The Reason for Being guides how the organization acts when it comes to creating employee experiences. To better visualize the 17 variables that create COOL spaces, ACE technology, and a CELEBRATED culture, I created something called the employee experience equation which you can see in figure 8.1. The goal is to show that all three of these environments are required to create the overall employee experience and the more of the environments you can execute on, the better that experience is going to be.

The original version of this concept had + signs instead of × signs, but the more I started to dig into these environments, the more I realized how much of a dramatic impact they had on one another. This led me to understand that although culture, technology, and the physical environment are very distinct from one another, they each help empower and support the other. For example, one of the attributes of the physical environment is flexibility, yet flexibility is not possible without having the right technologies in place. One of the attributes of the cultural environment is allowing employees to learn and grow. Again this is not possible without having the right technologies in place to allow learning and education at scale in a modern way. We can see in these examples that although technology is its own entity, it also has an impact on the physical and the cultural environments. This same exercise can be done with any of the three environments. As a result the employee experience equation isn't so much a linear addition as it is an exponential evolution. Organizations that focus on all three of these environments will see a dramatically larger impact when compared with organizations that focus on just one or even two of the environments.

No single environment can get to its maximum potential without having the support of the other two. This is one of the reasons why so many organizations around the world are struggling with not only improving employee engagement but also justifying the investments required. They are stuck focusing on just a small part of the big picture, and even that small part isn't being executed on well.

Thinking of the overall employee experience in this type of equation helps organizations realize that all three environments are crucial and have a much greater impact than the sum of their individual parts. This will become quite clear when you get to the Chapter 11 which focuses on the business value of employee experience.