Employee Experience Design

2Hardball Objections, Straight Answers

“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”

—Attributed to Mark Twain

As we said in the last chapter, we like skeptics. They're the folks that don't quickly salute the next initiative because they have questions, and sometimes lots of them. They may take a while to be convinced of something because they want a solid foundation of understanding.

Of course, you can tell we're big fans of Employee Experience Design, or we wouldn't have written this book. But in this chapter, we want to focus on people who may have a number of concerns or objections.

First, Some Definitions

We'll get into the tough questions in a moment, but it makes sense first for us to get some basic definitions out of the way. First, when we refer to “employees,” we're being inclusive to mean full‐time employees, part‐time ones, contractors, volunteers—people who work together to deliver on a business promise.

Next, “Employee Experience” or “EX” is not an initiative or set of tools—it's a combination of three things:

1. It's a mindset. We'll discuss this in detail in Chapter 5;
2. It's ways of working. Multiple chapters will give you the methods we've used; and
3. It's organizing what was the HR function beyond the traditional responsibility or scope.

It also is the combined thoughts, feelings, and interactions that employees have at work. EX can be great, terrible, or somewhere in between, and every organization ...