Employee Experience

Scripture Ecclesiastes 3:22: “I have seen that there is nothing better for a person to enjoy his activities because that is his reward.”  

Hot off last week considering how to offshore and automate your business, we are talking this week about how to take care of your core employee group – especially those that are onshore and in these unique times (ie Great Resignation) have options to either stop working and/or find a more lucrative offer elsewhere. The truth is that if you are not already working on employee experience, it is probably too late so you should start working on it for your next wave of employees. 

In terms of the scripture for this week, remember this verse not just for yourself but to make this true for your people too. This is what employee experience is all about – helping them enjoy their activities or work. More money, parties, coffee, or happy hours will not last if you are not investing in the enjoyment of the work (Check out Work vs. Toil blog) by your teams. 

Based on our experience working with hundreds of executives across dozens of clients, we would recommend three things to be successful. 

First, accept the reality that some people just won’t ever be happy or fulfilled at your company or in any particular role you can offer them. This can be for a myriad of reasons. It may be that they are confusing work/life fulfillment with eternal fulfillment and you cannot be their God or Savior. It could be their worldview, upbringing, values or temperament that make finding work fulfillment extremely challenging (Josh the Consultant struggled with this early in his career). It could be their strengths are mis-aligned with their current role or even your entire organization. Finally, it could be that they have a ceiling far beyond what you could ever offer them. In short – give yourself grace because there is only so much you can do in the season (however long it may be) you have with your employees. 

Second, get to know your employees on a personal level so you can understand their strengths, personality and what motivates them. Then create a personalized path for them that helps improve their fulfillment today and gives them a vision of how they can grow with your company. As you establish this path, be flexible in its application because life will happen as babies are born, illness impacts an employee or their family and other circumstances influence the perspective and priorities of each person. 

Third, assess each person’s role including the processes or tasks that they manage. How can you infuse these with greater degrees of creativity or freedom that might leverage the strengths of the given employee. As discussed last week, this would require automating or offshoring the more mundane or predictable tasks/processes and allow your employee to deliver much greater value while feeling more fulfilled by accessing more of their strengths.  

What are some ways The Consultant and The Coach help their clients with employee experience? 

The Consultant

• Work with a leadership team to refresh their strategy and in particular, examine their people strategy
• Conduct business process mapping exercises to determine what people and roles might add greater value and find greater fulfillment by exchanging lower value tasks/processes for higher value ones

The Coach

• Conduct personality, strengths and/or motivator assessments for each of the executives and/or across the entire enterprise. 
• Develop career development plans for each of the executives and work with human resources on developing plans for each employee which reflect their personality, strengths and motivators