To place employee engagement into a context, we must consider the traditional role of human resources in the organization. In the conventional traditional corporate hierarchy, human resources would be tasked with ensuring that employee engagement was up to scratch and that employees were being “cared for”. This meant that the line management were expected to be less involved in employee welfare as often this conflicted with their key performance indicators (KPI’s). Before I get shot down, this is a generalization, rather than a blanket rule.
The concepts of employee engagement and employee experience will no longer be the domain of human resources whose traditional role is merely to apply and enforce policies and procedures. Employee engagement extends to understanding the role of the employer in the life of the employee, hence the future of the employee experience.
So the question is “What makes up the employee experience and the future of the employee experience ? “ I am going to delve into a few areas in this article.
Physical and psychological stress
The historical divide between work time and employee time has become somewhat blurred. This has been occurring in many organizations where the expectation of the employer is that the employee gets to work before the boss and leaves after the boss. This places expectations on employees that cannot continue without causing mental and physical distress.
We live in a world of 24/7 access to everything; Google and Siri time compress the speed of information from days to milliseconds. The average team member applies this accelerated time scale to their work. The instant accessibility of the world, where global business is the norm, means that employee stress from this 24/7 accessibility becomes normalized.
Employee experience becomes far more critical as a component of the culture of the future. Dealing with the physical and physiological wellbeing of team members becomes the responsibility of all team members, not just the staff function of human resources.
A friend recently took a few days leave from work and during that time made a point of not checking work emails or messages. Early in the morning of the “return to work” day she found 185 emails for her and was quite stressed by that.
Life – work balance
How do all these work-related stresses integrate into a work life balance. Or potentially in the age of the employee experience that should be a LIFE WORK balance.
How will the future of culture and the future of work focus on the employee experience ? One way will be by measuring disengagement and working out the potential cost to the organization of the state of the team.
If we focus on life – work balance, then employers need to change the dimensions. Employers need to be looking at the core values of individual team members, and then assessing how many of those core values are being fulfilled in the work environment.
If team members are coming to work each day and feeling unfulfilled as their core values are not being addressed, then it affects their work performance.
Measurement tools
The tools we have in place and that are available to you can give you a detailed look at the levels of employee experience and fulfillment of core values along with a numerical indication of potential costs of disengagement.
Looking ahead
As we move forward to 2020 and beyond the employee experience will take center stage as a critical component of the future of work and the future of culture.