There has never been so much talk about employee experience. Chief EX officers, engagement barometers, listening platforms, and well-being indicators are everywhere, and yet employees have rarely felt so unheard, so ill-equipped to work effectively, and so uninvolved in the decisions that shape their businesses.
How can this be explained? In my opinion, it is because employee experience has become an HR issue rather than a collective performance challenge.
In short:
- The employee experience is often reduced to an HR issue, far removed from operational realities and with little connection to collective performance.
- The actions taken (onboarding, communication, intranet) are often superficial and do not improve working conditions or the customer experience.
- The problems encountered by employees are structural: unsuitable tools, information overload, inefficient processes, and poor organization.
- HR does not have the necessary levers to transform work in depth, and roles such as Chief of EX remain symbolic.
- Employee experience should be part of operations and organizational design, with cross-functional coordination embodied, for example, by a Chief of Work.
A topic that is too HR-focused, too vague, too far removed from the work
As an article I read recently said, EX initiatives are often disconnected from the core business. The author questions the relevance of better onboarding or a more modern intranet if they do not actually help employees work better or improve the customer experience. In other words, we invest in superficial effects without transforming the conditions in which the work is carried out and, above all, we are unable to measure the business impact of the employee experience (How I Stumped A Panel Of EX Experts). In this context, it is difficult to be credible and obtain budgets.
We have reduced the employee experience to a matter of communication, key moments, or even staging, and we have forgotten that it is first and foremost the result of organizational design and work architecture.
The irritants of the employee experience are not only psychosocial: they are structural, stemming from poorly designed tools, imperfect processes, and constant information overload. (Digital Infobesity: When Collaboration Tools Degrade Productivity, QWL and Amplify Mental Workload), flawed work organization (From employee experience to operational excellence: HR not so well equipped! and 2023 Employee Experience Barometer: the employee experience confronted with its contradictions), ineffective collaboration, and so on.
When well thought out, the employee experience goes beyond the role of a simple support function (Employee experience is not a support function but a business function…).
HR does not have the leverage to change the way work is organized
In reality, HR teams are rarely in a position to fundamentally transform the work experience. They can observe it, measure it, and sometimes support it, but they rarely reconfigure it. This is because they do not have the tools, processes, or decision-making power that dictate the daily lives of employees (People are everywhere in the workplace, but HR is nowhere when it comes to work).
Even at Moderna, whose reorganization has been the subject of much discussion recently (HR/IT and the reality of working at Moderna: the unspoken truths of a reorganization), it is unclear who is in charge of what, and when it comes to work orchestration, there is a great deal of uncertainty about its very nature.
The Chief of EX has not changed the game
Faced with this reality, some businesses have created the position of Chief of Employee Experience. But this role often remains symbolic because it operates on the periphery: it does not guide workflows, design tools, or manage operations.
Employee experience is thought of as an HR product, when in fact it is the result of organizational decisions. However, there is currently no structure in place to integrate business objectives, operational needs, and working conditions.
What if employee experience were a question of operations?
Employee experience is a matter of organizational design and should be part of operations in the broadest sense: namely, how businesses organize work to produce value.
We can even go further by giving employees the power to influence operating methods, as advocated by the “people-centric operations” approach developed by INSEAD (Putting People at the Center of Operations and
People Centric Operations: adapting work and operations to knowledge workers ).
The idea is simple: for work to function, employees must be able to organize themselves, resolve exceptions, circulate information, and improve processes. The employee experience then becomes an effect of operational excellence rather than a separate process (Experience is the new name for quality and is the result of operational excellence).
The Chief of Work: gadget or real solution?
It is with this in mind that some people are imagining a new role: the Chief of Work (Chief of Work: A Modern(a) C?Suite Role). But to be useful, they must not be super HR or super IT managers, but rather cross-functional champions of the work logic, ensuring consistency between tools, practices, processes, management, and what I refer to more broadly as the work context (Do we need a chief of work?).
This is not a new silo but an orchestration function.
Bottom line
As long as employee experience is treated as an HR product, it will not change anything. To become a performance driver again, it must return to where it began: in operations and the very design of work. And that will require much more than a barometer or a buzzword, because the challenge is to rethink the way we think about, govern, and design work.
Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI).
Related articles:
Do we need a chief of work?
HR and IT merger: Moderna redesigns its organization for and with AI
A mass experience. Irritant #3 of the employee experience
Is it heresy to put “people” and “operations” in the same sentence?
People are everywhere in the workplace, but HR is nowhere when it comes to work
Engagement, motivation, or reason to stay: let’s stop confusing everything
