Employee experience or employee engagement – the future ?

To placeemployee engagement into a context, we must consider the traditional role ofhuman resources in the organization. In the conventional traditional corporatehierarchy, human resources would be tasked with ensuring that employeeengagement was up to scratch and that employees were being “cared for”.  This meant that the line management wereexpected to be less involved in employee welfare as often this conflicted withtheir key performance indicators (KPI’s). Before I get shot down, this is ageneralization, rather than a blanket rule.

Theconcepts of employee engagement and employee experience will no longer be thedomain of human resources whose traditional role is merely to apply and enforcepolicies and procedures.  Employeeengagement extends to understanding the role of the employer in the life of theemployee, hence the future of the employee experience.

So thequestion is “What makes up the employee experience and the future of theemployee experience ? “ I am going to delve into a few areas in this article.

Physicaland psychological stress

Thehistorical divide between work time and employee time has become somewhatblurred. This has been occurring in many organizations where the expectation ofthe employer is that the employee gets to work before the boss and leaves afterthe boss.  This places expectations onemployees that cannot continue without causing mental and physical distress.

We live ina world of 24/7 access to everything; Google and Siri time compress the speedof information from days to milliseconds. The average team member applies thisaccelerated time scale to their work. The instant accessibility of the world,where global business is the norm, means that employee stress from this 24/7 accessibilitybecomes normalized.

Employee experiencebecomes far more critical as a component of the culture of the future.  Dealing with the physical and physiologicalwellbeing of team members becomes the responsibility of all team members, notjust the staff function of human resources.

A friendrecently took a few days leave from work and during that time made a point ofnot checking work emails or messages. Early in the morning of the “return towork” day she found 185 emails for her and was quite stressed by that.

Life –work balance

How do allthese work-related stresses integrate into a work life balance. Or potentiallyin the age of the employee experience that should be a LIFE WORK balance.

How willthe future of culture and the future of work focus on the employee experience ?One way will be by measuring disengagement and working out the potential costto the organization of the state of the team.

If wefocus on life – work balance, then employers need to change the dimensions.Employers need to be looking at the core values of individual team members, andthen assessing how many of those core values are being fulfilled in the workenvironment.

If teammembers are coming to work each day and feeling unfulfilled as their corevalues are not being addressed, then it affects their work performance. 

The toolswe have in place and that are available to you can give you a detailed look atthe levels of employee experience and fulfillment of core values along with anumerical indication of potential costs of disengagement.

As we moveforward to 2020 and beyond the employee experience will take center stage as acritical component of the future of work and the future of culture.