Does the Employee Experience Movement Leave Us Stuck on an Escalator?

Employee experience is the big new shiny HR object to improve work. Some have even proclaimed 2018 as the Year of Employee Experience. Frankly, I think I am more comfortable with 2018 from the Chinese perspective as the Year of the Dog.

There are countless conferences and consultancies extolling the virtues of this new view of employees taken from the work on customer experience. Employee experience is considered to be composed of 3 areas: culture, the technological environment, and the physical environment. Organizations are busy learning lessons in how to improve the experience for employees ——— but what about the employees themselves?

In my 25 years teaching counselling psychology at the University  of Manitoba we categorized experiences as what happens to people. In one of the most popular textbooks in the field, The Skilled Helper, Gerard Egan wrote,

“because experiences often dwell on what other people do or fail to do, experience-focused stories at times smack a bit of passivity. The implication is that others – or the world in general – are to blame for the client’s problems.” (Egan, page 82)

Employees already are in the center of their own experience, we must do a much better job of not only acknowledging this but educating employees to assess, design, manage, and master their experiences at work. Otherwise, you know what happens, as demonstrated by this classic escalator video:

David Zinger is focused on how to successfully weave the employee experience into employee engagement for the benefit of all to achieve results, build relationships, and cultivate wellbeing.