The shift to the employee experience is here to stay

The global workforce underwent a spectacular change during the twentieth century. Technological, medical and legislative changes caused massive improvements in worker safety and conditions. Changes such as improving workplace health and safety standards, heating and cooling office buildings and reducing work hours all amounted to vastly improved conditions for the average worker.

Despite these structural changes to the workplace, the employee’s role was still a largely utilitarian one for most of the late twentieth century. As Jacob Morgan writes, this utilitarianism meant that employers focused solely on providing the essential tools and resources that employees needed to do their job. 

As time went on, the employers’ focus changed. First, they established processes and procedures to extract as much as possible from employees in the quest for improved productivity. Engagement was next, shifting the employee-employer relationship from one that involved extracting as much as possible from the worker to one that looks at what the organization can do to actually benefit the employee. This change in the workplace relationship was a radical redesign of how things had been done for most of the entire history of work. The goal was that it would have massive benefits on productivity and happiness. 

Unfortunately, this didn’t really pan out. The short-term morale boost of, say, getting a pool table in your office building soon went away, and employees returned to their usual unenthusiastic equilibrium. Following engagement efforts came the rise of employee experience.

Where did the concept of employee experience come from?

The concept of the employee experience (EX) is difficult to trace from its origins. It seems to have become a hot topic around 2017 when Mark Levy decided to transform the Human Resources Department at Airbnb. The company became a pioneer in employee experience, even titling Mark Levy as Global Head of Employee Experience rather than using the more traditional Human Resources nomenclature. 

But what is employee experience exactly? 

Susan Peters, Former Senior Vice President of Human Resources at General Electric, defined it as “seeing the world through the eyes of our employees, staying connected, and being aware of their major milestones.” This definition is a little vague and hard to quantify into actual policies and procedures or workplace design. But luckily, Jacob Morgan, writing for the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) back in 2017, gave a more concrete explanation of the employee experience mindset: 

“Instead of trying to force people to fit into outdated workplace practices, organizations must redesign their workplace practices to fit with their people.”

In other words, people were starting to become the central focus of the organization. This change started with an intense focus on customers and customer experience but has since been translated more internally to explore the experience of those within the organization. Those companies that were first to embrace employee experience later became the employers most sought-after by the best talent: Facebook, Google, Apple, Accenture and Southwest Airlines, for example. In fact, authors and consultants at McKinsey suggested that the way talent would be won or lost was based on EX.  

Employee experience in our context

Employee experience was already an upward trend, the culmination of decades of ever-increasing focus on human resources and better policies, as well as the people themselves. In recent years, there has been heightened organizational awareness towards HR and its employees, and the increasing importance of HR and an employee-centric vision is already being seen. The US is currently facing a labor shortage more acute than in previous times. Where this is most acutely felt? In low-wage and toxic workplaces, such as the restaurant industry.

The surplus of available positions in countries like the US has not come about because people don’t want to work; companies that embrace employee experience are overwhelmed with interest. A recent report claimed that Google, which ranks very high on employee experience, receives 2 million applications a year. What people are increasingly NOT interested in are companies with poor EX, who take little care of their employees—either in wages, toxic working cultures, inflexible structures, and the list goes on. 

Looking ahead, this is the major shift I see happening: I see Human Resources having an ever-increasing role in the organization. This is partly in response to the need to focus more on people but mostly driven from the ground up, by upcoming employees and talent voting with their feet, opting only for those workplaces that provide a high-quality experience. Any company interested in attracting and retaining talent needs to pay attention: start listening to your employees and start caring more about them, or else.