It's easy to say that the employee experience is owned by everyone, but from what I have observed, when something is said to be owned by everyone, it's really owned by no one. Instead, I prefer to look at employee experience as something of a ripple effect that starts with the most senior leaders at the organization and extends to every employee regardless of role or seniority. You can see what this looks like in figure 22.1 below.

INITIATED BY THE CEO AND EXECUTIVE TEAM

The entire employee experience of the organization starts with the Reason for Being and the values that the organization chooses to espouse. This starts at the absolute top of the organization with the CEO and every member of the executive team. This can be thought of as the foundation on which the employee experience house is built. The CEO and members of the executive team need to embed this Reason for Being into their talking points both publicly and privately. They also need to make this a part of how they work, communicate, and interact with employees, customers, and the public. Basically, the CEO and the executive team are supposed to be the biggest evangelists of this. When you look at Experiential Organizations, such as Facebook or Google, they all have CEOs who are amazing champions of making sure that their people are taken care of and that their organizations are places where employees truly want to show up to work. This can't happen effectively if the top executives aren't on board.

One of my favorite examples here comes from John Legere, the charismatic magenta‐ and Batman‐loving CEO of T‐Mobile, a wireless provider with over 54,000 employees. Everything about John is unconventional, including how he encourages drinking games around his competitors' earnings calls, regularly responds directly to customers on social media with his e‐mail address, hosts a regular Sunday cooking show on Facebook Live, or has his entire wardrobe T‐Mobile branded, down to his magenta Converse shoes. John also has millions of people around the world who follow him on social media and interact with him regularly. Knowing all of this, it should come as no surprise that John has some pretty strong opinions about employee experience (and many other things!).

Ever since he took over as CEO, he's been on a mission to not only connect with and inspire his employees but also improve their experiences by removing as many of their pain points as he possibly can. In a conversation I had with Marty Pisciotti, VP, employee careers, human resources at T‐Mobile, he told me that during John's first few weeks at T‐Mobile, he was already on the road meeting employees in the regions to hear firsthand about their challenges. At one of the first large sales employee meetings, he held an open mic so that employees could ask him any question they wanted. The first few questions were the predictable safe questions that any employee could ask without getting in trouble. After a few of those, John got up, walked over to the mic, and announced, “I want every question after this to be something that will make you think that the person who asked it will be fired.” Employee experience is so crucial to John that all of his executives and managers know the mantra to “listen to your frontline [employees who directly interact with the customers], shut up, and do what they say.” It's not often that you hear about a CEO who so openly wants to challenge conventional management and workplace practices.

OWNED BY THE PEOPLE TEAM

At places like General Electric and streaming Internet radio company Pandora, employee experience is a role that exists under the human resources (HR) department, and the people who lead employee experience report to a chief HR officer. I've also seen scenarios where heads of employee experience operate a role that runs in parallel with HR, and the chief employee experience officer is a direct peer. There are all sorts of combinations you can come up with for how the role and the functions are structured. Even all the top companies don't have similar approaches. Airbnb has a chief employee experience officer and someone else responsible for more traditional HR. Adobe has an executive vice president of both customer and employee experience. At Cisco there's a chief people officer, and at Accenture there's a chief leadership and human resources officer. The point is that all of these models and scenarios are perfectly acceptable, and they can all work (and they do). There isn't a one‐size‐fits‐all approach as far as what the makeup of these teams looks like from a function and role perspective.

Ultimately this group of people is responsible for guiding employee experience across the organization. They usually start the discussions, come up with strategies for how to execute on experience, test ideas, provide guidance based on people analytics, and otherwise take ownership of making sure the entire company champions employee experience. These guys are like the secret task force that the company can turn to. This doesn't mean that they have to make all the decisions or that nothing gets done without their input. It simply means that they help guide and steer the ship, but everyone participates in getting it to the right destination. The main goal of the people team is to help put employee experience at the very center of the organization.

DRIVEN BY MANAGERS

Every manager at an organization is responsible for driving and creating employee experiences. This means helping make sure the 17 variables above are being implemented and recognized by employees, identifying the key moments that matter, getting to know the whole employee, and encouraging employees to speak up and help shape their own experiences. When looking at the future of work, the manager isn't the one who sits at the top of the pyramid. The manager is the one at the very bottom of the pyramid who lifts everyone else up. The manager is a servant, a coach, and a mentor whose goal is twofold: First managers must help make sure that employees actually want to show up to work, and second managers should help make their employees more successful than they are. When I look at all the most successful organizations that I analyzed in this book, the one thing they all have in common when it comes to management is an enormous amount of trust in making sure their managers are helping create an amazing employee experience.

Internet radio company Pandora is one of the best examples of this. Music is a very personalized thing, so it's natural that Pandora takes the concept of personalized experiences quite seriously and does this by relying heavily on managers. Because the company is publicly traded, there are, of course, some standard HR policies and rules that are put into place around things such as compensation, vacation time, and the like. But outside of these traditional things, the managers are responsible for shaping and creating the experiences for over 2,300 employees.

All employees have their own agreements with their managers on how they prefer to work and what they expect and need to get their jobs done. These aren't driven by blanket policies or rules that every employee has to follow. To be able to create personalized experiences, all the managers at Pandora go through a training program that includes modules that focus on self‐awareness and emotional intelligence. The rationale for doing this is that before you can lead others, you must first know more about yourself. Only then can managers at Pandora lead with humility, empathy, and an awareness of what their personal biases might be.

For example, managers at many organizations would typically see going out to happy hour as a kind of team building and bonding activity. However, what if you work in a team with a Type A personality (outgoing, ambitious, competitive, and perhaps impatient) project manager, an introverted software developer, and a very extroverted sales professional? Clearly going out drinking might not make sense here. At organizations like Pandora, managers are trained to see things through the eyes of their team members and then act accordingly. This is what allows the managers to do things such as treat people fairly, help foster a sense of purpose, make others feel valued, and the like. The leaders at Pandora genuinely understand their employees individually, so they know what they care about and what they value.

CHAMPIONED BY EVERYONE

As I mentioned at the start of the book, the overlap between employee needs, wants, and expectations, and the organizational design of those employee needs, wants, and expectations is where employee experience is created. This means that every employee from the intern to the CEO needs to get into the habit of sharing, collaborating, and providing feedback around what they want their work experience to look like.

Looking at this framework I want to stress a few key points. Although the people team inside of your organization may be responsible for helping guide everyone else, this concept of employee experience needs to be embedded everywhere and practiced by everyone. Think of employee experience as the sun, and the rest of your company rotates around it.