Employee Experience Design

5MindsetsSeven Mindsets for Employee Experience Design

We live in an age of push‐button convenience. We push a button to start our car or to heat up a meal. We make a few clicks to write a resume or “compose” an original song on AI. There seems to be no end to what we can do with a button, click, or swipe.

We have some good news and bad news for you. First, the bad: There are no buttons you can press or AI prompts to write that will do the heavy lifting when designing an effective employee experience. This brings us to the good news: Because you will be rolling up your sleeves to design the employee experience with your organization, it will be custom‐tailored to whatever makes your situation unique.

Peter Drucker, the famous management consultant, said: “Only three things happen naturally in organizations: Friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.”¹

The leadership we'll discuss in this chapter involves first doing things differently from the well‐worn path that many initiatives follow; then it's about combining certain elements of EXD in a way that works for your organization.

The Path of Least Resistance

Above, we referred to the “well‐worn path.” People take that path, for example, when they're under pressure to implement a new policy. They may have been reminded that “time is money” and that the deadline is somewhere around “yesterday.” Here's what that project looks like when done the conventional way:

1. We often start with “best ...