A different perspective on the employee experience

My belief is that the next 10-15 years will be about the employee experience, the same way the past 10-15 years have been about the customer experience.
Why? Because engaged employees provide any organization with a competitive advantage. As Richard Branson says, “Your employees are your company’s real competitive advantage. They’re the ones making the magic happen— so long as their needs are being met.”
When you think about it, the mapping and the implementation of the customer experience have given organizations the benefits of better understanding and addressing their customers’ pain points. Thus, these organizations have seen an increase in customer engagement, customer retention, and customer advocacy.
The mapping and the implementation of the customer experience have also given these organizations the opportunity to engage with their customers on a more personal level – whether by offering a variety of products or services to address different market segments, or through the usage of multiple communication channels to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time. Organizations can accomplish the same with understanding, mapping out their employees’ pain points and design a strategy to engage with those same employees.
Millennials are massively entering the workplace. By 2020, they will form 50% of the global workforce, per PwC. Gen Y seek for and thrive on brand experiences, and their employee experiences should be no different from their customer experiences.
Employee Experience Summit in Cincinnati
We believe the employee experience should be as much defined and driven by HR than by Marketing and Customer Experience teams, if not more.
Join us at eX Cincy on May 11 to hear thought leaders, brand strategists, designers and HR disruptors discuss the topic. Find out more and register here.

A marketer's worst mistake?... "To know".

When I was in High School, I hated philosophy classes. I hated it so much that at the French baccalaureate Philosophy exam, I aimed to have one of the worst grades in the nation to make my point (to be fair, I only made a point to myself, my parents and teacher did not agree with me at all - lesson learned). I thought philosophy was a lot of BS and rhetorical non-sense. Only in college did I start to appreciate the reasoning behind some of the philosophical principles. 

One principle stuck to my mind and has become my mantra ever since: "I know that I know nothing" (Socrates). If you still think philosophy in non-sense, feel free translate this principle into the Game of Thrones language: "You know nothing Jon Snow" (Ygritte).

Many people think they know a lot, they know everything. Maybe they do. But in marketing, my experiences and lessons learned from other marketers' mistakes have taught me that if you start thinking that "you know", you get on the path of "alternative facts", of biased thinking.

I'm a huge believer in Design Thinking, the process where you are presented with a problem to solve, where you put aside your own assumptions, beliefs and "lenses",  you empathize with the targeted audience, and put yourself in their shoes, to understand what their perspective is. There is a whole lot more behind Design Thinking, but my point here is the necessity to emphasize, observe, and learn. It's not about what you know (or you think you know), it's about discovering.

When it comes to execution, there is no miracle recipe. I love the agile marketing approach, simply because it applies the same principle: you don't know if/how your targeted audience is going to react to, engage with your product or messaging. You prototype it, test it, fail it, measure it, iterate it, try it again, etc. 

When it comes to product marketing, I witnessed first hand how building a product (for that matter, a PaaS - platform as a service) based on your own assumptions of what the market wants (because you "know what they want", without any research to back it up), ends up in a complete disaster. Even if your product launches successfully (and meets market needs), at some point down the road you will still have to learn from your market in order to make improvements to say relevant, especially in the SaaS/PaaS world.

The same applies to marketing campaigns. It's all about testing your messaging, tracking how your targeted audience responds to your message, measuring the campaign's success or failure, gaining insights, iterating, testing it again. Even if you run a successful campaign, your message will have to evolve at some point: whether a new competitor comes in with a more compelling message, or your audience simply gets tired of your message, you will have to be agile and make the necessary adjustments.

What are your thoughts? What do you know?

Disclaimer: I don't pretend to say what I'm writing is right, simply because I know one thing, it's that I know nothing.

Is your company's job interview experience good enough?

Many companies feel they are in the driver's seat when it comes to the interview process. They feel that working for them is a privilege; that candidates should be thankful for the opportunity to even be considered for the job. They are WRONG, especially in industries and job markets where competition for talent is fierce.

Very much like companies don't tell their customers what their customer experience (CX) should be, they should not tell or dictate their employees (or soon-to-be) what their employee experience (EX) should be. Employees drive the EX, the same way customers drive the CX.

It should not be news to employers/recruiters, but the job interview process is the first chance for a candidate to experience what it's like to work for a company. Companies now have to think of themselves as employment brands. They should treat their employees (or soon-to-be) the same way they treat their customers.

Companies should apply customer journey mapping tactics to their job interview process. A mapping exercise helps identify all the different touch points a candidate goes through and how (s)he interacts with the company. From job descriptions to where/how jobs are posted, to how easy/complicated it is so submit a resume or job application, to how phone or face-to-face interviews are conducted, to the salary/benefits negotiation process, etc.

Because top companies compete for top talent, talented candidates likely have the choice between several offers. Salary, benefits package are nice, but research shows they are less and less of a tie-breaker. What makes the difference is the "employer brand" experience.

For those located in the Indianapolis area, join us at eX Summit's eX Meet Up to discuss the job interview experience (free event). Richard Whitney, Global Employment Brand Manager at Cummins, and Justin Fite, Chief Sales Officer at Lessonly, will speak on the panel on what makes or breaks the candidate experience. They will be joined by a couple of employees who will share their own perspective on what a good/bad experience is. Register here.

Some key "employee experience" take-aways from eX Indy (part 1)

eX Summit successfully launched its first event - eX Indy - last week at Launch Fishers in the Indianapolis area. We had a packed house, great speakers and panelists who provided the audience with a lot of actionable best practices (85% agreed on that).


Engagement measurement

As we already wrote about it, only 30% of the US employees feel engaged and inspired at work. It is a serious issue organizations must address, considering that increased engagement means (from Emplify's presentation):

• 22% higher utilization and productivity

• 50% lower turnover rate

• 3 times more profitable in operating margin.

Surveying employees about their relationship with and commitment to the company's mission, values and brand message is an effective way to measure their engagement. The most compelling component of engagement is the psychological conditions of the workplace: meaningfulness, safe, capacity. When an organization addresses them positively, the engagement increases. Mobile applications, such as Emplify's app, are a great way not only to measure your employees' engagement, but also to communicate and exchange in a more personalized way, versus the traditional and generic emails sent from HR.


The power of workplace design

Business Furniture, from a Steelcase report, highlighted that in order to design a workplace that is resilient and encourages engagement, organizations must create an ecosystem of interconnected zones and settings that are destinations where people have choice and control over where and how they work. This ecosystem should offer a palette of posture, presence and privacy. When organizations do this, they help people by offering spaces that support their physical, cognitive and emotional wellbeing.

When considering (re)designing the workplace, companies should:

• conduct a thorough research on workplace design strategy and best practices

• engage employees throughout the process to increase the rate of adoption 

• provide spaces for BOTH collaboration and concentration.

"Companies lose by viewing office space as something to manage or minimize. The workspace is, in fact, a crucial driver of productivity and morale." (Read: Change Your Space, Change Your Culture: How Engaging Workspaces Lead to Transformation and Growth)

How design drives the employee experience

Studio Science highlighted how organizations can use design methodologies and processes to foster employee collaboration and engagement.

Using design sprints - the same way tech companies use "dev" sprints - Nathan's team creates the space and the framework to tackle complex problems by involving multiple teams with different skills and mindsets. 

"Employees must participate in meaningful work and know that they’re impacting the world around them... A design-led culture creates positive experience by engaging employees in the meaningful creation of solutions and value, and encourages strong relationships with co-workers. It ultimately connects individuals to purpose.", concluded Nathan.

Stay tuned for "eX Indy part 2" next week.

Branding lessons from the Brexit

I'll be brief because:
a - nowadays politics aren't worth spending too much time discussing, unfortunately
b - there's already too much literature on the subject.

The bottom line is: politics is like branding. If you don't give a crap about your electors/consumers, they take you out of their lives.

When decisions are made at the C-suite level/government level, with little if no empathy towards the base (electors/consumers), your message becomes irrelevant to your audience.

If you want to stay relevant in politics and in branding, you must identify what your constituents/consumers need and want, in order to offer them something they can believe in, relate to, buy into. If you make decisions based on what yourself think is good for the masses, the masses merely take you out of their lives.

Electors/consumers are not stupid, even though many politicians and top executives think they are. Real leaders show empathy, understand their audience's pain points, and respond to these pain points with an answer that meets these expectations.
Do political and business leaders understand the growing demand for change? Can they meet those demands without inflicting irreversible damage on their politics and their economies?

WHITE PAPER: New guest experience is within proximity - the next frontier in marketing & guest engagement

INTRODUCTION
Mobile phones and tablets have become the average traveler’s essential companions, whether it is to get driving directions, flash a boarding pass, find the best places to eat nearby, make hotel/restaurant reservations, shop online, or watch movies... Mobile technology is ubiquitous; it has changed the way we live and conduct our day-to-day personal business.

By embracing this shift to mobile technology, hoteliers can better understand and address the needs of their guests and engage them in more personalized, relevant and contextual ways.

With this whitepaper, our intent is to explore new solutions for proximity-driven mobile engagement, and educate hoteliers on how these solutions can be adopted to drive direct value (engaged guests tend to spend more) as well as indirect value (through increased customer loyalty).

PICTURE THE SCENE
Melanie, a 35 year-old mother-of-two and marketing executive in a large Midwest appliance company is flying to Seattle for an industry trade show to meet with customers. She has decided for once to arrive a day early and take a “day off” to unwind before this big conference.

She is glad she was able to confirm her arrival time 24-hours ahead in the hopes that her room would be ready as she gets in. When her plane lands mid-morning in Seattle, she wonders if she will be able to get into her room that early. As she hails a taxi, she gets a text message advising her that her room is ready.

She enters the hotel lobby and notices the long check-in line at the front desk. She smiles as her hotel app automatically detects her presence and checks her in right away, allowing her to skip the front desk and go straight to her room – only using her mobile phone as a key. As she opens her room door, she feels almost at home as the lighting and temperature are set to her likings, based on her preferences she set in her app profile. Even a bottle of Perrier is waiting for her in an ice bucket, as she had requested via the app the day before. Away from home and the family, but still in a personalized setting...

After a few hours of work to prepare for the conference starting in two days, she decides to go out for dinner, starving for local seafood. Having never been to Seattle before, she checks online quickly and finds a nearby seafood chain restaurant, unaware that at the back of the hotel is a hotel-run seafood restaurant with much better food and similar prices. As she is walking through the lobby, she receives a text message from the hotel about a special offer at the in-house restaurant. She decides to give it a try. She could have missed out an experience unique to the property.

The following morning, she decides to do some shopping and heads to the nearby mall. As she browses through stores, she notices a small pop-up massage store offering a 15-minute neck massage for a good price, which reminds her of the discount the hotel’s spa extended to her earlier through the app. As she heads back to the hotel, she makes an appointment at the spa for the afternoon from her phone app.

The hospitality industry is missing out on many opportunities to better engage their guests on property through direct, simple marketing and communication channels...

To read the full white paper, click here.

What does it take to define your brand experience?

The old adage said that companies defined their brands, and through simple advertising and marketing, customers embraced the brands and bought products.

As a matter of fact, customers – not companies – define brands. Brands are only relevant if they resonate with customers. It’s no longer the brand who spends the most money in advertising and marketing that gets customers’ buy-in. In today’s advanced technological world, customers are not brand loyal anymore, or at least they are loyal to a brand as long as the brand remains relevant to them, which can be a few weeks, or a few seconds at the speed of the click of a button on their mobile phones or tablets.

Brand experience draws customers to connect with the brand and buy products, but only if the brand delivers on its promise. Brand experience must be simple, contextual (engage with the audience at the right time and place), and personalized.

So, what does it take to define the brand experience?

Company leadership must be committed and lead the definition of the brand experience.
Leadership sets the vision, the purpose of being in business. Selling products and making money is a consequence of doing business, not the purpose. What are the customers’ needs that you can satisfy and how do you create an emotional connection with your customers so that they believe in and adhere to your value proposition?

Show empathy.
The brand’s purpose is not defined by what you do for your customers. It is defined by why what you do matters to your customers. By focusing on the why (watch Simon Sinek’s video on why/how/what), you show empathy to your customers.

Not only do you understand their needs (which leads to innovation and new product ideas), but you also understand their emotional journey (which leads to defining a roadmap of the customer experience, the foundation for your brand strategy).

Insights.
Many companies develop their products on what the CEO thinks his wife or children (or even himself) would want; on what the R&D team or Software development team think is cool to create based on the engineering complexity of it; or simply on the principle of what-competitors-do-and-we-can-do-it-cheaper-or-better. It sometimes works, at least in the short time, often time it does not.

That’s why consumer research and consumer insights are so important to uncover unmet needs, understand customers’ behaviors, and define the customer journey. If you don’t focus on customers, customers won’t focus on your brand. Your brand will mean nothing to them.

Brand promise, internal buy-in and collaboration.

Once you’ve identified and segmented your key audiences, it is important to define what messages you want to convey to them, what your brand promise is. What companies often miss is that if there is no internal buy-in on the brand promise, it is hard to define and convey these key messages to your audiences.

Painting your brand promise on a wall, or repeating it at every staff meeting doesn’t do it. Internal buy-in is critical because you want to stimulate, inspire your employees to develop innovative products, create engaging marketing campaigns, provide great customer support, etc.

How you get employees’ buy-in is by getting them involved in defining and carrying that brand promise. R&D, marketing, sales, customer support, finance should not work in silos. You must encourage, foster collaboration between teams. R&D can’t make products customers really want to buy if marketing does not tell R&D what customers want. Sales can’t sell if they don’t understand how the product works, or if the product is too expensive because of its engineering complexity while customers want just a simpler and cheaper version, etc.

Communication between teams is important, but what’s more important is to get teams work together on projects. By bring together engineers, software developers, marketers, finance guys, customer support experts, you get different perspectives, you confront ideas…

Collaboration, internal buy-in not only help define your brand promise, but more importantly collaboration keeps it alive. Your employees are your first brand ambassadors.

Keep delivering on your promise.
Gone are the days when once your brand was established, it was in the customers’ minds for the long run. Now customers are more versatile then ever, brand loyalty is a matter of seconds, or best of a few days, before they switch to a different brand. What’s critical is for your brand to STAY relevant.

You’ve got to ask yourself these questions over and over again.
- is your brand deeply focused on what drives experience within the market? You can no longer rely on the market research you did 5 years ago, because it’s no longer relevant.
- are your marketing messages in sync with the customer experience? As agile process and design thinking work for product development, it also works for marketing. Customers’ needs evolve constantly, thanks to the simplicity of buying products anywhere at anytime, the plethora of similar products available, the convenience of buying online vs. in stores, the technological improvements that make an iPhone 6S obsolete in 3 months, etc.
- do customers (still) share your view of who you are and what you want to be? Think of the Apple brand which in its early years meant that the buyers were the mavericks, the anti (PC) system, the rebels. Think of the Apple brand today, mass-market, ubiquitous, mainstream, to the point that many early Apple adopters have gone away because they’ve lost the connection with the brand (“too mainstream”, “now, everyone has an Apple”, etc.). Worst cases: Kodak, Nokia, Borders…
- are your products easy to use? If you make a product that is too complex to use, doesn’t provide a gain in time, is not convenient to use, you won’t succeed.
- what’s your roadmap for new products? You can’t rely on your laurels and your cash-cow product. You must always look for what’s next, what are the customer needs that we haven’t met yet. Innovation is key to keep delivering on your brand promise.


Do you want to be the next Kodak, the next Apple or the next Uber?

Spoiler! Consumers don’t give a crap if your company is innovative.

Unless you’re Apple, you’ve just released the 6^th generation of iPhone and the masses see that as the latest most innovative product on earth (yeah, Apple can still make believe), consumers don’t care about incremental updates to your “new” product.
You can brag as much as you want about how innovative your company is, how disruptive your market strategy is, how unique your company’s culture is, the reality is (sorry!) that consumers don’t give a crap about all this.

Clone baby, clone

Many so-called “innovations” are driven by executives or engineers who (genuinely?) believe their product is groundbreaking. The reality is, their product is only “innovative” to them, not to the consumer.

Back in the Cold War era where former USSR and the USA piled up new weapons one after another not only to catch up but to out-feature the opponent, present companies follow the same strategy: piling up new features to out-feature the competition. Companies look for ways to do better, cheaper, faster, nicer products, but they all offer cloned products. Executives’ motto now is “stop me before I innovate again”.

Most companies adopt a reactive/ adaptive strategy (“let’s see what our competitor does, we’ll do it cheaper”). A very few of them adopt a proactive strategy. Going back to Apple, it probably fits in both categories.

As most products become commoditized almost instantly as they enter the market (if not even before), companies forget a very important marketing principle: consumers don’t remember specific features, they remember the experience they had. Companies are confusing product upgrade with innovation. As consumers are volatile, go from one brand to another, one new product to the newest one, they forget very quickly about your product unless they get a memorable experience out of it.

Innovate to change the game

In an interview last Fall, Howard Schultz talked about how Starbucks’s business model is about changing behaviors, from selling coffee to redefining social interactions to moving to e-wallet. You don’t innovate to compete; you innovate to change the game.

Consumers have an abundance of choice. With new technologies emerging, interactions between businesses and consumers are evolving. Excessive proliferation of choice creates confusion and uncertainty. Consumers want choice and they want the choice decision to be easy. They are looking for ways to simplify their lives.
Consumers, especially Gen Y, want to be in control of their experience, with the technology being the enabler of that choice, not the dictator.

Companies have to switch their focus from being transaction oriented to being emotion oriented. A product is a transaction, an experience is an emotion. That’s their differentiator.

From transaction to emotion

The right way to think about innovation is this: how are we transforming customers? How are we changing and simplifying their lives?

This is a different way of thinking about your value proposition; it’s about developing human connection with customers. Not simply delivering a product or service “because that is what companies do”. Companies who believe that out-featuring competitors is the path to innovation are kidding themselves. It might work in the short-term, but it will turn against them in no time. Customers, people, users, are experiencing more chaos than ever. Too many choices are creating noise in their lives. This is a huge opportunity for both startups and established companies to make an impact in people’s lives. The sooner you rethink how you look at innovation, the faster you will orient your efforts towards really thinking about how you might change your customers’ lives and behaviors.

The consumer experience with 
a brand is more than just the functional benefits. It is the total brand experience including emotional benefits as well.

To change your organization, change the way you bring change.

Change is constant. If there is one thing that does not change, it is change. Have you ever considered changing partners? Not changing partners in terms of swapping spouses, but changing your partners’ or employees’ mindset and behavior? Have you tried to do that? Not easy, right?

A few weeks ago I spoke in front of a group of local business owners. I first asked how many of them were open to change; they all raised their hands. “How many of you have been through a change initiative at your company in the last 3 years?”. Once again, most of them raised their hands. “How many of you can say it worked?”. Then, only a handful raised their hands.

Change within companies is a bit like sex among teenagers. Everybody talks about it, but only a few actually do it. In fact, change has become a dirty word inside organizations. People are tired of being asked to change or innovate.

Why don’t people like change?

Heidi Grant Halvorson, PhD, says that it's not just that people fear change, though they undoubtedly do. It's also that they genuinely believe (often on an unconscious level) that when you've been doing something a particular way for some time, it must be a good way to do things. And the longer you've been doing it that way, the better it is.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, in a HBR blog, reveals the 10 most common reasons why people don’t like change, such as:

- Loss of control

- Excess uncertainty

- Dislike of surprises

- Doing something differently creates confusion

- Concerns about competence

- More work 

What you need to change… is your approach to change

The most effective approach to change does not start or end in the C-suite. It happens at the heart of the organization, where mid-level managers and their teams build the momentum to implement and lead change. Executives initiate and support change, the rest of the organization lead change.

Everyone is a change agent. Leadership ought to realize that empowering their teams to lead change, think in different ways, and experiment will help take the business to places it’s never been before. Not only people want to be inspired about change, they also want to be in control of how change can happen. Experimentation should become part of your company’s metrics, not just success. If you base your employees’ performance just on success, they will take the safe route, where risk and trial don’t exist. If you empower them, encourage them to experiment, (and likely to fail – at first), you will lead them to think creatively, solve problems in their own way (not the company way), and ultimately innovate.

Change is a mindset, not an SOP manual. In your organization, Marketing has a different culture and way of working than Accounting, IT, or HR. Teams don’t need a 50-page SOP document to talk about or implement change. In contrary, teams need customized tools to break down barriers, kill rules, challenge assumptions, and reverse the “we’ve always done it this way” mentality. There is no one-size-fits all program on change. This is why it is so critical to delegate change implementation and change management to teams to customize it and make it a reality. The key is to provide directions and create new behaviors, not to dictate teams how to do it.

One step at a time. Because you can’t change a company’s culture in one day, leaders need to implement change in increments. Find small sized projects with a realistic (successful) outcome and instill new ways of thinking and new ways of doing will get people notice that something different is taking place. Employees and managers will be more willing to take a chance and embrace the change if the outcome is tangible. Leaders must encourage employees to participate. As experimentation must be part of the metrics, participation is the same – not forced, but encouraged. “Is there a different way to make this work?”. “What should we do to make it fail?”. “Why would customers not buy our product?”. Reverse thinking is a way to turn upside down the approach to tackle problems. In other words, employees need to unlearn to be innovative. Little by little you will change your company’s DNA and make it a place where change it not only possible, but it is critical to its success. 

What is really important is to build an enterprise where employees: 

- can think asymmetrical in a linear culture

- are not afraid to come up with (bad and good) ideas

- feel comfortable to fail by experimenting

- get rewarded not by their number of successes, but by their number of attempts

- embrace change as an opportunity, not a threat.

Change happens. It doesn't care whether you like it or not. Change doesn't need your permission. Change is the one constant in business. What you decide to do with change is up to you.