What is the main message of The Employee Experience Advantage?

The main message of The Employee Experience Advantage is that providing a great employee experience leads to better business results.

How long does it take to read The Employee Experience Advantage?

The reading time for The Employee Experience Advantage varies, but it usually takes several hours. The Blinkist summary can be read in around 15 minutes.

Is The Employee Experience Advantage a good book? Is it worth reading?

The Employee Experience Advantage is worth reading as it provides valuable insights on how to improve employee experience, leading to greater satisfaction and productivity.

Who is the author of The Employee Experience Advantage?

The author of The Employee Experience Advantage is Jacob Morgan.

The Employee Experience Advantage Summary of Key Ideas and Review

Name: The Employee Experience Advantage
Rating: 4.3 (64 reviews)
Author: Jacob Morgan

Introduction

What’s in it for me? Learn how organizations can achieve success by creating an optimal employee experience.

Have you ever looked at companies like Facebook, Google or Amazon and wondered how they always attract the best talent? It’s certainly not an accident, and it’s not just because they throw their money around either.

In these blinks, you’ll find out how to build (or rebuild) your organization from the ground up, with the cooperation of your employees. You’ll learn how to create a work environment that nurtures their talent and helps them get the most out of their jobs. And you’ll be surprised by how even simple changes can inspire them to reach higher levels of performance, resulting in financial success.

As we go along, you’ll also learnt:

why Facebook’s offices are more than just fun-filled working environments;
why thinking about your organization’s wider impact on the world is crucial to its success; and
how a NASA janitor inspired President Kennedy!

Key idea 1 of 9

By focusing on employee experience, you can create a physical workplace environment that truly meets your workers’ needs.

What if every single one of your organization’s employees arrived at work truly excited about their jobs? What if they couldn’t wait to get started with their work each and every day? Some businesses have already figured out how to turn this dream into a reality. What’s their secret?

Well, its begins with the realization that focusing on employee experience is very different than focusing on employee engagement.

When seeking to promote employee engagement, companies try to find ways to better motivate their workers by making them feel more involved in the workplace. Unfortunately, they often end up simply trotting out the same old half measures that businesses have been rehashing since the 1980s.

For example, consider so-called “engagement initiatives.” Many employees have come into work one morning to find free snacks, a beer fridge or a sporadic team-building trip thrust upon them. Sure, they’re a great way to make employees feel better – for about five minutes. But these short-term cosmetic changes are outdated and wear off quickly.

Focusing on employee experience instead leads to a very different approach. It involves a more holistic, long-term redesign of your entire organization. Here’s a useful metaphor for understanding what that means and why it’s important. Let’s say you’re rebuilding an old car. You can repaint the exterior and refurbish the interior, but without a new engine, the car’s performance is exactly the same!

To improve employee experience, you need to upgrade the engine of your organization. And what is that engine? Well, it can be split into three main components: the physical, technological and cultural environments of your workplace.

Let’s start with the physical environment. Facebook provides a well-known example of a company that has enhanced its employee experience by creating highly attractive, innovatively designed offices. But the social media giant didn’t build them just because they looked cool on paper. It spent a lot of time talking with its employees to figure out what they needed, and then it designed a physical environment to meet their requirements.

That’s one of the reasons why Facebook has become such a coveted place to work. By carefully listening to its employees’ expectations, desires and needs, a company like Facebook becomes an experiential organization – an organization that is truly focused on employee experience.

In the next blink, we’ll take a closer look at how an experiential organization can create an optimal physical environment for its employees. Then we’ll look at the technological and cultural environments.

Key idea 2 of 9

Experiential organizations design physical environments that inspire creativity.

When designing their workplaces, organizations often forget that their physical environments have to reflect their core values. A failure to remember this fact can spell disaster when you’re trying to create an optimal employee experience.

To see why, imagine you join a company that actively ignores the principles it claims to care about – like having a lack of recycling bins, despite professing eco-friendly values. Wouldn’t you feel lied to and betrayed?

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Key idea 3 of 9

Cultivate a technological environment that makes all of your employees’ lives easier.

Over the last few decades, technology has revolutionized the world of work and knowing how to use the latest technology to make your employees’ lives easier is central. Experiential organizations know this.

Consider the radical changes that the San Diego Zoo made when updating its technological environment. This 100-year-old nonprofit organization moved from conducting analogue training sessions in classrooms to implementing a free, flexible online learning system that employees could access anytime, anywhere.

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Key idea 4 of 9

Boost your employees’ motivation by fostering a team-centered, purpose-driven cultural environment.

The physical and technological environments are simple enough to understand. After all, you can touch them and see them. But the cultural environment is more intangible. You feel it on an emotional level. It leaves you with that pit-in-your-stomach feeling when you don’t want to go to work – or that thrill you feel on Monday mornings when you do! Either way, your organization already has a cultural environment, and it has a huge impact on how your employees feel about their jobs. That’s why it’s arguably the most important environment to improve.

But where to start?

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Key idea 5 of 9

Experiential organizations are better places to work and enjoy greater financial success than their competitors.

It can take a lot of time and effort to implement the three key environments, so what’s the upside? Why should you care whether your employees have an amazing experience at work?

Simple: people value experiences far more than material things. Research gathered across the Universities of Cornell, Chicago and California found that when people spend money on experiences, they feel happier over time. In contrast, when they spend money on physical items, their happiness nosedives in the long run.

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Key idea 6 of 9

Organizations wanting to create an awesome employee experience must start with a strong reason for being.

Most businesses are familiar with the idea of a mission statement – a formal summary of the company’s core aims. However, mission statements tend to be a little vanilla. They typically focus on things like profits, customer satisfaction and shareholder value.

For example, one major retailer states it aims “to be a leader in the distribution and merchandising of food, pharmacy, health and personal care items, seasonal merchandise, and related products and services.” While that’s a clear and honest ambition, it’s not exactly going to fill employees with rousing inspiration.

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Key idea 7 of 9

Improve your organization’s three key environments by implementing an infinite design loop.

Business changes fast – really fast! And this makes a great employee experience a moving target. To make sure your organization doesn’t get stuck in yesteryear, you need to create an infinite design loop.

This means you have to listen carefully to your employees. To arrive at valuable insights, you have to seek out their input and analyze what they have to say. You can then use these findings to design solutions that can be launched quickly, so feedback can be gathered almost instantly. In other words, an infinite design loop is all about actively involving your employees in the process of improving their organization.

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Key idea 8 of 9

Replace the tired concept of an employee life cycle with the idea of moments that matter.

The “employee life cycle.” We’ve all heard the term, and we’ve all cringed. None of us thinks about our work in these terms, but for some reason organizations do. In truth, employe life cycles couldn’t be further from reality.

It’s therefore time to rethink this concept! So how can you design employee experiences based on how life actually works?

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Key idea 9 of 9

Ensure the employee experience is championed by everyone in your organization.

Who’s in charge of creating an optimal employee experience in your organization? The simple answer would seem to be, “everyone,” or, “the people at the top.” However, there’s a more complex, but also more productive way to think about how the optimization process works. It’s essentially a ripple effect, which kicks off with your organization’s senior leaders and then reverberates all the way down its hierarchy.

The process has to be conceived and nurtured by the CEO and executive team. Ideas can come from anywhere, but they’re the ones who implement the organization's reason for being, and they must be the biggest ambassadors of the organization’s core values.

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