Resources

Various factors have put the spotlight on employee experience (EX) today. But what is the state of EX? Where do companies stand in their efforts to improve EX, and what challenges do they face? FOUNT and TI People recently conducted a study to gain some answers.

Karthik Kashyap, an assistant editor at Spiceworks, covers a broad range of topics across HR Tech and Martech, from talent acquisition to workforce management.

His latest article, Silos and Bad Data: Top Barriers to Employee Experience Improvement This Year, summarizes the findings from the Big, Bad State of EX.

Spiceworks is the marketplace that connects the IT industry to help technology buyers and sellers get their jobs done, every day, The company helps people in the world’s businesses to find, adopt, and manage the latest technologies while also helping IT brands build, market, and support better products and services.

Take a deep dive into The State of EX 2022 from the team at HRDive

One of the more challenging aspects of securing investment for Employee Experience (EX) practices is convincing business leaders of the resulting impact. This article from HRDive, To get C-suite buy-in, HR needs to think small, reflects on key findings from the State of EX 2022 report.

FOUNT cofounder and CEO, Christophe Martel, explains why HR teams “need a depth of focus — a smaller aperture” and offers readers helpful suggestions for narrowing their focus and expanding their impact. Read the full article to learn more.

Research has repeatedly shown that happy employees are productive employees. Our CEO contributes the following excerpt to the article, What Can Companies Do to Improve Employee Engagement?

Positive Employee Experience Requires a Human Touch 

According to Christophe Martel, CEO of Washington DC-based FOUNT, fixing the broken workplace requires a shift in perspective. Today, companies offer ergonomic desks and chairs, but not ergonomic work. This is not surprising given that work was never really designed around humans and their needs. Rather, it was designed around the organization and its needs.

Employee experience is born out of interactions between people and their environment, Martel said. Marketing and services teams understand this concept and have built better customer experiences that continue to improve over time. But this hasn’t yet been transposed to the workforce in many organizations because people misunderstand the nature of human experience at work.

“Without the right tools to reflect individuals’ interactions at work, company leaders can’t understand the highs, lows and various points of friction where they can make a measurable impact. They keep trying to help but fail to be helpful.”

Christophe Martel, Co-founder and CEO of FOUNT

Read the full article on Reworked

We’re thrilled to see our Co-founder and CEO on this list of influential HR leaders. These European HR Tech influencers have a big hand in predicting and analyzing the hiring trends in Europe. The list was compiled by Paramdeep Singh, Head of Marketing at RChilli Inc., the trusted partner for parsing, matching, and data enrichment.

He says, “with their valuable insights on HR automation, migration, and the labor market, their work speaks volumes about them.” From CEOs, best-selling authors, consultants and serial entrepreneurs, Volker joins a prestigious group of European leaders. Congratulations!

View the full list.

This guest post from Stephanie Denino, Director of Applied EX at TI People, originally appeared on LinkedIn. Read why this EX practitioner who has been in the field from the very beginning is so inspired.

When I entered the emerging field of Employee Experience (EX) in 2016, I instantly found it inspirational. There’s an energy about this space… it’s about pushing boundaries in new ways to get to better outcomes than ever before, for individuals and the companies they work for. What’s not to love about that?!

In my time doing this work, I’ve seen the full range of interest in the topic – from a company’s most junior employees to its most senior leaders who want to lean it to make work better for everyone.

But as I’ve learned, being committed and inspired to improve EX is one thing; knowing how to go about making real impact through EX work is quite another. Having experienced it firsthand, making progress on EX within complex organizations can feel like a bumpy, windy and sometimes lonely road filled with unforeseen challenges.

To further complicate matters, there’s a lot of EX posturing going on fueling confusion as to what EX is all about and providing the sense that some have figured it all out. Everyone seems to want to contribute to the movement. But it’s important to remain humble and remember that conceptual understanding is one thing; execution excellence is another.

The truth is, when a space is new, everything must be defined and charted for the first time: with few insightful examples and wildly different approaches that struggle to take root; some that feel intuitively wrong, others meh, and – perhaps if we’re lucky – a few that feel right. In other words, there is no such thing as best practices yet, only practices. But how do fields get to have agreed upon ‘best practices?’ Surely, by exposing practices, comparing their impact and elevating the best ones.

We’re at a point in time in which the foundations for EX are being set – and this is the perfect moment for believers to come together and share the reality of the state of EX – for all to appreciate where the field is at, and to figure out together how we continue progressing it. Only when we have this view, can we collaborate to shape the best practices for this field.

To all those who, like me, see the promise for the field of EX (and perhaps even those who don’t yet, but are intrigued), I invite you to join the movement – fill in the state of EX survey today.

https://bit.ly/3zSnVd5

Executive Networks, the global leader in building trusted, peer-knowledge, exchange networks for HR executives, is partnering with employee experience experts, TaskHuman and FOUNT, to support leaders to reinvent the solutions needed for workforce well-being.

In partnership with Executive Networks and TaskHuman, FOUNT invites HR Directors to engage in a half-day workshop with subject matter experts to co-create actionable and relevant well-being solutions for yourself and your company.

Teddy Zmrhal, a renowned and celebrated design-thinking expert, will facilitate an energized, engaging and productive workshop for HR leaders to optimize exclusive research results, collaborate, and co-create well-being solutions to support you and your employees. 

This opportunity is FREE, and space is LIMITED. Because we are committed to creating a relevant and safe space for you to collaborate with your true peers, the application process needs to include details to help us approve your request quickly. Apply for your spot today! Register for the workshop closest to you.

West Coast

Fort Mason Center, Firehouse 2 Marina Boulevard San Francisco, CA 94123

When: September 27th 1-5 pm PDT

East Coast

Meet Hospitality 41 Madison Ave New York, NY 10010

When: October 4th 1-5 pm EDT

The “Great” buzzwords – Resignation, Reshuffle, Attrition – capture the zeitgeist of a changing philosophy of work for both employers and those they employ. Catchy headlines notwithstanding, we see the impact of this shift everywhere. It is reflected in U.S. labor market statistics showing an ever-increasing attrition rate despite billions of investment in HR systems designed to keep employees happy and productive. We also hear it directly from our global customers who are seeking new solutions to augment their HR tech investments and make experience data a cornerstone of continuous improvement – one that filters through every aspect of their organizations.

For those who know us from our TI People roots, you understand the extent to which we live and breathe a fundamentally different perspective on Employee Experience (EX). Our definition goes beyond the usefulness of capturing engagement, sentiment and loyalty. We believe work should work for employees, not just companies. When you see what employees see as they go about their daily jobs, it’s as if you’ve gained x-ray vision into every thing – big and small – that gets in the way of their lived experience at work.

Remove those obstacles and you unlock workforce performance and productivity at levels that make a meaningful and quantifiable impact on the business. Our spinout company, FOUNT, aims to productize this unique approach, empowering organizations to harness the most insightful EX data they gather directly from employees and take action to make work life better for everyone.

If you are interested in sharing your own perspectives on Employee Experience, we encourage you to participate in our 4th Annual State of EX research. We’re very proud of this year’s survey as it kicks off a new enterprise-wide and longitudinal format, collecting the experiences of three different practitioner groups to provide a 360-degree, long-term view of EX improvement work at organizations worldwide. Results will be published in mid-October and participants will receive a copy of the final report.

Volker Jacobs’ latest article in Germany’s leading HR publication, #Personalmagazin.

We live in the experience economy. Staging superior employee experiences creates a significant competitive advantage for companies. Yet, when embarking on their employee experience journey, companies too often start from the wrong premises and lack clear direction. How to avoid flying blind into the experience economy?

Whether you’d like to admit it or not, companies find themselves in fierce competition not only for products and services, but also for the experiences that customers and employees have when they deal with the company. We do live in the Experience Economy.

The great upheavals of our time (new work, economic and political crises, generational and value changes) challenge companies and the people that work for them. In response, employers increasingly turn their attention to their employees. A recent McKinsey article put it this way: “By not understanding what their employees are running from, and what they might gravitate to, company leaders are putting their very businesses at risk.” Which makes the management of the Employee Experience, or EX for short, an imperative for each company.

If you are serious about a competitive advantage through EX, you have to make the company as a whole more experience-centric. This requires a sustained effort. Businesses need good sensors to set and achieve the right goal. No one will succeed flying blind.

Employee Centricity Does Not Equal Experience Centricity

Whether Human Resources with a capital “H” or P&O with a capital “P”, HR departments by nature focus on employees: Everything they do revolves around the people working for the respective companies. In times of massive change, they listen more to employees (Employee Listening) and analyze their data more thorough than ever (people analytics). They are creating new working models (hybrid, agile), revising HR products (e.g. remote onboarding) and investing in new IT tools for employees.

This is all fine and fair, but it does not transform businesses into experience-centric organizations. It is true: Employers know a lot about employees, but (almost) nothing about their experience at work. Without this knowledge, they run the risk of rushing blindly into Experience Economy. 

View the full article below.

personalmagazin-06.22_EX_Volker-Jacobs-enDownload

Companies selling products and services are leveraging experience to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. People have become accustomed to sophisticated and well-designed consumer experiences and increasingly expect the same of their experience of work. In short, experiences count.

Do you speak the language of experience?

The Experience Economy

People have experiences all the time, including when they work.

Companies selling products and services are leveraging experience to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. People have become accustomed to sophisticated and well-designed consumer experiences and increasingly expect the same of their experience of work.

In short, experiences count.

Adults spend more than a third of their waking lives at work each year, and unsurprisingly people want work to work for them: to meet their unique needs, to provide a daily source of satisfaction rather than frustration.

If the experience of work is good for employees, the benefits for the business are clear: productivity is greatly increased, and much higher levels of employee retention result. However, we know that the opposite is often the case.

Many people’s experience of work is that it is something to be endured, rather than something to look forward to. Worse, many employees feel that they get their work done in spite of the company rather than with its support.

What happens when this is the case? An experience economy is also a free market – many employees will just go elsewhere. Quitting in search of an employer that can provide better experiences of work is easier than ever. The well-documented phenomenon of ‘The Great Resignation’ has shown that employees feel empowered to act when it comes to improving their quality of life, of which experiences at work play a large part.

If the experience of work is good for employees, the benefits for the business are clear

In an already tight labor market, losing staff is a critical business problem and the answer cannot lie with simply replacing them – attracting, hiring, retaining lost talent is expensive and time-consuming (if it is even possible), and may represent a threat to the very existence of the enterprise.

Perhaps even more concerningly, those that don’t leave may drift into presenteeism which can be infectious and harmful to morale. In addition, while gaps in headcount may be easily quantifiable, it can be harder to get visibility into the proportion of your workforce who are still employed but may have ‘checked out’.

Either way, if enough staff leave (physically or otherwise), the net impact is real damage to the performance of the business.

Misunderstanding Work

Fundamentally, the challenge of people having a poor experience of work is not actually their problem, but rather the company’s problem. With unmet demand for labor and the proliferation of sources of information and communication such as Glassdoor and LinkedIn, the barriers to leaving for better experiences elsewhere have never been lower.

The solution for the company is much harder- to improve employee’s experience of work you have to understand what work really is for your employees, and change it to meet their unique needs.

Companies typically design work around their own business needs, thinking about work in terms that they understand, and organizing themselves and their employees accordingly. To create work that supports business objectives and meets the complex needs of human beings, organizations have to shift their whole frame of reference for how they conceive of work to be more human-centric.

Instead of starting from the requirements of the organization and working top-down to the employees, they need to internalize the opposite perspective: beginning with the human experience of work and then adjusting the organization around it. One could sum this up with the following statement: rather than Human Resources that work for the company, they should think in terms of balancing it with Company Resources that work for humans.

To improve work you have to understand what it really is for your employees, and change it to meet their unique needs

Much as businesses have grown to accept that they need to meet customers where they are, ultimately the gap between the organization-centric understanding of work for employees and the lived human experience is what needs to be bridged.

Business as Usual: Lost in Translation

This is not to say that companies haven’t committed plentiful resources – with good intention – towards what they see as improving work conditions.

Many leaders may embrace and agree with the notions of the Experience Economy and the need for human-centricity, but they may also only see in those concepts vindication for the strategies they are already pursuing – especially when the terms ‘human’ or ‘experience’ appear somewhere on the list.

However, these strategies often reflect a top-down view of organizing people and work around the company’s own needs. As a result, they will likely fail to bridge the gap between the company’s and the employees’ concept of the experiences of work, and will not meaningfully change work to meet the human needs of employees.

When organizations conceive of ‘experience’ it often doesn’t align with what employees think and feel about work on a daily basis. Institutionally, companies lack the framework and language to describe and codify work in ways that are not focused around process, silos, systems and functions within themselves.

The existing company-centric view of strategies to improve work conditions includes much of the typical Human Resources project portfolio.

Examples include:

• Implementing or expanding engagement & listening programs
• Human Capital Management (HCM) system upgrades
• Digital transformations
• Employee Value Proposition (EVP) rebrands
• Revising company communications & messaging
• Free breakfasts

The above projects and initiatives may impact the individual, but are not fundamentally tailored to understanding and improving their experience. As such, any improvements in human experience that result from much of the existing HR agenda will be by accident rather than design.

Rather than Human Resources that work for the company, think in terms of balancing it with Company Resources that work for humans.

By describing the work employees do purely in the language of the organization, the company’s good intentions get lost in translation.

Employees’ human experiences remain unmanaged and the deep problem of building a positive employee experience remains unsolved.

Given the strong business and labor market incentives to ‘get experience right’, as well as the finite nature of resources there is the very real possibility that, from an experience perspective at least, it would be better to do nothing than to spend a fortune doing the wrong things.

Ultimately, if a new perspective on the problem of experience is desired, then a new set of tools to solve it are needed.

Cracking the Code

In order to improve work, companies need to understand, measure and meaningfully change the human experience of it.

The many goals that individuals pursue in the act of working are nuanced and varied. The myriad activities they perform, whether little or big things, trigger interactions with a complex human, digital, and physical ecosystem within the company. This interplay is what it means to experience work.

This is where existing listening data fails to provide enough insight – organizations need to be able to collect information across this multitude of factors and interactions and then analyze it. If this weren’t hard enough already, it needs to be done at scale and across the company.

At FOUNT we know that employees don’t speak the language of processes, silos, and other organization-centric concepts; instead they live the daily language of human experience. If an organization is serious about changing the experience of work for its employees, it needs to translate their language into insight it can act on – this is where existing listening strategies fall short, especially at scale.

If a new perspective on the problem of experience is desired, then a new set of tools to solve it are needed.

FOUNT has cracked this critical code, and our Employee Experience (EX) Intelligence solution provides the tools and the structure to gather and analyze authentic experience data.   That intelligence empowers leaders to prioritize the most important work experiences that need improvement for specific talent segments, and pinpoint sources of friction within those experiences.

Implementing an employee-centered listening capability is the critical strategic foundation that provides the data and intelligence to inform the right improvements within your company. However, developing a more mature strategy where this type of change is orchestrated across the many people, teams, projects and initiatives spread throughout an enterprise is a gargantuan task.

The FOUNT solution is the infrastructure to operationalize the delivery and improvement of experiences across the many moving parts of an organization. By tracking progress over time, and determining and appointing responsibility and visibility, a self-sustaining feedback loop can be created to drive meaningful improvement in your employees’ human experiences of work.

That’s why FOUNT exists – we believe that people should feel great at work and we’re excited to partner with our customers to achieve this ambition.

With the right tools organizations can learn and understand this new language of work. By acting on experience, common human frustrations and frictions can be swept away.

Ultimately the dream of work that just works can be made real.