Key Messages
How To Catalyze Performance And Attract Talent — Lessons From The Most Successful Companies
The Employee Experience Advantage is a book that will show you how organizations can achieve success by creating an optimal employee experience.
It teaches readers how to build (or rebuild) their organization from the ground up, with an emphasis on collaborating with their employees for improved results.
The book explains why tech giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon always manage to attract the best talent, it also provides insight into how to make work environments more nurturing and inspiring so your workforce can reach higher levels of performance.
You’ll discover why fostering a sense of purpose and a culture of meaningful work is essential for achieving longterm success.
Furthermore, you’ll learn why thinking about the global impact of your company is so important and how providing rewards beyond financial gains can help motivate employees.
Finally, emotional stories such as the one about NASA’s janitor who inspired President Kennedy are included in order to truly hammer home the power of well managed employee experience.
How To Transform Your Organization For Optimal Employee Experience By Focusing On Three Components
Focusing on employee experience is essential when it comes to providing an optimal working environment for your employees.
Instead of focusing merely on employee engagement, which involves short-term rewards such as snacks and team-building trips, a focus on employee experience leads to a full redesign of the workplace.
It’s important to take time to carefully listen to the expectations, desires and needs of your workers so that you can create a physical environment that truly meets their requirements.
By doing this, you can ensure that your employees arrive at work every day feeling excited and motivated.
Just look at Facebook–they’ve created an incredibly attractive and efficient office layout by listening to their employees’ input and taking their needs into consideration.
That’s why it’s become such a highly sought after workplace!
When starting out on your redesign journey, it’s important to pay attention not only to the aesthetics but also the practicality of the workplace design–think about comfort levels, ergonomic designs and natural lighting or views from certain parts of the office.
Additionally, attention should be paid designing common spaces for casual interactions and creative thinking sessions, as well as outlining paths for targeted feedback loops in order for ideas or issues to be quickly addressed before they become larger problems.
By understanding how all these components combine together, an organziation can effectively transform their physical environment into one that meets everyone’s needs and creates true motivation amongst its workers everyday!
How The Physical Workplace Reflects Your Company’s Core Values And Enhances Employee Experience
Experiential organizations understand that maximum employee engagement and creativity come when their physical environment reflects the organization’s core values.
This is why they design their workplace to be a reflection of who they are as an organization, not to just have the “cool stuff.”
For example, Facebook has created a campus environment that is reflective of its major core values: “Be bold.
Focus on impact.
Move fast.
Be open.
Build social value.” There are open floor plans, eclectic art throughout the space, different options for both private and collaborative workspaces, and regularly rotating speakers and diverse team members.
Organizations with these types of creative physical environments often reap rewarding results as it encourages employees to be productive and engaged in their work by empowering them to take control of when and where they work.
FlexJobs conducted a survey of 10,000 employees worldwide which revealed that enabling flexibility in work arrangements significantly boosts productivity, reduces absenteeism and creates improved trust between employer and employee—all resulting in financial gains for companies.
By designing the physical environment around the organization’s values and taking into consideration what the employees need in order to create maximum levels of creativity, experiential organizations reap amazing rewards!
Invest In Consumer-Grade Technology To Make Your Employees’ Experience Easier
Creating a technological environment that makes all of your employees’ lives easier is critical for successful organizations.
Take the San Diego Zoo as an example; this 100-year-old nonprofit moved from conducting analogue training sessions in classrooms to implementing a free, flexible online learning system which employees could access anytime and anywhere.
The zoo also offered interest-free payroll deductions to cover the cost of computers and tablets so hundreds of them could gain 24/7 access to their training – leading to better employee performance and conservation of natural resources.
But having technology available isn’t enough – it must be easy to use as well.
If technologies are only geared towards IT professionals, they will likely result in a clunky and confusing user experience which won’t benefit anyone.
Therefore, investing in consumer-grade technology is important.
Tools which are well designed and intuitive enough that people feel comfortable using them at both work and home would make all the difference.
The Royal Bank of Scotland, or RBS, understood this; most of its 100,000 employees used Facebook mechanically so they rolled out Facebook for Work (the business version of Facebook) that combines advanced features with an easy-to-use interface.
Ultimately though, talking to employees about what they need is key before any new technologies are implemented or purchased.
This means collaborating between different departments like IT specialists and HR personnel to ensure everyone’s needs are being addressed appropriately.
It’S Time To Improve Your Organization’S Cultural Environment: Put Teams First And Show Employees The Impact Of Their Work
Organizations should strive to foster a team-centered, purpose-driven cultural environment in order to boost their employees’ motivation.
One of the best ways to do this is by making employees feel like they are part of an important and valued team.
An experiment at Stanford University demonstrated that participants worked 48% harder when they felt like a part of a team.
Similarly, companies such as Facebook aim to eradicate the idea of individualism altogether and praising teams instead of people for accomplishments.
This helps create a sense of unity among the staff and helps everyone focus on achieving a common goal – no matter what their job duties are.
In addition, organizations can also help their employees feel purposeful at work by showing them the direct impact made through hard work and connecting it back to core values.
This was exemplified at NASA, where a janitor clearly explained how his efforts were helping put a man on the moon – creating a sense of awe among all present and inspiring everyone more than ever before.
Having such an environment in your organization helps your staff understand why what they do on a daily basis matters and gives them more enthusiasm to complete tasks than without it.
Through creating such an environment, companies can truly experience The Employee Experience Advantage for themselves!
Why Should You Care About Creating An Amazing Employee Experience?
When it comes to an incredible employee experience, research has shown that experiential organizations have higher satisfaction from their workers than their competitors.
This can be seen not only through indicators of customer service, innovation, employer attractiveness and employee happiness, but also in the financial results.
Data from Yahoo!
Finance, PayScale and Fortune shows that organizations with a focus on the employee experience are 40 percent less likely to see employee turnover, more than double the average revenue, quadruple the average profit with almost three times more revenue and over four times more profit per employee compared to other businesses.
Simply put, experiential organizations are creating better places to work and enjoying a greater financial success as a result.
With careful attention paid to physical environments, technological features, as well as cultural aspects such as engaging team-building exercises, they are enabling their employees to reach new heights in terms of both performance and satisfaction.
How To Create An Inspiring Reason For Being: Go Beyond The Traditional Mission Statement And Rally Your Employees Around A Meaningful Goal
For organizations that want to create an awesome employee experience, it all starts with a strong reason for being.
Gone are the days of the vanilla mission statement that focuses solely on financial gain and customer satisfaction – you need to go beyond this and create an inspiring goal that everyone can rally behind and continually strive to work better.
This goal should be something lofty, but achievable; something that will show your employees how they can make a difference in the world by being part of your organization.
At Salesforce.org, their reason for being is not just focused on profits – they look to “utilize one percent of all its resources, including its technology and people, to help improve communities around the world and encourage other companies to do the same.” This provides their employees with a powerful calling – no matter what progress has been made, there is always more work left to be done when it comes to improving communities around the world!
When crafting your own reason for being as an organization, don’t forget to include your team in these discussions – ask them what they believe your organization stands for and how it makes a difference.
Once you find it, you’ll have an awesome employee experience that makes everyone proud.
Creating A Continual Design Loop For Optimal Employee Experiences
If you’re looking to improve your organization’s three key environments — productivity, engagement, and satisfaction — then an infinite design loop is the way to go.
This involves actively involving employees in the process of improving the business.
For example, Airbnb created a hugely successful design loop with their dedicated “food team”, who provide staff with three meals a day and send out emails before each one with a link to a feedback form.
This helped them increase productivity by 90%, not to mention acting as a strong incentive for people to stay at Airbnb.
Of course, an infinite design loop can’t be used effectively if you don’t care about or listen to what your employees have to say.
Annual reviews may be important, but they shouldn’t be relied upon solely; instead, it must be constant and easy for employees to get involved every day.
If you give teams freedom to develop solutions and power to quickly launch them, then you’ll help create employee experiences at the heart of your design loop.
Rethinking The Outdated ‘Employee Life Cycle’ And Embracing Moments That Matter
The tired concept of an employee life cycle is outdated and not reflective of the reality of modern day life.
Instead, it’s time to embrace the idea of moments that matter.
These are any events or experiences that have a strong emotional impact on an individual’s experience of work.
It could be their first day on the job, a promotion they receive, or even a team building exercise they attend.
No two employees may share the same moment that matters to them and you can only find out what those are through talking to each individual personally.
By doing this, you can create an environment which is tailored for each employee’s needs – making them feel special and unique amongst their colleagues.
For example, technology giant Cisco has identified 11 key moments where workers have had strong emotional reactions within the organization, such as allocating five days off for employees volunteer for causes close to their heart Furthermore, new hires get welcomed with a customer success stories to show how much impact their organization makes.
Physical working environments also need consideration – is there flexibility during busy periods? Do employees have workspace options? These are just some questions to ask when creating a personalised environment for staff members.
At the end of the day, it’s clear that listening to each individual’s needs is critical in order to make sure they get their moment that matters – this will result in greater employee engagement and motivation which your company deserves!
How To Create An Optimal Employee Experience With A Ripple Effect Starting At The Top
Creating an optimal employee experience requires collaboration from everyone in your organization.
It starts with the senior leadership, who create and nurture a company’s reason for being, its core values and the organization’s overall purpose.
The best way to do this is exemplified by T-Mobile CEO John Legere, who frequently visits “the frontline” – employees interacting directly with customers – to ensure that their perspectives are taken into account when rolling out initiatives.
Once that’s done, roles like a chief employee experience officer or executive vice president of employee experience can be established to steer the optimization process.
These officers are responsible for supporting individual managers who are driving progress forward in their various teams.
At the same time, it’s also essential that employees across all levels of an organization understand and take responsibility for fostering an optimal employee experience.
This means giving feedback, ideas and suggestions to improve the overall atmosphere at work, while not being afraid to raise complaints if necessary.
Creating a positive working environment takes dedication from everyone to champion it at all times, embedding experiential elements at every level of the organization.
While there may be financial rewards associated with this approach, most noteworthy are the rewards such as becoming a transformative force within corporate sectors and communities around the world.
Wrap Up
The Employee Experience Advantage is a must-read book for any business looking to succeed.
It provides a clear roadmap on how to create an experiential organization and foster the optimal physical, technological, and cultural workplace environments.
The key, according to the book, is to ensure that employees are motivated and empowered through every step of their journey.
This involves focusing on teamwork and having a strong sense of purpose to drive the organization forward.
The actionable advice for those looking for change is to talk to your coworkers about your gripes in order to spark meaningful conversations that lead to positive changes.
Additionally, ask yourself if you would take a “pill”-form representing what it’s like working at your company right now – if the answer is no, then speak up and make the necessary adjustments.
By following these steps, you can join organizations that have already adopted this successful strategy and start experiencing the employee experience advantage!
