The Employee Experience Advantage

CHAPTER 21What about the Actual Work?

One thing is quite obviously missing from all the discussions around employee experience: the actual work that employees have to do. Put more directly, the question that people oftentimes ask me is “How does the actual work impact the employee experience?” It's a very fair question to ask, and the work does affect the experience. However, it wasn't included in this book for one crucial reason. In almost all cases the organization doesn't control the work you do, but it controls the environment in which it gets done. Usually, you decide on the work.

When you apply for a job, you should have a pretty good sense of what the role is, what you will be doing, and what's expected of you. In other words, you are picking the job, and there shouldn't be that many surprises. If you get hired in sales, chances are you won't get asked to go fix a server issue, and if you get hired in customer service, you most likely won't have to give a presentation on sales performance. Of course, I'm not naive enough to think that we all have the luxury of leisurely picking our jobs and the organizations we work for. Plenty of people around the world are simply willing to take any job to pay their rent. Even in these situations the environment in which we work has an impact, and even in these situations the employee knows what he or she is getting into. This means that employees need to have a certain level of self‐awareness to determine their careers, the organizations ...