Employees vs. Leaders: The missing link in EX Today there is a broad consensus, that Employee Engagement is a significant driver of desirable organizational outcomes. EX is one way of creating the environment, structures, attitudes, and behaviors that support employees’ sense of belonging, commitment and engagement By Henrik Kofod-Hansen
The challenges for the EX approach
STORY
When companies design their EX they often use a 7 phased Employee Lifecycle model and they create a long list of “Moments-thatMatter”. While this provides a neat and easy-to-manage structure, it is complicated by two challenges: • Often employee lifecycle frameworks are too crude, and only insufficiently adapted to describe and capture employee’s true experiences. As a consequence, it feels disconnected and generates little real value for employees. • “Moments-that-matter” frameworks are supposed to capture the moments that generate emotions, but in many companies, the employee’s experi-
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hen companies invest in Employee Experience (EX) frameworks, they expect a return on investment through a higher Employee Engagement level, which in turn is expected to improve the organization’s performance. Additionally, there are appealing side-effects: Organizational well-being increases, employee loyalty improves, customer satisfaction increases, and over-
all, the company becomes a better organization to work for. The origins of EX can be difficult to trace, but Gallup’s research in 2012 that showed the relationship between Employee Engagement and organizational performance, is probably one initiator of the EX hype. This report has unfortunately since been misinterpreted and misquoted, leading to exaggerated claims such as “Employee Engagement drives 22% of a company’s profitability”. Whereas in fact, the report merely states that “Work units in the top quartile in Employee Engagement outperform bottom-quartile units by 22% in profitability”. It is important to be aware of these nuances because it potentially inflates the expectations of what compa-
nies can achieve with their EX initiatives. Today there is a broad consensus, that Employee Engagement is a significant driver of desirable organizational outcomes. EX is one way of creating the environment, structures, attitudes, and behaviors that support employees’ sense of belonging, commitment, and engagement. But something is missing.
Too often, both EX and Engagement initiatives are designed to create transparency for HR, but ignore what should be the real objective: To create a better place to work, where employees thrive may 2021 |
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