Every organization has a different purpose, culture, mix of employees, business model, and priorities. This is why I caution readers to create something that makes sense for your organization instead of trying to copy what someone else is doing. Although this can be tempting to do, it will end up hurting you in the long run.

One of the organizations that have pioneered employee experience is Airbnb. Mark Levy was hired three years ago as the global head of employee experience, and in 2015 Airbnb won Glassdoor's award for being the number one company to work for in America. At Airbnb employee experience refers to the activities, programs, resources, and approaches taken to make sure that employees are set up to be their best selves, feel they belong, and contribute to the success of the company mission and business results.

Three years ago you would be hard‐pressed to find many people with employee experience in their job titles let alone having an executive with this title. Mark was one of the first executives at a global organization to formally hold this role. When he joined the company one group ran talent, another team handled recruiting, and a third group ran something called ground control, which included the workspace environment, internal communications, employee events, and recognition and celebration. All of these functions reported to different people. Airbnb wanted to bring all of these into one function that was ultimately responsible for helping support employees. Airbnb has a rocking customer experience team, so it decided it would make sense to create an employee experience team as well. Originally Mark was responsible for talent (human resources) business partners, talent operations, total rewards, talent programs, compensation and benefits, recruiting, diversity and belonging (its approach to inclusion), learning and organizational development, workplace (facilities, safety and security, food and environments), and ground control, plus any traditional human resources (HR) functions that typically exist inside of an organization. At one point talent information systems and global citizenship were also part of employee experience, but they have since broadened their scope and now reside in other functions. Basically every aspect of how Airbnb touches a prospective, current, or past employee was a part of the employee experience program. It all rolled up to Mark.

When other organizations first found out about how Airbnb was doing things around employee experience, they became quite fascinated with it, and some even attempted to emulate it. But, this is a great example of why you shouldn't copy another organization. What few people know is that Airbnb has since changed its structure around employee experience. According to Mark:

After 2.5 years of growing the company, expanding the various functions within employee experience, and curating our culture to be recognized as the best place to work by Glassdoor at the end of 2015, it became apparent that pulling all of these groups together to look after the entire employee journey makes a lot of sense. It was also clear that it was impossible for me to be able to go deep into any given area with the responsibility of nine or so distinct functions. In hindsight, the structure of having more integration between the traditional HR functions would have ensured that this group within employee experience would have been more effective rather than leading them all as separate groups within the broader employee experience team.

As such, we are moving to a model where I will be responsible for the workplace and ground control teams. We are looking for someone else to lead and better integrate the more traditional HR functions like talent business partners, talent operations, talent programs, total rewards, and potentially learning, recruiting, and diversity. The employee experience approach is the right one, though it includes a lot of pieces and parts, which is why it will be great to have someone leading most of the organization while I stay focused on what has made us unique and special all these years.

What we can learn from the Airbnb example is that having one person responsible for literally everything that touches the employees can be too much.