When the Employee Experience (EX) comes up, the conversation generally revolves around milestones. I suspect that’s because the EX was derived from the Customer Experience (CX), which is built around the marketing funnel with its milestones: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, purchase, advocacy. But the fact is, employees have experiences every single day they’re at work. From apps that don’t work right and an IT support team that seems uninterested in helping to a boss who regularly recognizes great performance, the interactions that occur on a day-to-day basis shape the EX.

In this installment of the New Model series, we’ll delve a little deeper into these day-to-day encounters and how communicators can help make them as positive as possible.

This is the latest installment in a series of posts exploring a new model of employee communication, designed to deliver measurable results that demonstrate the impact on the organization in ways that matter to leaders.

The series:
Part 1: Introduction	Part 13: Place
Part 2: Overview	Part 14: Engagement
Part 3: Alignment	Part 15: The Strategic Narragive
Part 4: Listening	Part 16: Engaging Managers
Part 5: Consultation	Part 17: Employee Voice
Part 6: Branding	Part 18: Organizational Integrity
Part 7: Channels	Part 19: The Customer Experience
Part 8: Culture	Part 20: The Customer Journey
Part 9: Vision/Mission	Part 21: Touchpoints on the Customer Journey
Part 10: Values	Part 22: Customer Ecosystems
Part 11: Practices	Part 23: The Employee Experience
Part 12: People	Part 24: The Employee Journey

The four overlapping circles at the center of the model represent the best opportunities for employee communication to affect an organization on a day-to-day basis. This post explores the impact of day-to-day encounters on the Employee Experience, a critical component of the final circle..

Explaining the difference between employee engagement and Employee Experience (EX), Burt Rea—Deloitte’s director of human capital consulting—says, “Employee Experience has come into vogue because it’s such a practical concept. It’s the day-to-day moments that matter to employees.”

There are big moments, to be sure, like promotions and training opportunities. But these don’t come along every day. Employees experience far more less-momentous moments each day that collectively shape the overall experience at least as much as the big ones.

These smaller moments, in fact, can accumulate over time, either reinforcing or undermining the impact of the big moments. A promotion can make an employee feel great but after a while, that great promotion becomes just the job; if the employee’s calls for help to Human Resources or IT are less than satisfying, those routine aggravations loom large long after the rush of the promotion recedes into the past.

One of the shortcomings of most employee journey maps is that they highlight milestones, not mundane daily interactions. (That’s not very different from a road map, which highlights offramps,  streets, and key destinations (like hospitals), but makes no effort to display every pothole or speed bump no matter how uncomfortable they make the ride.)

Ultimately, the experience delivered by the employees working in the various departments that provide services to employees is a function of culture. (Remember my definition of culture: “the way things are done around here.”) If dismissive responses to pleas for help is the way things are done around here, the employee experience won’t be great. But that’s not to say there is nothing to be done if these departments are diminishing the Employee Experience.

A Mile in Employees’ Shoes

One of the most important tips for building an employee-centric workplace is for leaders and employees who work in service functions to put themselves in employees’ shoes. What is it like to be on the receiving end of the service the facilities department or the procurement department delivers?

A colleague of mine found the perfect way to drive home this message when dealing with a rift between a client’s customer call center and product engineers. The engineers were fed up with the complaints coming from customer service while the call center staff had had enough of the engineers’ contemptuous dismissal of their reports. My friend sent the call center staff home and had the engineers take customer calls for a day. At the end of the experiment, the engineers had heard directly from customers about the issues they had with the company’s products. The engineers. having walked in their shoes, now had empathy for the call center staff.

While this is a dramatic example of a communicator influencing how support staff interacts with employees, it makes it clear that such influence is possible.

There are other ways to help support staff experience what it’s like to interact with them. Chief among them is facilitating the upward communication that reveals employee perceptions of these departments. Multiple approaches to obtaining this feedback are available, from pulse polls to focus groups. At a conference I attended in 2019, SABRE’s now-retired Culture VP, Mark Schumann, shared one technique he had applied, the Culture Club.

The club was made up of employees who had volunteered to participate in brief in-person or online gatherings to share how the company was doing at enabling them to do their best work. (In one instance, for example, employees told Mark that the best interactions were those that allowed them to get to know a co-worker.) Mark took a podcast-like approach to sharing his findings with managers, emailing them a short audio file (about 2 minutes long). Managers used the information in the audio clip to help their teams better serve employees.

Armed with employee input—which, by the way, also supports employee engagement by amplifying the employee voice—communicators can employ a variety of techniques to help improve the experience or to help other departments (e.g., training and development) develop a solution. These can include the following:

• Role-playing—Knowing how employees feel about calling HR, for example, you can have a member of the HR team play the role of an employee while you assume the HR role, responding to the employee’s question or concern based on what you know from the feedback you have received. After the role-playing session, witnessed by the entire HR team, facilitate a discussion about how the experience can be improved.
• Virtual Reality simulations—There is a growing mountain of evidence that one-on-one simulations in VR elevate empathy. There are now VR programs for difficult conversations (including laying people off) among other situations. Finding one (or commissioning one to be built) that helps support staff better serve their clients can improve the experience in short order.
• Establish the team as a discrete audience—It may make sense to define an internal support team that is missing the mark as a target for focused communication. If it’s the HR staff that’s eroding the Employee Experience, find ways to communicate directly with them on an ongoing basis, helping them focus on the bigger picture, develop their brand, and learn new techniques for handling employee calls.
• Set up an advisory group—Assemble a cross-functional group of people who interact regularly with the support team in question to provide regular feedback.

Recognition

As I have noted before, reward and recognition are the two key drivers of behavior change. Recognizing support staff that gets it right can be a powerful way to influence others to change their approach. Recognition has been a recurring theme in this series for good reason!

While it is always powerful to recognize desired behaviors with formal programs, it is at least as effective for employees to be recognized by their peers. On the intranet at the company where I work, we have introduced “High Five,” a module that allows for peer-to-peer recognition. A recent one reads, “Thank you for always being great to work with. I appreciate all that you do to make sure we have plenty of Covid supplies for our employees. You go above and beyond to find solutions.”

That’s the kind of appreciation that can inspire other employees to strive to deliver that same level of service.

Articles on the intranet (or whatever channels works best in your organization) that recognize staff employees who went the extra mile also serve as recognition vehicles. An internal podcast would be a great place for a conversation with a support team member and the employee they helped.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The behavior of support staff is not the only day-to-day issue that can sour the employee journey. If a strong culture is one that allows employees to bring their best selves to work so they can do their best work, routine encounters with racism, gender bias, sexism, ageism, and other forms of discrimination are clear obstacles to ensuring a great journey.

These biases can manifest easily during day-to-day interactions. Just one example: A Black employee whose peers talk over her and minimize her contributions while making veiled racist comments can intimidate the employee and lead to her staying quiet rather than risk another hurtful remark from a colleague. That’s clearly not an employee who is able to bring her best self to work. There is no doubt that her Employee Experience is far less than it could be.

Reinforcing your organization’s commitment to DE&I, and sharing stories of people who reflect the company’s desired behaviors, can help shift the behaviors of others.

Purpose and Values

I covered corporate values in part 10 of this series but, along with a purpose, it’s worth revisiting briefly as part of the daily interactions employees have.

Also, in part 18, we explored organizational integrity, a foundational element of employee engagement. Organizational integrity is best described as the say-do gap, when leaders say one thing but the reality on the ground is the opposite. When a company promotes its values or purpose statements but leaders’ and managers’ behaviors contradict those statements, employees grow cynical.

As with DE&I, communicators have an opportunity to craft communications (including counseling leaders on their communications) that demonstrate to employees that there is no say-do gap (or, at least, that the gap is narrowing).

Up next

Work-Life Balance is the subject of the next post, an increasingly challenging goal unless you get creative.

The graphics for this series were created by Brian O’Mara-Croft.