The Employee Experience Advantage

How to Win the War for Talent by Giving Employees the Workspaces
They Want, the Tools They Need, and a Culture They Can Celebrate
Jacob Morgan
Wiley, 2017
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A 2015 Gallup study found that only 32% of US workers feel engaged in their jobs. To combat this
epidemic of disengaged employees, embrace the concept of providing a positive “employee
experience” in every facet of your organization: cultural, physical and technological. Author Jacob
Morgan explains how and why companies that give their employees positive experiences become
corporate winners. He provides vital information – down to a catalog of specific metrics – on how to
make your employees happier while boosting your profits. getAbstract recommends Morgan’s
affirmative manual to senior executives.

In this summary, you will learn

 What makes a firm “experiential,”
 Why delivering a positive “employee experience” matters,
 Where you should focus your experiential efforts and
 How the top firms offer a high-quality employee experience.

Take-Aways
 Everyone wants positive experiences, including employees on the job.
 The “employee experience advantage” occurs in workplaces where the employees’ desires and
requirements intersect with the firm’s plan to satisfy them.
 Providing the right employee experience engages your workforce and gives you a competitive
advantage.
 Deliver great employee experiences across three work environments:
 “Physical experiences” are based on your facilities and workplaces.
 “Technological experiences” depend on providing employees with the top-quality technology
they need to do their work.
 “Cultural experiences” come from the atmosphere that defines your company.
 Assess your employee experience based on fulfilling your purpose, satisfying 17 important
variables and supporting your staff at pivotal moments.
 To make your firm an “experiential organization,” you must know the experiences your
employees want and deliver those experiences. Survey staffers to learn what they want.
 Experiential organizations have a “reason for being” – an aspirational goal.

Summary
Making Employees Happier

Google provides its employee with perks that include free food, concierge services, haircuts, subsidized
childcare, oil changes, car washes, shuttle services and delivery of organic groceries. Workers enjoy
some of these perks for free or for reasonable fees that the company negotiates with vendors. Google
prides itself on providing positive “employee experiences.” Pandora, the Internet music service, works
out an individual agreement with each employee that identifies his or her job preferences, including
what he or she specifically needs, wants or requests in order to be able to work most productively.
Pandora managers oversee – and take responsibility for delivering – the terms, conditions and benefits
in these agreements. Adobe Systems, the multinational computer software company, totally redesigned
its work and discussion spaces, including outdoor patios, community areas, alternative workspaces,
cafes, open floor spaces, places for games, meditation areas, a gym and even a place to get an artisan
sandwich. Adobe’s rank of executives includes a vice president of employee experience. Many other
companies now include such officers on their leadership rosters.

What Is Employee Experience?

Employee experience is a vital corporate imperative. It’s shorthand for the conditions and environment
a company wants to establish for its people, the way it thinks their lives at work should be. Companies
can build in the right employee experience at “the intersection of employee expectations, needs and
wants and the organizational design of those expectations, needs and wants.” Experiential companies
survey their employees to discover what they prefer as part of their working lives. Managers
collaborate with their staff members and work with them to provide what they need to do their best.
Such companies focus on the pivotal transition points that matter the most to an employee, like
onboarding when they start a new job.

Aspirational Goals

Focusing on employee experience is the natural evolution of employee engagement, now supplemented
and extended. Positive experiences engage your workforce. To foster such experiences, an organization
needs an aspirational goal that helps employees understand that their work has meaning. For instance,
Starbuck’s corporate goal states its “reason for being”: “To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one
person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.” A mission statement that sets out your company’s
reason for existing can inspire your employees. The most effective aspirational goals share four
characteristics: 1) They don’t concern profits; 2) they focus on your organization’s positive impact; 3)
they motivate employees; and 4) they value “something unattainable” – an impossible dream.

Experiential Environments

A positive environment has three major facets:

 “Cultural” environment – This refers to the company’s intangible atmosphere and tangible
priorities – what it cares most about. Your corporate culture should envelop your employees,
give them a warm view of your organization and show that you value them. To create the right
corporate culture, your company must convey that it has a “legitimate sense of purpose.” It
should practice diversity and make staffers feel like team members. In the right cultural
environment, workers can keep learning, executives function as mentors and coaches, and the
company treats employees well and dedicates itself to them.
 “Technological” environment – Today’s employees depend on technology to help them work
together, communicate and perform their jobs. The technology that has become essential in
many workplaces includes “videoconferencing platforms, internal social networks, task
management tools, human resources (HR) software, billing and invoicing systems,” and much
more. To satisfy your employees’ work requirements, make technological tools available to
everyone, install gear that meets high-quality consumer standards and fulfill your employees’
needs, not just your business requirements.
 “Physical” environment – Pay attention to the spaces where your staff members work. Avoid
out-of-date, monotonous decor, with drab carpets, walls painted in muddy neutrals and desks
tucked into rows of cubbies. Instead, create “employee experience centers.” Modern office
environments should offer work-arrangement flexibility, reflect the organization’s ethos and
 values, and encourage employees to invite their family and friends to see their offices.
Companies can leverage “multiple workspace options.”

Long-Term Changes

When corporations try to foster employee engagement, they often try short-term, cosmetic changes.
That doesn’t work. Improving your employees’ experience requires positive, long-term change.
Compare typical employee engagement campaigns to giving an old car a new paint job, new upholstery
and new tire rims. It’ll look great, but it’ll still run like an old car.

“The future of work is about completely redesigning our organizations to put employee experience at
the very center of how they operate.”

Employee experience, on the other hand, means replacing the engine, which will improve performance
no matter how the car looks. Rather than spending money on “well-being strategies,” pursue
programming that will improve your employees’ lives and boost your firm’s performance.

“People Analytics”

People analytics, a subset of data science, can help you learn more about your staffers and what they
need. Such analytics can give you a “core foundation” for planning employee experiences. This
expanding field gathers data for companies and gives them the insights they need in order to make
informed decisions about their staff. For example, IBM embraced formal people analytics in 2010. It
now employs 70 experts in the field. The company used people analytics to reduce turnover and to
launch “Blue Matching,” a program to facilitate employees’ “internal mobility.”

Notable Employee-Experience Firms

An evaluation of 252 companies’ employee experiences identified the 15 firms that are doing the best
job of giving their staffers a good employee experience: Facebook, Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Ultimate
Software, Airbnb, Microsoft, Riot Games, Accenture, Salesforce, Hyland Software, Cisco, Amazon,
Adobe and Worldwide Technology. These experiential companies know who their employees are, what
they want and what makes them feel good. Armed with this essential knowledge, such companies
redesign their organizations to become places “where people want, not need, to show up for work.”

Employee-Experience Categories

Most companies fall into one of these nine employee-experience categories:

1. “inExperienced” – These companies just exist without any identifiable mission. They seem
content do to business as it was done prior to the 1990s. Money is their motive.
2. “Technologically emergent” – These firms provide advanced high-tech tools.
3. “Physically emergent” – These companies focus primarily – or solely – on improving their
physical spaces.
4. “Culturally emergent” – These organizations strive to develop the robust corporate cultures
that support employees.
5. “Engaged” – These firms work hard to improve their culture and their physical settings.
 6. “Empowered” – These organizations succeed in technology and culture, but offer a poor
environment.
7. “Enabled” – These organizations have a good physical plant and fine technology, but their
culture is inadequate..
8. “preExperiential” – These firms do well, but don’t excel in all three environments.
9. “Experiential” – This is the top rank for firms that offer great employee experiences.

Attributes of Employee Experience

Seventeen special attributes – factors that are important to your employees – distinguish experiential
firms. Visualize a pyramid as the outline of your plan. The base of the pyramid is your firm’s essential
purpose. The next level contains the three employee experience environments: technological, physical
and cultural. Then come the 17 variables:

1. The technology is of high quality.

2. It is always at hand.
3. Employees have the right technology to do their jobs.
4. People have choices about where to work.
5. The company’s setting communicates the firm’s values.
6. Workers proudly show it to others.
7. Staff members work with independence and flexibility.
8. People feel that their work is purposeful.
9. Leaders treat people in an evenhanded way.
10. Employees know that the company values them.
11. Supervisors serve as coaches or mentors.
12. Everyone has the security of being a team member.
13. The company provides the resources for people to keep learning continually and to advance
professionally.
14. Employees refer their friends to seek jobs in your firm.
15. The company is known for “diversity and inclusion.”
16. Employees know the firm cares about their well-being.
17. People have a positive feeling about the company’s brand.

Companies’ “responsibility isn’t just providing a job for their employees. It’s also looking after them
and taking care of them.”

The top of the pyramid focuses on giving employees special attention at pivotal moments, like when
they begin a job. These measurable attributes differentiate your firm from companies that believe that
their employees are just part of a machine, “managers are zookeepers and work is drudgery.”

Experiential Firms Succeed

Experiential companies routinely outperform firms that don’t offer positive employee experiences. In
the metrics that matter, “experiential organizations had…40% lower turnover, 1.5 times the employee
growth, 2.1 times the average revenue, 4.4 times the average profit, 2.9 times more revenue per
employee, and 4.3 times more profit per employee when compared with nonexperiential
organizations.” As a rule, experiential firms’ stock prices do better than those of other firms.
Experiential companies score high for innovation, brand value and customer satisfaction. They tend to
be “smarter, greener, happier and more diverse.”

Going Experiential

You can’t transform your company into an experiential firm by copying Apple, Airbnb or Amazon, or
by applying a rigid checklist to your operations. Instead, adopt psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s
famous System 2 thinking: aim for something purposeful and deliberate. Base your planning on people-
analytics data and input from your employees. Focus on them and what they want. Avoid short-term
fixes. Becoming experiential is a long-term, multisided, continual effort. It is an “infinity loop,” a
constant circle of interactions and communications from the staffers to the company and back. This
loop travels endlessly through these phases:

 “Respond” – Seek employee feedback to learn what your workers like and want their
experiences to be. Utilize “apps, internal social networks, surveys, focus groups, one-on-one
interviews” or whatever method works for your firm to gain this feedback.
 “Analyze” – Use the feedback to develop insights about your next steps.
 “Design” – Create your experiential program.
 “Launch” – Start your employee experience program; have it address your firm’s physical,
technological and cultural environments.
 “Participate” – Your employees participate in new positive experiences.

“Life is short. We all deserve…to work for an organization that has been (re)designed to truly know its
people and has mastered the art and science of creating a place where people want, not need, to show
up to work.”

To make your organization more people-centered, provide a range of positive experiences for your
employees. They will thank you, as will your customers. And your bottom line will benefit. A positive
employee-experience program also will improve your recruiting especially as your firm becomes
increasingly well known as a great place to
work.

About the Author

Best-selling author, speaker and futurist Jacob Morgan’s previous books include The Future of Work
and The Collaborative Organization. You can go online to take an assessment of how your company
ranks on the 17 variables at https://TheFutureOrganization.com.