How can organizations truly create a place where employees want to show up to work versus need to show up to work? For decades the business world has focused on measuring employee engagement meanwhile global engagement scores remain at an all time low despite all the surveys and institutes that been springing up tackle this problem. Clearly something is not working. Employee engagement has become the short-term adrenaline shot that organizations turn to when they need to increase their engagement scores. Instead, we have to focus on designing employee experiences which is the long term organizational design that leads to engaged employees. This is the only long-term solution. Organizations have been stuck focusing on the cause instead of the effect. The cause is employee experience; the effect is an engaged workforce.
There is no question that engaged employees perform better, aspire higher, and achieve more, but you can't create employee engagement without designing employee experiences first. It's time to rethink your strategy and implement a real-world framework that focuses on how to create an organization where people want to show up to work. The Employee Experience Advantage shows you how to do just that.
The Employee Experience Advantage: How To Win The War For Talent By Giving Employees The Workspaces
Overall, the more of these environments you can execute on and take small measures to improve, the better the overall employee experience will be, and thus, the more engaged your employees will be. This ultimately gives your organization a substantial competitive advantage.
Morgan, Jacob. The employee experience advantage: how to win the war for talent by giving employees the workspaces they want, the tools they need, and a culture they can celebrate. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2017. Print.
Jacob Morgan explains very well the way the nature of work changed over times. First it was about utility (some people had a work capacity and needed money, some others had money and needed a workforce), then about productivity (optimizing the workforce utilization), the engagement (because happier employees are more productive) and today we see the dawn of the experience era to make people show up because they want and not because they must.
The Art of Community is a manual for cultivating a sense of belonging and shared purpose among groups. The book does not focus exclusively on work, and instead provides a set of more general guidelines and best practices for forming community. The author highlights seven key practices for building strong communities such as rituals and storytelling, and gives leaders tools to use to foster connection, inclusivity, and unity among the group. The book contains valuable tips applicable to team building, forming work friendships, and creating cohesive work friendships. Getting along with coworkers undoubtedly improves the employee experience, to the extent that having work friends makes professionals less likely to leave jobs. The Art of Community gives leaders the power to turn workplaces into gathering places and make employees feel like a part of something significant.
Employee experience books are guides that show leaders how to craft workplaces team members can enjoy and thrive in. These books preach the philosophy that employee engagement is only one part of the job satisfaction puzzle, and urge leaders to think more holistically in terms of what makes companies great in the minds of their employees.
Technologies must be in place to allow real-time communication and dialogue Managers must be comfortable receiving and asking for feedback Transparency must be the default culture mode The organization must be prepared to take actionMoments That MatterMorgan argues that to design employee experiences, we first have to think differently about employees and the journey that they take with your organization. Instead of the traditional life cycle, he argues that managers need to think of moments that matter or have an impact. He says that there are three different types of moments that matter:Specific moments that matter: Includes things like your first day on the job, buying your first house, having a child and getting promoted.Ongoing moments that matter: The things that happen, such as when someone takes you aside, and thanks to you for your help or you get a shout out at an all-hands meeting.
Kegan, Lahey et al. remark that we need to tackle those internal pressures by creating a workplace environment that respects and encourages employees for who they are, and the talents they are already bringing to the table. It takes a very humanistic approach to business, advocating for personal growth, as well as company growth.
Easy Hiring Process vs. True Job FitA new employee might be happy about a quick and smooth hiring process. But getting hired by a company that understands what you do best and then selects you for a role where you have the natural talent -- it's an experience that boosts confidence and success.
So, employee experience is important. What can we do to find the right people, get them established, and keep them engaged? A great goal is to optimize each stage of your employee lifecycle. It can be intensive, but this is where Omnia can help. The Omnia assessment and its various reports offer insight into your employees at every level. The reports show motivators, challenge areas, communication styles, and more so you can create and lead your team through every stage.
As Jacob Morgan writes in The Employee Experience Advantage "How to win the war for talent by giving employees the workspaces they want, the tools they need and a culture they can celebrate", three factors, work environment, technology and organisational culture, have a positive or negative impact on how employees experience interactions within their organisation.
Your employer brand is your organization's reputation. It is what potential candidates and employees think of you. It's what they speak about you to their friends and families. Needless to say, it plays a vital role in attracting and retaining top talent. Hence, we have listed out the top books on the subject.
At the Lory Student Center, we are committed to a beneficial learning environment where people can gather, explore, discover, and belong. To do that, the employees who work in and with the Lory Student Center must experience this, too. The SHAPE Training & Talent Development Program seeks to address learning objectives of employees through a variety of events and workshops throughout the life-cycle of the employee, over the course of an academic year.
To really engage employees in a meaningful way companies need to go beyond quick, easy fixes and really take a good look at culture and how it operates, says Jacob Morgan, a futurist who has extensively studied the future of work, workplaces and employee experience.
Employee experience, on the other hand, is the actual redesign of the organisation. In other words, changing the core workplace practices. This means that in order to have an engaged workforce you need to start with employee experience, which I define as a combination of three environments: culture (how employees feel), technology (the tools employees use to get their jobs done), and physical space (the actual spaces in which employees work).
Employee experience, on the other hand, is the actual redesign of the organization. In other words, changing the core workplace practices. This means that in order to have an engaged workforce you need to start with employee experience, which I define as a combination of three environments: culture (how employees feel), technology (the tools employees use to get their jobs done), and physical space (the actual spaces in which employees work).
In a society and economic environment increasingly being dominated by technological advancements and developments that at first glance seem to minimize the need of employees, their relevance still seems to grow, according to experts such as Morgan (2017) or Suseno and Pinnington (2017). At the same time, technologies such as Business Intelligence or Artificial Intelligence (Larson & Chang, 2016) or robotics (Taylor et al., 2016) and other forms of automatization (Geyer-Klingeberg et al., 2018) make it seem like the business world is taken over by spiritual machines, as Ray Kurzweil (2000) already predicted two decades ago. One of his predictions was that machines would replace a wide variety of work. This would apply to mechanical, menial jobs that can be outsourced to machines and intellectually challenging jobs. According to his predictions, spiritual machines, as the author named those systems that should already have self-awareness and artificial intelligence, also took over so-called white-collar jobs. However, whether this became true or will become true stays unknown and is outside of the scope of this work. However, the rise of such systems did strongly influence the employment market: Machines and technical solutions destroyed jobs, as public perception often labels this development (Balsmeier & Woerter, 2019). However, the consequences of the ongoing digitalization and subsequent digital transformation (Pretsch, 2019) are also described to be job-creators and value-creators. Individuals who can perform in a highly complex environment and who can innovate and transform companies and businesses are in higher demand than ever before--a development labelled already two decades ago as a war for talent (Chambers et al., 1998). Winning this war for talent implies from a corporate perspective two important battlefronts: recruiting and retaining talents, thus, highly skilled individuals capable of outperforming the competition (Ulrich, 2015; Ulrich & Smallwood, 2012).
The present work focuses on the retainment of employees, thus on ways to foster their motivation, reduce their intention to quit (Firth et al., 2004), and strengthen their organizational commitment (Meyer & Allen, 1991; Meixner, 2020). Organizational commitment describes employees' commitment regarding their company and can be discussed from different viewpoints and perspectives, as this paper will show. One of the core questions of modern leadership and human resource management (HRM) is how this organizational commitment can be fostered--leadership approaches like transformational leadership aim at fostering commitment and at motivating employees, thus actively contributing to a successful pathway through the aforementioned war for talent (Avolio et al., 2004; Busse, 2014a). 2ff7e9595c
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