Leading People
Gerry Murray talks to leading people about leading people. Get insights and tips from thought leaders about how to bring out the best in yourself and others.
Leading People
What if the way we build organisations is no longer fit for purpose?
In this episode…
Gerry Murray speaks with organisational psychologist and Chief Scientist at AIHR, Dieter Veldsman, about how to redesign work for a more human future.
Drawing on his new book Work for Humans, Dieter shares why employee experience (EX) is much more than a buzzword, and how to make it a philosophy, a process, and a practice.
Together, they discuss:
• Why EX is now a core leadership issue, not just an HR function
• How to measure EX meaningfully — without making it overly soft or overly rigid
• The role of technology in either amplifying or eroding human experience
• Why frontline workers must be central to any EX strategy
• How EX links to organisational design, trust, inclusion, and long-term performance
This is a manifesto for leaders and HR professionals who want to build workplaces where people — and businesses — thrive.
Curious?
🎧 Listen to the full conversation now to discover how to do this.
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Welcome to Leading People with me, gerry Marais. This is the podcast for leaders and HR decision makers who want to bring out the best in themselves and others. Every other week, I sit down with leading authors, researchers and practitioners for deep dive conversations about the strategies, insights and tools that drive personal and organizational success. And in between, I bring you one simple thing short episodes that deliver practical insights and tips for immediate use. Whether you're here for useful tools or thought thought-provoking ideas, leading People is your guide to better leadership.
Speaker 1:What if the way we design organizations is no longer fit for purpose? What if employee experience isn't just an HR initiative but a strategic lens for building more human-centered systems? And what if the future of work depends not on technology but on empathy, measurement and meaningful leadership? In this episode, I speak with Dieter Felsman, an organizational psychologist, chief scientist at AIHR and co-author of the new book Work for Humans. We explore why traditional structures are failing people, how leaders can reimagine the employee-employer relationship and what it really takes to design organizations where humans can thrive. So if you're curious about building better systems, engaging your people more effectively and redefining leadership for a changing world, stay with us. Now let's get into the conversation. Dieter Felsman, welcome to Leading People.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, gerry. It's fantastic to be here with you today. And welcome to the listeners.
Speaker 1:Now I believe you're South African, but you're joining me today. From which part of the world?
Speaker 2:I'm joining you from the Netherlands, so I'm currently just outside of Utrecht, but, as you rightfully mentioned, originally from South Africa, but I've been in Europe for the last four years or so.
Speaker 1:Now you've just published a book, which is the primary reason I've brought you on the podcast, and I attended a webinar you gave several months ago as well, so I kind of know what I'm getting into here. But first you've been warned, I've been warned, but first to kick things off so our listeners can get to know you better. So how did you come to end up focusing your work on employee experience and sort of what people, places or events stand out on your journey, and were there any epiphany moments that led you particularly to write this book with your co-author?
Speaker 2:Yeah, jerry, I think something has always been interesting for me in my career and also made me choose a career in organizational psychology and behavior and human resource management has been how human behavior plays out in organizations and the decisions that we make around how we work and why we work and the fundamental role that work plays in people's lives. That are very different depending on what your approach towards work is and how it fits. So I think that's been something that's driven me quite a lot and then from there I started shifting a lot more to understand but how do organizations as living systems actually think about the workforce, especially with some of the changes that we are also currently seeing with new technologies et cetera, coming into the workforce? So if you ask me about pivotal moments, I think there's been a couple. I first had the privilege and opportunity to work in big technology implementations in organizations and how that changed human behavior and to guide them through the change process. After that, worked quite extensively in organizational design and organizational development. At my heart, I still believe that the core of a lot of challenges we find today is because organizations are not designed well and not designed with both human beings and business outcomes in mind and then from there I shifted back into the working world, into the corporate environment there, where I eventually became the group chief human resource officer for a multinational insurance business and on the other side, which led a little bit towards the writing of the book as well.
Speaker 2:I've always been a bit of a closet academic, if I may call it that way, so I've always been very interested in the academic world, but not necessarily being part of it. So I've kept on writing and doing a lot of research and I'm also a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg as part of my role also as chief scientist at the Academy to Innovate HR. So I think those are kind of the things that have shaped my interest and the work that myself and my co-author, dr Manav Anumarivas, done around employee experience originated out of the need to say but we should be doing work better and as organizations, are we not caught up in this mix of process and efficiency and only considering one of the parties? And that led us towards this interest around exploring but should we not be doing employee experience in a very different way? And that's been gosh about seven years ago already when we started some of this work okay, so that's a great introduction.
Speaker 1:So now people have the frame of reference for for Dieter um, you do have a PhD, don't you? So you, you have, you have a certain high level of academic achievement. Uh, behind you as well, um, so let's get to the book. So, just for our list, for my listeners here, it's called work for humans.
Speaker 2:Um, and it's really about how do we design practical employee experience strategies that work both for the business and for the humans that fall part of the workforce, and for the humans that fall part of the workforce.
Speaker 1:Right, and this has got to be a very interesting topic for any leaders or HR folks listening to this. So who is this book for and why did you and Marna feel now was the right time to write it?
Speaker 2:So, as I mentioned in the intro, I think about seven years ago or so, we both Marna and myself we were working in the same organization at the time and we were tasked with redesigning the talent management process. And the more we started to review what was in place in that particular organization, the more we started to realize that this was actually designed with very much wearing an HR hat and an HR mindset, so very much designed for process, designed for efficiency, but not necessarily thinking about the experiences. And I asked her the question to say you know, if I was a consumer, would I buy to do this? Would I actually pay my own money to form part of either this talent process or learning process or performance process? And we reached the conclusion that no, we would not. And we asked the question but why are organizations not thinking about their employees as consumers of the organizational product? And if we talk about a skill-scarce talent market, surely that we should be thinking in a very different way about the experiences that we provide to people? Now you asked the question around why did we write a book about it? It wasn't the intent when we started out.
Speaker 2:So we started out as practitioners, developing some models, frameworks that we then applied in various organizations over the years and, as I've mentioned before, I have a bit of an academic background as well and we started looking towards the academia side of things and started realizing but academics and practice is not adding up when we start talking about employee experience On the one side in practice, we see a lot of good work being done in terms of tools and methodologies and frameworks being developed we felt that it lacked the deeper science to actually tell us where does this fit with concepts such as employee engagement, employee satisfaction? Is it just a buzzword? Is it something new? So we thought it lacked a bit of the scientific rigor. And when looking towards the science and the academic side of things, we thought but this is not practical enough. As practitioners ourselves, we would never utilize any of this in practice. And we wrote the book to try and bring these two different worlds together, to say how can we think about employee experience and where? The field is currently based on solid science but giving a very practical experience focus and experiential focused guidance to practitioners that wants to do this in their organizations. And that's really what led towards the writing of the book and we tried to summarize the work that we've done over the last seven years in the book in a concise manner to say but start here and use this bit of a guide and a playbook for you and if you start building out your employee experience practice okay.
Speaker 1:so a few things uh emerge from what you've just said which I think we could unpack a little bit further. And this idea of, I think and you're not the first guest I've had talk about this is this idea that you know how much effort goes into the customer experience in an organization and then, as you said, if I was a consumer would I buy it, and there's a gradually becoming more and more of a shift saying, well, hold on a second, you know, maybe the employee is like a customer of the organization. And then you talk about the distinction. You said, like you know, the word that gets bandied around all the time is employee engagement or satisfaction, and you seem to imply that this is, this is way beyond that, right? So maybe we could unpack this and you sort of this idea of almost employee experience as a philosophy and a process and a practice. Can we unpack that a little bit and maybe, uh, pull, pull out some of the distinctions, like this idea that that you're a consumer uh, you're, you're.
Speaker 1:This is not about just engagement, satisfaction, this goes way beyond. On leading people, the goal is to bring you cutting-edge thought leadership from many of the leading thinkers and practitioners in leadership. Today. Each guest shares their insights, wisdom and practical advice so we can all get better at bringing out the best in ourselves and others. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share a link with friends, family and colleagues, and stay informed by joining our leading people LinkedIn community of HR leaders and talent professionals.
Speaker 2:So I think it starts with a principle there and, almost to tie on to the last thing that you've mentioned, jerry, around the fact that if you view your employee as a consumer of the work experience, we ask very different questions there.
Speaker 2:We ask you know what makes their eyes light up, what gives them energy, why would they want to buy this? Why would they want to come back? So almost that same type of thinking that, to your point, we apply in the customer experience space. But if you start thinking in the way that if we acquire employees, if you want to engage them and you want to retain them, how would we do things differently and set up the work experience in a very, very different way? Also bearing in mind that we are trying to balance not only the needs of the employee but also the needs of the organization, because I think there's a misconception that employee experience is only about the employee. It's about the employee in the context of the organization. So it does need to make business sense in terms of how and where the organization also focuses in terms of optimizing EX, because you can't be everything to everyone, but it's important that you're clear on who you are and what you can and what you can't offer and what that experience entails. So I think, from a fundamental starting point of view, it's this principle about saying if employees were consumers, how would we treat them? And if we treat them in a different way, what does that particular outcome look like Now in terms of looking at things like employee engagement, satisfaction, employee experience. They are definitely related concepts because these things do overlap to a large extent, but I think they focus on different periods of time. Engagement for us, is an outcome over a long period of time in terms of the sentiment of the employee towards the organization, their willingness, their commitment and discretionary effort that they apply. And employee experience, we think, is a living thing that almost integrates and leads towards employee engagement and it's about those moments that matter to you in the organizational life and you know I often describe it as a bank account there's certain things as an employee in your bank account with the employer that deposits money and goodwill into it and, let's be honest, work is tough. Work in life is hard. There's certain things that will withdraw money as part of that. But employee experience is how do we manage that balance of that bank account over time? By making sure that there's enough deposits in the moments that really matter to employees in order to build that particular goodwill.
Speaker 2:Now I do want to categorically state it's not about having a fun organizational environment and it's not only about the culture that we want to create, but it goes deeper than that. It goes about the principles of what do we promise as an employer? Are we living up to it and are we actually making sure that the experience of it is really great? And know almost to visualize it a little bit, jerry, there's three circles that I think we don't talk enough about. The one is employer brand. What do I promise?
Speaker 2:And I think we do a really good job in organizations about selling who we are as an organization to new talent. Then there's the employee value proposition side of things. Do I actually offer the things that I promise? But then the missing link for me is employee experience. That has to kind of bring those two circles together in the way that I then experience what the organization promises to me, because very often people join. You know it's great the benefits, for example, we offer, but man, the experience of accessing those benefits or getting things done, or applying for that bursary or, you know, being part of the high performance talent group. That's just a really, really terrible and kind of detracts from that bank account that I mentioned earlier and that's kind of a little bit from the premise that we wanted to shift around thinking a bit more holistically and thinking a bit more systemically about employee experience as well.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I want to dig a bit deeper into all of this. As you could imagine, there's a couple of questions here that I want to ask about, and the one that is sort of jumping at me first is what is the contribution of a manager or leader to the employee experience, because context can condition a lot of things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that's it's an important thing to to think about employee experience on four levels right, and almost see them as four different circles that build on each other. There's a very key component there that starts with the individual themselves. I need to want to be here in the organization, so it's a very cognitive decision that I also make One to participate, to bring my best self to work, to actually be part of the workforce and contribute my skill set, be part of the workforce and contribute my skill set and I know it sounds really strange to put it that way, but employee experience does also put responsibility on the employee about creating their own experience at work. I think, then, this interaction that you spoke about quite fundamentally and we know it from a lot of the research around the impact and the influence that the relationship with your direct manager has on things like employee experience, on things like employee engagement, and I think that's an important, almost gatekeeper relationship, if I might call it that. So there are elements there that we need to think about in terms of how do I get feedback? Do I trust my manager? Do I believe that they are fair to me in terms of how they respond and how they treat me, do they guide me in terms of my development, do they care about my well-being. So I think there's a core part where the manager almost represents the organization in that experience with the employee.
Speaker 2:And then, obviously, to your point, there's a third circle, very much in the organizational domain around have we designed an operating environment that is conducive to the experience that we want to create? And very often this is not an HR thing, it goes beyond that. That talks very often about the physical work environment, the way we collaborate virtually. It talks very much also about some other of the can I call them the harder factors that exist in that environment that influences just the way that people experience the work environment. And then, lastly, it also then happens in an environmental context, and I think that's something for a very long period of time that we've ignored.
Speaker 2:You know, some areas are tougher to work in than in others, depending where you are based. There's certain realities that you're going to have to face. You know I sometimes tease being from South Africa. You know, in the Netherlands, I think the weather is a really good consideration for you in terms of how you set up the employee experience during the course of the winter months. Now I'm saying that tongue-in-cheek, but what I'm trying to just showcase there is that I think it goes beyond just you know, oh, I've got a nice office chair in a nice office environment with a great canteen. It goes much deeper, around those circles being aligned and being authentic and delivering on what is promised.
Speaker 1:So you have the individual, then the manager, then I suppose the circles go out the way the organizational is designed, not just in the physical sense but the virtual sense, and then you have the operating environment in which the industry or whatever the person is working in at the time. And I think that point you make about the individual creating their own experience. I mean, I've also talked to people about the engagement aspect, where engagement is not the obligation of the organization, it's a two-way psychological contract between spot on, you know, organizations cannot give you everything you want to to have you show up and give, do your best work, but you have to be prepared to step up yourself. And and there's a growing body of work that says you know you could be, you know you have to be a responsible employee, you're accountable for your own. When you can take responsibility and accountability for your own work, you're. You're actually growing as an individual in in so many ways, aren't you?
Speaker 1:Now there's an interesting aspect to this, which is the other question, and it's related a little bit to when I was thinking about this a few minutes ago. So we have this potential to think about the customer experience and think then about the employee experience. Now, interesting thing is what role does technology play in all this? Because there's a growing body of evidence in customer experience which says technology is actually killing the customer experience. And so then if we think, well, okay, but let's just throw some technology at the employees, what impact would that have? So, in your research and your thinking and everything else, what conclusions or what insights did you come to in terms of the role of technology in this experience? Employee experience.
Speaker 2:That's a great point. You know, there's something interesting that came out that talks about the fact that just because we can does not mean we should. And I think it's extremely relevant today when we think about technologies that are able to automate a lot of the aspects of the employee experience, when we start thinking about the utilization of things like generative AI as part of the employee experience and there's a very interesting case study that talks about the fact where an organization tried to replace the performance management discussion between the manager and the employee with AI actually facilitating the feedback, and it completely bombed out because the employee gave the feedback to say there's no humanness towards this typical interaction that we have. I realize these limitations the manager might be subjective and there's bias, but how do we control for that and use technology to almost address that problem, as opposed to really kind of exchanging it with the high touch human moment that we want to create out of that experience? So, to get to your point, jerry, there, around the fact that we think that technology is a key enabler of the employee experience, but it needs to be done intentionally, within the context of what is the memorable moment that you want to create and what's the most appropriate shape and format and channel to create that. So, practically, there will be some experiences that we can automate through technology, but we choose not to because we want to create a very humane, high-touch experience in that particular moment.
Speaker 2:And that's why what we found in the research and we also write a lot about it in the book, and it ties a little bit to your earlier point around the psychological contract is you have to understand what the need is of the employee in particular moments of their life with you as an organization. What are those moments that matter and what is the need that they hold as part of the psychological contract. Now, that might be stated on their side or it might be an expectation that could be unreasonable, that they've just brought this thing into the organizational environment. But it is important to understand what that particular need is because you will then approach it very, very differently in terms of what you provide, whether you utilize that moment through technology, et cetera. And I think that is quite a nice guide for people to say but what's the need in the moment, what's the best way to address it and how do I design around that? As opposed to saying technology can do the following things for me.
Speaker 2:I'll use a practical example. You get a salary or you get a promotion at work or you get a salary bump up. Sure, technology can automate and send you that message. But do you really want to hear that from an automated email or a Slack message or a Teams message, or do you actually want the congratulatory message to come from a manager and then it gets followed up by the technology process? Now, I know it's a very simple thing I'm mentioning, but the point I'm trying to illustrate there and to highlight is about what does the human moment look like and how does technology support and enable that?
Speaker 2:Of course, there will be other moments that we identify that has to happen, but they don't matter necessarily in the sense of contributing towards that bank account. So let's automate them, let's get them out of the way as quickly as possible, or let's use technology to neutralize moments that could actually detract from the employee experience as well. You know those frustrating things about. I have to fill in 100 different forms of my details all of the time. Utilize technology to take the pain out of the experience that people have at that particular point in the onboarding process, but be intentional about that, and that's what all our research told us and all the case studies we wrote up is the intentionality is what matters. Our research told us and all the case studies we wrote up is the intentionality is what matters, and combining the experience that we have with the human moment the moment that matter and then the technology enabler, is quite an important part that leads towards just a very different feel to it and um.
Speaker 1:How would you feel about a sort of notion that when you're evaluating whether to use technology, you ask the question how does this make us more human?
Speaker 2:It's an interesting comment right that you make, and I think, especially today, where you know, and AI is everywhere and I think what it's actually starting to do a lot more is to pose that question around but what does our humanness actually look like and how do we bring it out a lot more and not lose who we are as part of the progress that we make into this next technological era right, which I'm a firm supporter? I think there's so much opportunity there, but we have to remain human in the process. And that brings me back to the point where I said you know, just because we can doesn't mean we should. We are now getting to a point in time where we're going to have to be very intentional about what we choose technology to do for us and not do for us. And it's not just due to ethical concerns, but there might be certain things where it's not the best outcome if we just do it faster and more efficiently. Sometimes in employee experience, you might actually choose to do a process slower because it's more meaningful, and you could actually slow a couple of things down, obviously not across the board, but a couple of things down because it's just more meaningful to do it that way and the returns are much higher. So for me, employee experience is about.
Speaker 2:You know, I love it when organizations say they want to be a lot more human-centric, and then my first question is okay one do you know who your humans are beyond the demographic statistics that you report every month? Do you actually know who they are, what they worry about, what keeps them awake at night, what motivates them? And, if so, what have you put in place to address those particular needs? If you had to sell the work experience to them, what does that actually look like? And that changes a little bit. You know the discussion in the boardroom when you have to start making particular calls on where do we invest and where don't we invest if you really know who the human beings are and what they care about I got the inspiration for that question, by the way, from the title of your book work for humans well, I'm glad to see that it's inspiring something at least put it out there, live with the consequences.
Speaker 1:You know yeah there's two, there's two, there's two, two things emerging from what you're saying here and maybe they're kind of somewhat related you can decide how you deal with. So there's there's the you know. There's the question how do you know right which is down to this whole thing of how are you going to measure everything from expectations to how well they're being met, whether the expectations are realistic, etc. Etc. And then maybe you can dovetail that into the changing world of work and how work, what trends you've seen in the employee employer relationship, the contract, whatever it's called, the psychological contract, whatever we want to call it.
Speaker 1:Between that and particularly, of course, we had this pandemic a few years ago, which of course accelerated a lot of things in terms of technology and use and how we worked, and probably also maybe hasn't all landed yet, because it's like that. So let's get into the sort of measurement aspect and then maybe talk about the changing world of work. You're listening to Leading People with me, gerry Murray, my guest this week is Dieter Felsman, organizational psychologist and co-author of Work for Humans, coming up how top organizations are putting these ideas into practice, what leaders often get wrong and why the future of work might be more human than we think. Now back to our conversation.
Speaker 2:And I think I want to start maybe answering this one, jerry, by focusing on how we've seen the employer-employee relationship change and shift, and some of it has been due to the pandemic, where I think there was an immediate focus all of a sudden on what does the human being in the workplace look like and what do they contribute, as if it was a surprise for people that they're working with humans. And I think on the other side, even before, that people just want something fundamentally different from work today, and I think what has happened through the rise of things like social media etc. That people are a lot more vocal about the fact that, if they are, if their needs are not being met at work. I think organizations are being held a lot more accountable as well, which I think is a good thing, as long as it's done in dialogue and in a good way, and it's not necessarily about shaming organizations in the public domain. But it does tell us that people are a lot more vocal about their expectations from what it could look like in terms of an employer and employment, and there's been a little bit of a power pendulum that swung right.
Speaker 2:I think in the old days there was very much, you know, just get a good job, a job one right. I think in the old days there was very much you know, just get a good job a job is fine. Continued instability and employment is what you should be aiming for. And I think it has shifted a lot more, where people are making different types of decisions pertaining to employment and why they stick with an employer, and something we talk a lot about is called career life fit. You know, for some people they'll make a decision to say you know, maybe I don't want the you high status, high ego driven job for now, because family is more important for me at the moment and that's a conscious choice that I make around how work actually fits into my life and that's okay. I think for the very first time, we are in an environment where it's perfectly fine to make those type of choices. So I think there's been significant changes in the employer-employee domain.
Speaker 2:We also know that there is a global talent shortage, so I think organizations have to think very differently about accessing talent, and good talent always has options. I don't care what you tell me in terms of what the labor market looks like. Good talent has got the right networks. They always have options to shift and move if they want to. This does bring a very different dynamic as part of that psychological contract, because I expect different things from my employer, whilst they also expect different things from talent today in terms of what that contribution needs to look like. So I think there has been a significant shift there and that's why we see the conversation shifting a lot more beyond can I call it the transactional elements of the employee experience, which is, you know, am I paid fairly? It's almost like the tickets to the game, hygiene factors. It goes beyond that to say but what is it that differentiates you? What do you actually want to offer and what do you want to be famous for as an organization in terms of your employee experience? What are the things that you want people to talk about and remember when you are not in the room or once they've left, and to kind of be able to say, yeah, yeah, they promised me X, y, z. Those things really did play out that way, but you know they were clear about the fact that they can't do ABC and that wasn't an expectation that I had or something that's important to me. So I think that is shifting quite a bit and you know to link it around. But how do we know and what do the measures look like? Something that we do promote in the book. A lot more is to have, but more of a systemic, holistic way of measuring the employee experience.
Speaker 2:I think there's two extremes at the moment. The one side a lot of people say you know ENPS, one measure to rule them all in, one measure to guide them. And they say it's only about you know. Will you recommend the workplace to others? I don't think that's a good way to go about it. I think it's one of the metrics that you should look at. But you know, for example, I'm currently in an organization scale up at. But you know, for example, I'm currently in an organization scale up fast-paced environment. I know a lot of good friends that's good talent that I would not recommend the organization to because I don't think that they will be a good culture fit. So it doesn't mean that I have a bad employee experience. It just means I'm very realistic about the type of environment I am working in and what drives me, motivates me, won't motivate them.
Speaker 2:So what we talk about in the book is a little bit of a triangle there. When you think about metrics, there's some general operational metrics that you need to look at. That's day-to-day, daily things, on how people experience certain practices and processes. There's a tactical layer that kind of brings it one level up, that starts talking a lot more around measuring those memorable moments. And then there's an outcome layer right at the top that he talks about. But why does this really matter to business? Is it leading towards the expectations that we had around improved motivation, engagement, productivity as the outcomes of having a solid and a sound employee experience in place?
Speaker 2:Now to touch the last point, then let's talk about future of work. I think this is going to become even more important from an employee experience point of view. I'm not just saying that because we wrote the book about it. I'm saying it because I really believe that people going forward and we can already see that with the workforce they have very different questions and asks of employers and they're not afraid one as I've said before to voice their view and opinion or to vote with their feet to say I'm not getting it here, I will go someplace else where I actually find a better fit and somebody that cares about that experience.
Speaker 2:Now I'm not saying we should go towards the extreme and it's all about just designing places where people want to work. It's about designing workplaces where people want to work, want to contribute and want to stay in the longer term. That then obviously leads towards business impact and business outcomes there. That's good for all. So I think there will be a shift just in the way that we think about this and EX. In a lot of organizations it's a project. In a lot of organizations it's just one of the buzzwords that HR uses to kind of explain why they want budget for some new initiatives. I think if you're really serious about this, you must look at what are the underpinning capabilities we need to put in place to really make this a strategic people value driver for our organization, because that's where the value, I think, in the future of work is going to lie.
Speaker 1:Okay, so, um, a couple of things. I want to ask you a question and just for the listeners, I would you used a nice term earlier on the ENPS. Um, and it's not a Myers-Briggs classification term, it's the employee net promoter score. Is that right? Yeah, that's correct Taking.
Speaker 1:Frederick Reichelt's work on net promoter score and translating it into yeah, he simplified it from his early research into like would you recommend this to somebody else? Type of thing, and it's kind of the same idea, isn't it Sort of? Only you make it employee centric. So that's just to clarify the acronym. And the question I have is around the measurement.
Speaker 1:Again, a lot of satisfaction, engagement, stuff is done at a anonymous level and we talk so much here about the employee experience, which is actually it's mine, right, same with my customer experience. You can walk into a restaurant and have a totally different sense of your experience than I do. It might be the same experience in terms of what they create, but you might not be so happy with it and I might be okay with it. So how are organizations getting to that essential? So so actually, if I talk to you, dieter, about the stuff that another department has said is important, right, yeah, and you're going, this guy's not listening to me. I, I my what really keeps me awake at night is this I don't want a pay rise, I, I don't. I don't want a promotion, I just want more flexibility and I want to be to, to be given challenging work that I can grow and develop myself and some new skills. But this guy's proposing to me he's going to give me a pay rise. Now, it's not that I'm going to refuse the money, but it's just that I don't think he's on.
Speaker 1:So how do you get to the individual aspect of this, because otherwise there's an awful lot of mud thrown at the wall on this one. That's one of the biggest challenges with measuring this over the years is it's highly generalized and people go well, they're not happy. Have you ever talked to I talked to a couple of years ago very senior guy in finance and he said to me my scores came in lower than normal and he said I don't know what's going on. I've got 40 people in my finance department and there's at least five of them. I can't afford to lose, but I don't know who's. Who's bringing my scores down. I'm doing the same things I've been doing for the last three or four years. Why am I scored now? Of course, his scores were below the average, probably, which means that somebody's going to be below the average and maybe somebody else did something a little bit more special and got their scores up.
Speaker 2:So how do we get to that individual aspect of this, because for me it sounds like you really have to get to that level and there's a couple of things that you mentioned, right, I think, with things like employee experience, employee engagement and, you know, the net promoter score that we've spoken about, I think, unfortunately, people have this fascination with the quantitative metric and what it tells us. So engagement in a lot of organizations is just about the score and it's about the dashboard that we put up, and I, as a leader, don't want to be read in my division, right, they want to be one of the green people so that they they kind of leave me alone with interventions that we need to drive. I think that's an absolutely misguided way of thinking about all of these different practices, whether it's employee engagement or employee experience, because I think the score there is just something that helps you keep your finger on the pulse of how things are progressing and you should be viewing that over a period of time, the trends that it starts to tell you. So I think that's just a comment on the scoring component and that's why I definitely promote a both quantitative and qualitative way to start looking at this, because employee experience is personal, so you need to go deeper in terms of understanding the depth of what are people really telling you and what's the sentiment and the stories that they tell within the organization about who you are as an employer, but then how to do that at scale is then usually the other criticism that we get right. So you'll comment around, but maybe we're just throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks.
Speaker 2:For me, it does boil back to two things. The first one is understanding who the personas of the human beings are in your organization, and I'll use an example. We were working with an insurance business at the time and, you know, analyzing and doing a lot of kind of ethnographic interviews over time with their workforce, we actually realized that their can I call them? The most common profile was a 34-year-old African female, single with study debt, two kids to support and a dependent adult on them as well that they needed to look after. Now, all of a sudden, if you start thinking about it in that way and now we have to make a call around, okay, if we provide certain benefits, what's going to matter more to this person? Is it about alleviating their study debt, so kind of looking at bursaries and things like that Is it about a pay rise or, you know, is it more flexibility or more autonomy? Now we start understanding what really matters to that individual and helps us to guide the decisions that we make, because we also don't have unlimited resources in terms of being able to just look at and trying to do everything for employees. It gets to be a lot more smarter and focused and targeted.
Speaker 2:You have to acknowledge and realize the fact that you will work at different levels. So, at an organizational level, I think it's important to do persona mapping and have not a hundred, but have five or six type of personas that you look at in your workforce and always ask the question around decisions that we make, what's important to these persona groups and how is that playing out, so that when we also measure the scoring, you can almost measure it against those personas to see if you're meeting the needs or not and what needs to be improved. And then I think earlier you mentioned the important role that the manager plays, because I think that's where you start going really deep in terms of understanding. In my own context and in my own team, what are the anomalies that I find there and what are the things that I do need to talk about a little bit more? And yes, there's some things that are really good to gather anonymously. There are other things. If you have enough trust in the environment that it's really good to talk openly about and to put on the table around. You know what's the barriers towards the EX that people want.
Speaker 2:So I think it's trying to move away a little bit from it's about the score. It's a lot more about the interaction. It's the interaction. It's a lot more about the intentionality and it's a lot more about realizing that it happens at the different touch points and at the different levels. But try to bring the human being into the room when you start making some of those decisions, because it's always not and it's a pet peeve I have whenever we talk to executive teams it's very rare that the executive team is representative of the profile of the rest of the organization. Doesn't happen for various reasons. So do you actually have the voice in the rest of the organization? It doesn't happen for various reasons. So do you actually have the voice in the room that's telling you what matters to these people or not? And I think that's something just to think about and there's some practical guidance in the book on what you can also think about when you do engage in this way and you do start thinking about measuring more continuously, and both quantitatively and qualitatively, when you decide.
Speaker 1:So quite a lot of interesting perspective in there. Getting to that more individual aspect, I suppose a thought come into my head. When you're talking about the personas, you're still normalizing certain types of people. I guess the real power in this is if managers are taught how to see whether there's outliers on the personas in their team. And because those are probably the likely the people it you know a lot of the other people are going to cluster, aren't they mathematically? So they're going to, they're going to go.
Speaker 1:Well, he's like me. Well, he's kind of got the same set up as me and of course it's it's easier for the manage manager to perhaps manage to the norm and at the same time maybe some of their best talent, most talented people, are on the outliers and they could get it horribly wrong. So it seems to me maybe I'm just making it, I'm making it up, but I'm just using what you told me to say well, wouldn't it be interesting if a manager knows he's got six types, persona types in an organization because of the profiles you've created and at the same time they're not told this is it they're told? Take these as a working hypothesis and then test it and say who's who's sitting in my team and do they actually fit to this, because maybe what we're trying to do is as a poll at the policy level is just not going to appeal to those people and I I want to keep a couple of those because they might be a little bit unusual, but they're really good at their job spot on.
Speaker 2:And you know, I think the mistake that people make is now you have these persona profiles and now I try to play, you know, match the employee to the profile where I sit down and say, you know, I think Jerry is in profile five and Dieter is in profile three and person X is in profile Y. I think it is much more to your point. It's more to embed the principle and to utilize as a starting point to say think in a needs-based manner and realize that you have people in your team that do have different needs. You know, when I was an executive, I had people reporting into me. Some were 25 years, my senior. I had people that were younger than me over a period of time reporting into me and they were very different. Now, age is not the determining factor there, but in the determining factor there was that very different life needs at that point in time. So I could use the personas there as a starting point to say you know, for person Y, I think this is something that would speak to them. But let me validate it with them when I talk to them. Let me use this as a starting point.
Speaker 2:And you know a challenge that I sometimes have with policies and organizations is they do not apply to everyone. Let's be absolutely clear about that. Typically they are kind of written for the lowest common denominator to try and avoid risk. Now, I'm not saying that they shouldn't be there. They play an important part, but you can't just be guided by that, because there will always be exceptions to the rule. But at least here we are talking about the exceptions within a broader framework and starting to utilize just some other generalizable information to make an informed decision about how we treat this specific situation.
Speaker 2:And I think that's slightly different, but yes, it's not about you know. Okay, these are now your six profiles that you keep in your back pocket. So if person says x or they meet criteria y, this is what I offer them. It's a starting point, but there has to be continuous validation and that's my earlier point. Dialogue and trust it's two really, really important parts that I think employee experience needs to foster and needs to drive and intentionally put forth within the organization if it is successful yeah, and I want to get to another ethnographical group in a second.
Speaker 1:I'm just really curious did you employ anthropologists to help you do this research or how did you get to that? Because many organizations are realizing that there's quite a value in having people who understand anthropology come in, because they look at things in quite a different way from other maybe aspects of the HR function.
Speaker 2:I'm just curious did you did you do that, or we did have a multidisciplinary team and we also tried to borrow some techniques, also in terms of different disciplines and different sciences, and I think that's one of the things I love about E-X that it kind of originates out of various different places. There's a lot of techniques that you utilize from things like anthropology. There's a lot of techniques that you can utilize from things like user interface design, marketing, consumer science, psychology, et cetera, and it's about bringing those different things together. But ultimately, it's about understanding human behavior within groups over time, and I think that's where that's a really, really valuable contribution. So we had some pretty clever, smart people to help us along this journey, so it wasn't something that we just figured out all our own, and I think it is one of the things we write about. When you build an EX capabilities, you need a multidisciplinary team that's able to bring different perspectives and look at the organization and the human experience through different lenses.
Speaker 1:That's where the power lies yeah, so speaking of different lenses and this and another ethnographic group, that perhaps doesn't get enough attention. We a lot of ex. Stuff seems to be often defined from the knowledge worker perspective and you emphasize in the book um, the frontline workforce and I I think a lot of people out there get a little bit disenchanted with this idea that everybody's doing knowledge work.
Speaker 1:If you mean there's a lot of people out there doing incredibly valuable work and they're not classified as knowledge workers. So maybe you can speak a little bit to that before we come, you know, towards the end of our conversation. No, you're spot on, and I mean, if you work from the principle around, we want to understand who the human, the end of our conversation.
Speaker 2:No, you're spot on, and I mean, if you work from the principle around, we want to understand who the human beings are in our workforce. We need to understand and that's my earlier circles that I referenced that industries sometimes do play out very differently and I think, unfortunately, in a lot of the human sciences there's been a lot of focus on the knowledge of worker side of things and I think we've almost neglected the, can I say, the frontline workforce, for various reasons. I'll use a practical example One of the organizations we worked with. You know they designed some really, really nice employee experience technologies internally in the business. They asked the question okay, you've got, you know, 70% of your workforce is sales. They're on the road full day. How do they utilize this? And they're like no, they need to come into one of our campus environments to use it. So you know that's not really meeting up then with the need of that particular employee group. So what we've seen working with some organizations and that's also what we reference in that particular chapter is think about the frontline workforce in a very different way, because there is different needs, there is different realities and we are in a work era where, due to the technology and the techniques and things that we have, it's no longer a good enough excuse to say that the frontline workforce is too big from a scale point of view. It's no longer a good excuse just to say you know, we will just kind of adapt whatever we're doing in the knowledge worker or head office environment to the frontline worker. That's not their need. Their need is completely different. So if we start thinking from that perspective, there's different things that can actually play out.
Speaker 2:And I want to use an example, because often people say you know frontline workers very often location bound right Flexibility can't be something that's important for them in the workforce. There's actually an organization that spoke to their frontline workforce and said what does flexibility mean for you and is it something that is really important for you or not? And one of their key interesting findings was and they're a retailer, so people physically need to be in the stores during the times that they are open. They said I know I need to be on location, but flexibility for me is much more about choice. I want to be able to have a bigger say in how scheduling plays out, because flexibility for me means I don't want to necessarily take the shifts that's in the afternoon or I don't want to work every single weekend in the, in the store or not, and by implementing then a technology-driven scheduling solution, they actually enabled a lot of flexibility in that frontline workforce.
Speaker 2:But they had to go and find out what the need was in the frontline and I think today we have, like I said before, the tools, the techniques to really personalize the frontline workforce. And you know your earlier point that 70 to 80% of the working population is frontline or employees that can be categorized as the frontline workforce. So it doesn't help we do all these fancy things but it's only focused on a 20 to 25% part of the knowledge worker workforce and I think that's a big shift in employee experience but also just in general in people practices that we do need to make.
Speaker 1:it has to cater for the needs of different segments of the workforce in different realities, otherwise it is going to fall flat in future yeah, and if you have high turnover in some frontline roles like just take a hotel, for example if high turnover in the, maybe the housekeeping staff or whatever the standards are just going to suffer in that and the amount of retraining and supervision is going to be needed to upskill or reskill people, it's just going to be quite a challenge for for organizations and, as you say, investing all the money in an effort in 20-25 percent it doesn't maybe always make sense, right? Yeah?
Speaker 2:and I mean I think that you know there's a lot of research on on exactly this point around. Especially if your frontline workforce is customer facing and customer touch eye touch environments, I think that's got a significant impact. But even when it's more like, let's say, manufacturing type of function or something that happens in um in the back end and does not necessarily engage with customers on a day-to-day point of view, even there you suffer in terms of productivity, you suffer in terms of innovation, you suffer also around the fact that there's a lot of institutional knowledge that lies within your frontline workforce around how the organization actually gets a lot of things done, and I think it's an important part to always remember and to have that voice present when we have these conversations. And last point, jerry, maybe on this one, I worked for a leader in an organization and he managed at the time it was a financial, it was a bank, a financial institution, and he was head of the branch network, so all the frontline employees eventually kind of rolled up into his division and I always loved when I sat with him whenever we wanted to do anything in the branch network.
Speaker 2:He asked me this question around I was going to impact the working life of my people in the branch network, why should they care about this and how is it then eventually going to hit the customer?
Speaker 2:And those were the three starting points, and I knew over time as somebody that wanted to change things in the branch network. I had to be able to answer those three questions really well before he was even open to any new ideas that we would take into the workforce there. And I think it's a good way of just thinking very differently and applying very basic employee experience questions in everything that we do, and that's what we were also trying to promote a lot more. That EX is a mindset and it's an approach as opposed to just how it plays out from a day-to-day point of view. So we have to think a lot more about EX and how we design processes, practices, how we put things forward, when we think about workflows, when we think about technologies and I think, especially when we then start moving into the frontline domain, yeah, so organizations could actually just make clear what three or four criteria are as a sort of first-line filter for any new initiative that might impact workforces.
Speaker 1:I had Margaret Heffernan on the show on the program a while back and she talked about WL Gore in America, which is a famous company, and in terms of innovation they've got like three things they must check. If they've got an idea, they run it through these and then, if it passed muster, they can then pass it on for consideration, and so everybody knows what the starting point is. So it can be quite useful. So, coming to the end, I had to kind of I want to wrap the kind of two questions into one here. Your final chapters are sort of like a manifesto for the future of employee experience, and I guess my question would have been around if somebody wants to be a champion from an employee experience in their organization, where should they? They start. But I also have this thing I want to leave the listener out there, my listener, with at least some key insight or big takeaway idea, the big idea that you'd like them to leave this conversation with.
Speaker 2:So, coming to the end, three big ideas I think that we were trying to to promote in the book, and then I'll talk a bit about how we make them practical. And the first one is and I know it sounds like such an obvious one, but the realization that it's humans that form part of the workforce and humans have got certain wants and needs and if you want to get the best out of them, we need to start thinking very differently about how we design intentionally for them. Second big idea is that employee experience is a science and we need to put good science with practical application together. And it is a systemic process. It's not a flash in the pan once-off event. I do something nice on a Friday. It's actually something that happens longitudinally over time.
Speaker 2:My earlier analogy of the bank account there, and then the last one that we've almost touched on now, is that EX is about intentional choices that we make in the organization about what we do and what we don't do and who we want to be and who we can't be to our employees and being very transparent to manage the dynamics of the psychological contract and how that plays out.
Speaker 2:So I think if you want to put this into practice and somebody listening today that wants to say I want to be an ex-champion. I think first educate yourself on ex and how it plays out, give yourself the language to have these types of conversations with business leaders and then I think, secondly, I loved your suggestion there on what are the core questions that I should always keep in mind. You know, in the book we talk about, whenever I design anything, I need to ask the question around for an employee what I want them to think, feel and do as a result of this and at least start having the conversation in that particular way. And then, lastly, go out and listen to your workforce, ask them what matters to you and why, and I think that's a great starting point to start shifting and moving some of your existing practices to be a lot more employee experience-centric in future.
Speaker 1:So, Dieter, what's next for you?
Speaker 2:Well, Jerry, I think the one-minute version yeah.
Speaker 2:The yeah, the one minute version. Um well, I think we will continue with a lot of the work in terms of of ex. I think there's interesting work that we are looking at the moment, obviously, as I think a lot of people are, in terms of how ai will play into that, but we are actually also busy myself and somebody else writing a book on organizational identity at the moment, because we think if the organization doesn't know who they really are at a deep-seated level, we think it's difficult to provide an authentic employee experience. So that's our next project.
Speaker 1:Okay, as if we weren't impressed with one book, you're knocking out another one that's pretty good, and so, finally, how can people get in touch with you, and do you have anything special to offer them?
Speaker 2:Jerry, they can definitely get in touch with me on LinkedIn. I am quite active there, so please feel free to follow the work we do and we also share a lot of our research and our work there, both in an individual capacity and as AIHR. And for the first three people listening today that pops me a message on LinkedIn that references the podcast very happy to give you a free, signed copy of the book.
Speaker 1:Okay, and I'll put links in the show notes, as always. And yeah, I just want to thank you, dieter, for sharing your insights, tips and wisdom with me and my listeners here today.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for having me, Jerry. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Coming up on Leading People.
Speaker 3:And that's the impact hypothesis for L&D and it's not just applicable to learning and development. In fact, I use the same framework in the nonprofit sector with executive directors and leadership development companies who are like how do we create some kind of logic behind what we're doing?
Speaker 1:My next guest is Dr Elena Schlachter educator, data nerd and author of Measurement and Evaluation on a Shoestring. If Dieter Felsman asks us to rethink how we design our organizations, elena takes us one step further, helping us understand how to measure whether those systems are actually enabling people to grow, thrive and succeed. She shares how L&D can use data and storytelling, even on limited resources, to prove impact and influence what really matters. It's a fascinating conversation you won't want to miss and remember. Before our next full episode, there's another One Simple Thing episode waiting for you A quick and actionable tip to help you lead and live better. Keep an eye out for it wherever you listen to this podcast Until next time.
