If you look at the employee experience design loop, which was discussed earlier in Chapter 15, you will recall that half of it is devoted to employees, which means employees are just as accountable for creating their experiences as the organization is. Although it's tempting to think that the organization should do all the work, this isn't about creating Pinocchio's island where employees can simply ask for and expect to get anything they want. That is not the type of organization that anyone should try to create.

The role of employees starts by making sure they handle their due diligence before starting work at any organization. Remember the company controls the environment, but most of the time the choice of work is up to you. This doesn't mean you have to panic and worry about picking the right career and the right company from day one. That rarely happens. There's nothing wrong with experimenting and searching for a path that makes sense for you. I dabbled in search engine optimization, marketing, strategy consulting, and running my own start‐up before I finally found something that I was committed to, and even that may change in the future. My original plan was to work for a few years after college, go back and get my MBA, and then climb the corporate ladder of whatever organization I was working at. I was lying to myself and as a result I made poor choices in employers. Your most important job is simply to be true to yourself. How to do all of this falls outside of the scope of this book, but I can tell you what I did. I tried a bunch of different things until I found what I'm doing now.

Once you discover the work you want to do and the company you want to be a part of, the next step is actually to speak up inside of your organization. This means not only participating in the programs and initiatives that the organization deploys but also providing feedback, ideas, and suggestions to help influence the design of those programs.

If employees don't speak up and participate, then they don't have much of a say when it comes to shaping what their experiences actually look like. I encourage employees to volunteer for beta programs, participate in employee surveys, have discussions with managers, join in focus groups, and speak up at work. Employee experience should not be a one‐sided effort; it simply won't be effective.