The Employee Experience Advantage

CHAPTER 2Research on Employee Experience

I certainly didn't coin the term employee experience, but I did create the frameworks and approaches that you will find in this book. As far as I'm aware, I'm the only one to create a structured framework of employee experience that is based on actual data and organizational analysis of hundreds of organizations, so it only makes sense to share how it all came about. Although new titles, roles, and practice areas are emerging around employee experience regularly, there's a lot of confusion and uncertainty about what this actually is and what it looks like. Part of the reason for this is unlike traditional human resources (HR), which is very clearly defined, employee experience looks quite different depending on the organization, and that's okay. Because this is a very human‐centric role, there should naturally be differences in how various organizations approach this. I reached out to many chief employee experience officers, directors, managers, and even HR leaders who are responsible for employee experience to get their perspective on what this new shift is all about.

Many business executives and leaders I talked to were very candid and said they weren't entirely sure what this role focused on, what experience will become, or even what it will include because it's so new. Naturally this presented me a bit of a challenge in writing a book about this topic. Over the past two years I've had a few hundred conversations with senior executives ...