Chapter 0: Culture and the role of Employee Experience

In the intricate dance of organizational success, one element stands out as the driving force behind remarkable achievements: culture. An organization’s culture is the collective values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that shape its identity and guide member interactions. There are several reasons why having a positive one in an organization is crucial. For starters, it makes employees feel part of something bigger than themselves, making them more engaged and motivated. A positive culture will encourage employees to stay with a company while attracting new talent by creating an environment where individuals feel valued and aligned with the company’s values, thereby improving the morale and well-being of employees and leading to job satisfaction. Additionally, a positive culture encourages innovation, creativity and open communication, which are essential for maintaining organisational adaptivity. It is also responsible for ethical conduct, customer satisfaction, and general organizational performance, thus making it important for long-term success and leading to business sustainability.

Building a better organizational culture needs attention to detail concerning the employee’s journey through the brand image from sourcing to the firm’s exit period. However, the exit of an employee is not the end of the journey, as alumni networks (of ex-employees) are a very strong influencing force that should not be ignored. It is important that former employees have a wonderful stay in this ‘heaven on earth’ and must say good things about the company after leaving it. They are your brand ambassadors who could funnel business tomorrow and encourage potential employees and referrals to join your company. There are enough instances where these ex-employees have returned to the organisation when they fail to cope with growth, learning, or the environment in new companies. They often compare the new to the old, thus making a comeback.

An organization derives its success from the positive movement of several matrices like revenue, margins, CSAT, NPS, Market Share, Money in the bank, compliance adherence and more. This success is impossible unless an underlying cultural element is not realized, measured, analyzed, corrected and enhanced. One of the primary drivers influencing the culture is employee satisfaction, which provides insights into the happiness quotient of the people working with/for you. This can be measured through various methods, including employee satisfaction surveys, exit interviews, social media posts, etc., or by looking at various other background metrics like attrition, cost of hire, cost of training, cost of retention, compensation increase per cent, quality of work delivery and more, to satisfaction. The good news is that a majority of these measures can be evaluated and corrected by focusing ones attention on a key attribute known as the employee experience. Just the way Cx stands for customer experience where we map, review and enhance all the customer touchpoints to our organization, its products, services and people, Ex, which stands for Employee experience, measures the effectiveness of the employee journey in and with organisations, its people, its products, its customers and its services. It is a well-known fact that unless the foundation of a company is strong, it is not possible to build a world-class and effective organisation and to help strengthen this, we need to understand Ex a lot more.

The next few chapters detail the various touchpoints in an organisation that can make or break the employee experience.