to multiple workspaces are variables that affect this environment.
Experience Brings Return on Investment-Lots of It
I analyzed business performance to see if there is a significant financial return for experiential organizations (those that scored highest in culture, technology and physical workspace). It turns out there is. Only 6 percent of the organizations I analyzed can be classified as experiential, but when compared to nonexperiential enterprises, they have four times higher average profits, two times higher average revenues, 40 percent lower turnover and 24 percent smaller head count. Their stock prices also outperformed the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq.

I absolutely believe that employee experience is the next big area of investment for organizations around the world and that the business impact is crystal clear.
is a best-selling author, keynote speaker and futurist. His work has been endorsed by the CEOs of Nestle, T-Mobile, Best Buy, Cisco, KPMG, SAP, Whirlpool, Schneider Electric and many others. You can learn more at TheFutureOrganization.com

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3 Things to Know About Employee Experience

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Employee experience is the latest trend taking over the world of HR. In fact, we've even seen new roles emerge around this trend, such as global chief employee experience officer or head of employee experience. But is this just a short-lived change in job titles and descriptions or is there something deeper going on here?

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This video shortly summarizes the future of employee experience.

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How treating employees like customers can reap rewards.

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5 steps for starting an employee experience

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5 steps for starting an employee experience

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"If I think about the language that I used as an HR professional, let's say 18 months ago," said Paul Davies, employee experience leader at General Electric, "the term persona, the term user experience, the term user interface, the term moments that matter, storyboards, journey maps -- [these] were simply not in my vocabulary."

Davies focuses on creating a great employee experience at GE. It's a concept that some believe will be a requirement in the war for talent. In addition to being heavily influenced by design thinking, employee experience tends to borrow much from customer experience strategies. It also requires leaders to approach problems in what may be a new way, including collaborating across the organization.

To this point, Davies said that, every day, he now works across a number of departments -- including IT -- since the employee experience is "so influenced through the tools and technology that [employees] use to be productive in their jobs."

In HR technology terms, that means looking at tools, such as your talent management systems, the ease of employee-facing HR sites, mobile tools and software that enables feedback. But it also means scrutinizing all the other office systems and hardware, as well as whether physical spaces enable productivity and -- especially critical -- what effect your company culture is having. Indeed, designing the best employee experience strategy for your company means examining and being willing to improve everything that affects workers' jobs.

Just as you wouldn't expect that bringing flowers to a partner would solve major relationship problems, you can't expect that simply handing out superficial perks or new technology will solve systemic issues. To that end, here are a few ideas to help you begin designing a truly better employee experience.

Gather and analyze employee data

"Probably one of the most crucial elements in designing the employee experience is just knowing your people," said Jacob Morgan, a workplace futurist and author of the recent book The Employee Experience Advantage. For starters, there needs to be one-on-one conversations, but there also needs to be easy-to-use feedback tools.

Feedback software -- some of which are known as pulse tools -- includes products such as TINYPulse and Subcurrent, the latter of which supports running polls on the Slack collaboration platform. In addition, a number of ERP vendors are offering people analytics dashboards to help understand HR issues and can be considered in employee experience efforts.

Data analytics are critical to creating an employee experience strategy, Morgan said, whether a company builds its own technology or looks to vendors for tools. Morgan said that you may need to collect new data; however, first examine and understand the data you have already been collecting.

Samuel Stern, a principal analyst in Forrester's customer experience research practice (which also includes employee experience), recommends observing and welcoming employees' real work processes. Find out their adaptations from standard processes, and use those to design superior processes. "You have that ongoing set of data ... [that can guide you on] what the right employee experience will be," he said.

Stern also recommends looking to the high performers and teams to see what's working today. These can provide clues to what could work on a broader scale, particularly when it comes to perceptions of meaning and purpose.

Understand customer experience frameworks

Stern said Forrester's definition of employee experience "very much mirrors our definition of customer experience." Indeed, Stern said he sees a lot of companies taking tools from the customer experience, design and user experience practices, such as observational research and journey mapping (a tool to help understand what a customer truly wants), and applying them to the employee experience. As companies are trying to figure out this new world of employee experience, they are using these methodologies to figure out the "complexities and interlocking pieces," he said. Employee perception is critical, since how employees feel about what happens determines how they'll respond. Journey mapping software tools, such as UX360 and Touchpoint Dashboard, are increasingly being used to digitally capture both customer and employee journeys, Stern said.

Determining high performers, as mentioned above, can also come from the customer experience arena. Stern said that one pathway to determining high performance is to look at teams or locations with superior customer experience scores, such as a high Net Promoter Score or customer satisfaction score, or teams or locations with superior business performance, better revenue, higher profitability or lower cost to serve. As for customer feedback platforms, Stern said that Medallia, Qualtrics and inMoment are a few of the vendors companies may want to research. These are also increasingly being used to collect feedback from employees.

Forrester's definition of employee experience 'very much mirrors our definition of customer experience.'

Samuel SternPrincipal analyst, Forrester

GE's Davies said that, when you start with the customer (i.e., employee) in mind and ask questions such as "What do you need to be successful as you come into our company?" you are apt to find out some things you didn't know. Moreover, walking in the shoes of your employees can yield some important information that can enable employees to do their "very best work," Davies said. To this end, GE has a team dedicated to observing how the different employee personas -- in broad strokes, composite profiles -- interact with colleagues, tools and technology. This information is used to articulate the needs, goals and pain points of the different types of employees. "From there, we create journey maps to ensure we create great experiences for our people."

In other words, think customization.Just as one person's Amazon page looks different from another, using a customized approach with employees is important. As an example, having the right learning management system is critical. GE uses BrilliantYou, which incorporates machine learning and analytics -- among other features, such as sharing -- to personalize learning experiences. With its smart features, BrilliantYou is intended to help meet learning challenges and provide better performance development.

Consider the entire experience

For GE, the highest level of employee experience is truly seen across the continuum -- from the candidate experience all the way through to if an employee leaves the company. That even includes those who weren't hired.

Still, it's important to dive deep into milestones and pain points.

Stern said that such areas -- the hiring journey, the onboarding journey and the new manager journey -- can yield some important information. As an example, one company realized it was alienating new employees by not reaching out to them with information between when an offer was made and when they started. In another case, he said the company's onboarding system was so onerous that people were simply bypassing it.

GE's investigation of such milestones also yielded critical information. For example, Davies said the company discovered 40% of employees made the decision that GE is the place that they want to work during their face-to-face meeting on-site, insight gleaned both from surveys and outright asking. With that insight, the company can provide even more attention to this powerful milestone.

Learn from the leading edge, then customize

Davies advises becoming inquisitive and delving deep into the relevant new concepts to inform your employee experience strategy. "Go out and explore," he said. "That's what I did for the first 100 days." For example, Davies met with experts from Disney and Airbnb, as well as technology companies, startups, not-for-profit organizations and consulting firms. Davies took what he learned back to GE -- with a twist. "I think understanding market practice and then making it relevant to your business is important."

Understanding market practice and then making it relevant to your business is important.

Paul DaviesEmployee experience leader, GE

Employee experience is a new theme, Morgan said, and creating the best employee experience for your company has to be a customized process. Companies will need to address the three environments he believes constitute employee experience -- culture, technology and physical space -- but the rest will be individual. "What Google does is going to be very different than what Apple or what Netflix does."

As a testament to this, Morgan pointed out that one of the big trends has been getting rid of annual performance reviews. A few years ago, Facebook went public with the news that it was keeping an annual review. It had collected the data and found that 87% of employees wanted to keep them. Morgan said that's a good example of an organization not changing just because other companies are doing it, but instead looking to its own employees. He said that companies spend a lot of time looking at these broad research reports and forget that they have an excellent source of information in the people who work at their own company.

Feedback necessary to inform an effective employee experience strategy can be collected in a plethora of ways, including from employee survey software and performance management software, to name just two.

Embrace cross-functional involvement and change

The CEO, HR, leadership at all levels, employees -- they all matter in creating a company with productive, happy employees. As with any other important initiative, CEO support is critical.

Morgan said that companies such as Airbnb and other standouts in the employee experience space demonstrate this concretely. "The CEOs of those organizations make commitments to their people around investing in [employee] experience, and they make these in front of the whole world."

Concrete evidence of that commitment can also be found in empowered HR departments. A strategic HR department is critical to employee experience efforts since HR will be responsible for driving the employee experience initiatives, Morgan said. But then, there's a ripple effect. Everyone needs to get involved -- including employees.

"Employees need to speak up," he said. This includes participating in data-gathering programs and providing feedback.

A great employee experience strategy and all the actions to realize and sustain its vision require getting comfortable with becoming more agile. Davies said that, with GE coming from a Six Sigma background, variation was historically not seen as a good thing. Now, the company is experimenting with "acting more like a startup, taking more risks, failing quickly, [and] iterating."

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Five steps to kick-start your employee experience strategy

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"If I think about the language that I used as an HR professional, let's say 18 months ago," said Paul Davies, employee experience leader at General Electric, "the term persona, the term user experience, the term user interface, the term moments that matter, storyboards, journey maps -- [these] were simply not in my vocabulary."

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Google is an amazing example of the ultimate employee experience