CHAPTER 15
The Employee Experience Design Loop
We have the Reason for Being, the three environments, and the 17 variables that create employee experiences. But, it's still a bit hard to grasp what all of that actually means and how it comes together. The world changes quickly and this means that our organizations have to change quickly as well. Employee experience is a moving target, which means that all the things in this book aren't simply a checklist that you can go through. The way the things in this book get delivered will change dramatically over time. As a result I find it helpful to think of employee experience as an ongoing and never ending back‐and‐forth interaction between employees and the organization. In other words it's like a dance where both partners need to take the appropriate steps for it to make sense. Except in this dance, the music never stops, and neither does the dancing! This is actually one of the most effective ways for organizations to truly get to know their workforce. Let's start with conceptualizing what this dance actually looks like (see Figure 15.1).
Figure 15.1 Employee Experience Design Loop
This infinity loop shows an ongoing relationship or a continuum between employees and the organization. There is no break and it's designed to flow a bit like water smoothly around the loop. It's also worth noting that your organization will have many of these design loops going on concurrently, which I'll look at more closely below. While some organizations have purposefully deployed a similar model, others have a similar process without actually realizing it. In other words they just haven't taken a step back to visualize and think about what their employee experience design process actually looks like. However, this model resonates with every executive I have shown it to. The full loop has just six sections, which I will describe. You can start anywhere but to make things easier I'll start with the top left.
RESPOND
During this step of the experience loop, employees provide feedback to the organization. In most companies today employees are already talking about what it's like to work there but oftentimes nobody is listening. Employees provide feedback and ideas about anything and everything that can range from a workplace flexibility program to menu items in the cafeteria to management training and development to office design. This can also be extended to performance management as well (and should be). It's a bit analogous to social media. Many brands today are actively engaged with their customers on social channels such as Facebook and Twitter, and they have to respond to all sorts of comments ranging from product issues and outages to compliments to downright angry feedback. These social tools that most of us use in our personal lives act as the delivery mechanism and communication medium between consumers and the organization (in addition to more traditional channels such as e‐mail and phone support). The point is that as a customer, you have a direct path to brands, and if you use social technologies, you usually get a faster response.
We need to think of employee feedback in much the same way. Employees can (and should be able to) provide feedback via apps, internal social networks, surveys, focus groups, one‐on‐one interviews, or any other mechanism that your organization allows and provides for. I will say that it is absolutely crucial to have a real‐time feedback mechanism in place.
The important thing here is that this has to happen on an ongoing basis. Simply doing an annual survey to collect feedback is too much of a drawn‐out process. With the pace of change that we are all living and working through, the communication, collaboration, and feedback need to happen in real time. Instead of just a single large survey, it makes more sense to leverage multiple feedback points concurrently and continuously. This may include a weekly manager check‐in, a monthly pulse survey, a quarterly open discussion, a semiannual experience snapshot, an annual state of employee experience report, and an open platform that employees can use anytime they want. Of course, this is just an example, but it shows that organizations cannot simply rely on one form of response from employees. There should be multiple and they should be used as often as possible. Typically organizations have to actually ask employees for feedback, but why not make it so that employees can share information anytime they want?
Enablers
- 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 action.
ANALYZE
Next comes the analysis part, where the organization tries to extract as much insight as possible from the feedback to make the next design decision. This part can be rather messy and tricky, and it's where the concept of people analytics comes into play. There is no employee experience without people analytics. This can come in the form of structured data (employee satisfaction, performance, etc.) or unstructured data (observing employees or conducting interviews). The challenge for organizations here is how to make sense of the data that is being collected and then draw some insight from it. This needs to happen as quickly as possible to be able to take action in a timely way. You don't want employees to provide feedback only for it to take the organization six months to analyze and sort through it. Ultimately the big question that organizations need to answer during this stage of the experience loop is “What have we learned from the employee feedback we received?”
Here are some examples of some of the analysis and insight you might glean.
Scenario 1 Analysis Reveals
The highest‐performing teams at our company have managers who are more hands‐on with career development. Employees appreciate the concern and the effort managers put in and feel like they are genuinely interested and invested in the success of employees.
Scenario 1 Insight for Your Organization
Explore creating a specific training program for your leaders that encourages them to have more discussions around career development with their employees, which includes follow‐up discussions. Test how often the discussions should be had, what kinds of conversations should take place, and what types of career advancement employees are looking for.
Scenario 2 Analysis Reveals
Employees don't use the assigned seating areas they have been given. Instead they roam around the office and work in various locations. Employees want more freedom when it comes to their physical space and need a change of scenery during the day to stay engaged and productive. They also like running into new people.
Scenario 2 Insight for Your Organization
Look at creating a physical environment where employees don't have assigned desks but where they can make any space their temporary home. Look at why employees keep moving around and design spaces based on that. Test creating communities or neighborhoods where teams might be colocated or intermingled.
Scenario 3 Analysis Reveals
Annual employee reviews are not viewed as effective by either employees or managers. Employees believe the feedback they receive is too general, too late, and not actionable. Managers don't like stack ranking their employees but feel stuck always having to rate someone below average even though he or she really isn't.
Scenario 3 Insight for Your Organization
Develop a new performance management system where feedback happens in real time and where the information being shared between manager and employee is more goal oriented and purposeful. Leverage technology so that this can happen anywhere and anytime.
Analysis Enablers
Hopefully you see what I'm getting at here. Ideally your organization will also have some concrete numbers for these things so that you can measure effectiveness and improvements in the changes you are making. You might find that 80 percent of your employees want you to increase investment in diversity and inclusion programs and that as a result your retention increases by 10 percent. Whenever possible try to have some numbers in place, again fueled with people analytics.
Enablers
- A people analytics team devoted to analyzing data and gathering insight
- Technologies that allow the data to be aggregated and collected in a uniform way
- Nontechnology‐centric ways to collect data, such as focus groups or one‐on‐one discussions
DESIGN
At this stage employees have provided feedback, and the organization has analyzed the feedback to get some insight. The next stage is actually to create something based on that feedback and insight. What is your organization going to do based on what was learned? If you learned the employees are unhappy with the level of communication and collaboration, what's your solution? If employees want more workplace flexibility, how are you going to make that happen? If you find out that annual employee reviews are dreaded and hated, can you get rid of them, and what will you replace them with? This is the point when the organization actually creates solutions. It's not recommended to dwell too long in the design process because it kills the effectiveness of the entire mechanism. Instead it's better to think of this process as a series of sprints and iterations where the organization can quickly create something, get feedback, and then improve. Speed is more valuable than perfection.
Enablers
- Cross functional team in place to design and create solutions
- A process in place that allows for quick development (for example, the Lean Start‐up methodology)
LAUNCH
Here the organization actually releases whatever the it actually is. As mentioned at the start of this framework, it could be anything that affects the employee experience with culture, technology, or the physical workplace. As far as how organizations officially launch their initiatives, this can be done in all sorts of ways, including pilot programs, mass announcements across the organization, and creative marketing campaigns. How you decide to release something to your employees is completely up to you.
Enablers
- Communication mechanism to reach employees
- Champions and brand ambassadors to spread the word
PARTICIPATE
Naturally after you launch something what comes next is participation. After the organization announces and implements something, such as a new management training program, flexible work initiative, or workplace layout, employees then use it. This becomes their new reality and their new way of working.
Enablers
- Employee access
- Training and education when necessary
This is the most effective and simplest way for organizations to think about and design employee experiences. Notice that employees make up half of the feedback loop, and the organization makes up the other half. This is quite different from most traditional models, which see the organization own 100 percent of the employee experience while employees have no voice. Thankfully we will never go back to that type of model again. Many organizations use this type of approach without even realizing. However, once you conceptualize this process, it makes it much easier to structure how experiences are designed.
The faster and more frequently you repeat this process, the better. Ideally you will have many of these types of experience design loops happening regularly. You may be looking at a new manager training program while redesigning your physical environment, investing in a diversity initiative, and rolling out a new technology platform. This employee experience design loop is simply a new of way of introducing things into the organization and can be applied to pretty much anything. Let's walk through two real‐life examples of this whole process.
EXAMPLE: GENERAL ELECTRIC
This process drove an entire organizational overhaul. General Electric (GE) is a multinational conglomerate with over 300,000 employees around the world. To learn more about the transformation, I spoke with Susan Peters, the chief human resources officer at GE, and Paul Davies, the employee experience leader at GE.
Respond
Employees at GE participate in regular employee surveys and discussions with their managers. Initially, the survey was done every 18 to 24 months, and the discussions with managers weren't happening as often as they should. Naturally this made it challenging to get a pulse on the company. As the company grew it became more difficult to get things done. Too many checks and balances and too much bureaucracy crept into the company. In fact during an interview for Fortune magazine, its CEO, Jeff Immelt, said that one of his biggest regrets is that “We just got too slow.”1 One of the things it wanted to do to enhance its overall employee experience was make things simpler, and simplification became one of Immelt's key talking points in his internal and even his external meetings and discussions. Employees were constantly providing feedback to managers and executives that things were too slow, especially when it came to anything related to performance, talent management, and feedback.
Analyze
Through GE's employee survey, it was obvious that employees around the world felt there were many opportunities to reduce the bureaucracy and speed things up. In the past, its employee survey was administered every 18 to 24 months, and it often took months to compile results and communicate them back to employees. By then it was too late to do anything meaningful because the information and the guidance given to employees were already stale. Today, GE still surveys its employees at scale, but results are visible real time. Insights are solicited much more frequently. Leaders can make changes based on the feedback sooner than they have even been able to previously. This went from months, to days. From the feedback that GE received, it became very apparent that it needed to make changes in process, culture, and technology.
Design
The team at GE worked to create something called FastWorks. In its first iteration, it was created as a way of thinking about launching products. As FastWorks evolved, this methodology led to numerous types of projects, not just involving products, but also involving processes. Whether it was FastWorks for projects or the FastWorks Everyday process, the focus was on customer outcomes, testing, and iterating. This evolution of FastWorks helped GE create Performance Development, which is an entire new model of assessing employees. It moved from the Employee Management System (EMS) deployed in 1976 to the new Performance Development. This included new language around feedback, a new time orientation (real‐time vs. once a year), a new tone, getting rid of ratings, and deploying a new tool called PD@GE that enabled real‐time feedback between employees and managers.
The FastWorks methodology looks like this:
- Problem statement
- Identify and try to articulate customer challenges or opportunities.
- Leap‐of‐faith assumptions
- Validate leaps of faith—get customer input early.
- Minimum viable products (MVPs)
- The fastest way to get feedback
- Learning metrics
- Get feedback from customers to understand whether you are making progress toward their goals.
- Pivot or persevere
- Based on customer feedback and learnings, continue to your goal or iterate on your process.
Through this process GE tested a series of assumptions throughout 2014 in what it called a component MVP. In the fourth quarter of 2014, it launched a much larger, integrated MVP, designed based on those learnings of the Performance Development approach. Businesses volunteered to be part of this MVP test. GE identified and tested assumptions in smaller‐ and bigger‐scale experiments with close to 6,000 employees in this MVP. This is a small group compared with the 170,000+ employees globally who used the EMS. But, FastWorks taught them that if something doesn't work for 6,000 people, it definitely won't work for 170,000 people.
To summarize, FastWorks is the overall methodology to simply launch new products and experiment and test to create the most value for customers. Performance Development came about through a FastWorks approach. It is an overhaul of assessing and developing employees, and PD@GE is an app that employees use to provide feedback to one another, track ongoing priorities, and capture important conversations, or touchpoints.
Launch
GE introduced PD@GE and FastWorks in a phased approach, which looked like this:
- End of 2012–2013: Test and introduce FastWorks for major projects
- 2013–2014: Scale FastWorks across businesses and project teams
- 2014: Introduction of growth boards, a governing mechanism with a rigorous, question‐based approach to capital and resource allocation and customer validation, and introduction of the GE Beliefs, to define the way the company thinks and acts. GE also launched a pilot of Performance Development to 30,000 employees and continued to learn and scale until the global announcement in 2016.
- 2015–2016: Scaling of FastWorks across all GE employees, as part of a larger culture change, by translating FastWorks principles for everyday use to simplify the way employees work, and focusing on testing and learning early and often with customers, to become a faster, agile, simpler, and more customer‐driven organization.
PD@GE was introduced to various business populations as it was scaled across the company. There were marketing materials, including digital signage, posters, and the like. In 2016, when Performance Development was announced as the single approach to employee development, Susan Peters, the chief human resources officer, made the announcement through push notification using the PD@GE app.
FastWorks has been guiding GE's approach to Performance Development since its inception when the HR team started with mapping out the problem through the eyes of customer segments (managers, employees, and the senior leaders who represent the organization) and defining the vision statement. (approximately 2014). Success was measured in terms of the impact on customers (managers, employees, and the organization).
Participate
Employees participate in PD@GE (the app and desktop tool) by capturing touchpoint conversations with managers, sending insights to colleagues, and continuously tracking or modifying their priorities. Here are two scenarios for employee use of the PD@GE app.
Option 1 (an employee experiencing a Performance Development priority‐setting touchpoint): An employee at GE wants to walk through the projects they are working on to discuss priorities with their respective manager. As they do this the manager asks some challenging questions, such as “What's the solution you're providing for your customer?” “Who's the end user of this?” “Is it adding value to them?” “How do you know?” These are all focused on value and impact versus tactical to dos and tasks. As the employee leaves the meeting with the manager, they have a 10‐minute window before another upcoming meeting, so they open their PD@GE app and add new priorities based on the conversation. A key thing to point out is that employees are trusted by their managers to update their priorities. They also send their manager an insight that was learned from the conversation.
Option 2 (“imagine” scenario): Similar to option 1, imagine walking into your manager's office. You have a list of the goals that you want to set for yourself. You have the tactical elements set up, and you are ready to start working on them. You think you'll just need to report them out to your manager and then be on your way. Instead, your manager reviews the goals and then asks the same strategic questions as in option 1. You realize that you are missing feedback on one of your priorities. However, your manager thinks it has potential but pushes you to test it with your customers and then come back with any adjustments based on their needs.
As you leave the meeting, you walk down the hall to your next meeting. After your meeting ends, you feel a buzz in your pocket coming from your phone. You receive a push notification saying, “You have just received an Insight.” You open the app and see that your manager sent you a Continue Insight that says: “Thanks for bringing your goals to our meeting. They were well thought out and aligned to our overall strategy. I look forward to hearing the results of the tests that you'll run with your customers based on that one priority that didn't have direct input just yet. Let's set up another meeting when you feel you have enough detail to adjust or change that priority.” You've just lived and breathed Performance Development at GE. You collaborated with your manager to create value for your customer. You've received real‐time feedback that has helped you learn and grow. And you're empowered to try something new, test it, learn from it, and adjust it.
The scope of this project was grandiose to say the least, but it shows how a large organization like GE was able to leverage the employee experience feedback loop to drive change and test ideas based on employee feedback and insight.
EXAMPLE: AIRBNB
Airbnb is a marketplace that allows people to rent out local listings in almost every country around the world. Today the company has over 2,000 employees around the world and is a great example of how the employee experience design loop can be applied to something rather unconventional…food. David McIntyre, Airbnb's global director of food (how awesome is that?), explained how the company's approach works in the context of the employee experience design loop. It's important to point out that at Airbnb, food isn't a perk or an amenity. It's a purposefully designed strategic investment for the company. Its approach to food can be summed up in one word, Sobremesa, which is a Spanish word meaning “the time you spend at the table after you finish eating.” At Airbnb food is a way to get employees to talk, engage, share, collaborate, and build community.
Respond
Airbnb provides three meals a day for all of its employees. A menu is sent out via e‐mail before each meal, and at the bottom of these e‐mails, employees can click on a feedback link. There's also a dedicated e‐mail address for the food services team that employees can use anytime they want. Finally, the Airbnb team also conducts a food and beverage satisfaction survey around once a year. Using these mechanisms (in addition to some in‐person conversations), employees provide all sorts of feedback to the team, which ranges from general praise to specific requests for things such as more gluten‐free options.
Analyze
The food services team considers all the various feedback mechanisms and then looks at the collected data to determine a few things. First is general satisfaction of the food and beverage offerings to determine whether employees are happy with what they receive. Second is the balance of food options. In the surveys Airbnb seeks to balance healthful, indulgent, familiar, and exotic options. Ideally, it would see its menu show around 25 percent in each of the four categories. Third is the usage patterns of the employees: which meals and how many meals they consume in the office. Fourth, David and his team look at how food affects the culture of the company by asking employees where they connect with their peers most often. Last, Airbnb tries to determine how food affects the overall outcomes of the business by looking at things such as productivity, recruitment, and retention. According to its data over 90 percent of employees say that the food and beverage programs help make them more productive, and over half acknowledge that food affects their decision to work at and stay at Airbnb. Although Airbnb does look at quantifiable data, sometimes it also makes decisions based on observations. For example, it might notice that it is getting a lot of e‐mails requesting more vegetarian options, so then that becomes a priority item.
Design
David and his team have a very solid understanding of what the employees at Airbnb want and need when it comes to food and beverages. As much of their food as possible comes directly from farmers, so they know what is in season and what is coming in. The menus are designed quarterly based on the four seasons of the year, and everyone from the chef to the dishwashers provides feedback on the menu choices. The team considers everything from halal and vegetarian options to special gluten‐free or even paleo diets, not to mention food allergies that some employees might have. The team, of course, must also look at costs and what is practical and feasible.
The results from the food and beverage satisfaction surveys are always shared with all the employees so that they have transparency about why certain decision were made and why some options were chosen. Each Airbnb office has its own chef (whenever possible), which means that each is responsible for his or her own cuisine based on local preferences. There isn't a single head chef for the entire company. This allows for much greater personalization.
Launch
Launching the new food items is a matter of the chefs preparing, cooking, and placing the food out for employees to eat. It's amazing how much work goes into this. I've visited its headquarters in San Francisco a half dozen times and am always blown away by the quality and diversity of options. It also has a pastry chef who devilishly creates little treats that get wheeled around on carts throughout the day. The main mechanism for how it actually launches food is its opt‐in e‐mails, which showcase the menus of the day along with all the ingredients that are used in preparation. A picture of a relevant Airbnb listing also accompanies each menu to help remind employees of the mission of “Belong Anywhere.” This means that if the menu is inspired by Filipino food, employees will see a listing from the Philippines.
Airbnb also offers cooking classes and little pop‐up shops in various parts of its offices. For example, it's common to get an e‐mail that says something along the lines of “Today from 2 to 3 PM we are offering matcha tea lattes in the upstairs kitchen. Come grab one and say hello to your coworkers!”
Unlike traditional products or services that take time to create and are launched once, food is something that all employees consume globally and multiple times a day.
Participate
This is the fun part! Employees get to eat all the amazing things that David and his team work so hard to create and to prepare. Then they provide feedback to the team and the cycle repeats!
The employee experience design loop can be applied to any situation where employees and the organization collaborate and communicate to create something, solve a problem, or identify an opportunity. Oftentimes organizations are stuck in the design for mind‐set, and this approach really forces them to shift their perspective to the design with mind‐set. It's something many of the Experiential Organizations practice regularly, and it can also be called cocreation. This explains why the likes of Google, Airbnb, and Facebook are always ranked as such great places to work (and why they scored so high in the Employee Experience Index). Employees are quite literally involved in designing and shaping their own experiences, and these organizations are obsessed with getting employee feedback. Of course, none of this is possible without an unrivaled level of transparency.