Unlocking the power of your people: the evolution of the employee experience

Hybrid working is a chance to rip up the rulebook and redesign the world of work. But organisations are still working through teething problems – and we hear much more about the failures than the successes. So, who has the power, what are the rules (if any) and how can you fully unlock your people’s potential?

Sally Bucknell shared her experiences from the past 18 months as Programme Director, Future of Work, at EY.

Five lessons we learned from Sally’s keynote

1. It’s not just Gen Z that wants flexibility, connection, purposeful work and an inclusive culture.
2. Co-creation is key – immerse your leaders in the problem. And expect them to ask for the data (and yet be driven by their own emotional reaction to hybrid working).
3. Remove polarisation – it’s not one way of working vs the other. The blend is best.
4. Increased employee voice doesn’t need to come at the cost of commercial success.
5. Change needs planning, managing, tweaking and iterating. Shift the focus from what location people work at to what behaviour you want to see.

Panel 1: How has the employee/employer contract changed and what does this mean for the EVP?

Stephane Dehlinger, HR Director, Chivas Brothers

Maggie Papageorgiou Zekkos, People Director, Capgemini

Maktuno Suit, Global People Director, WPP

Highlights included:

• Matchy, matchy: your EVP needs to reflect the customer experience – if you’re Apple, does your everyday experience match up to ‘think differently’?
• Localisation matters: especially in global orgs. Don’t be tone deaf to your employee experience everywhere with blanket statements that aren’t applicable in certain geographies.
• Behavioural science factors: your people are susceptible to the peak end effect, where they only remember experiences at their peak or at the end, so create moments and milestones that matter.
• Create space for everyone: The workplace can be a space for profound community experiences. Leaders don’t have to know everything if they haven’t lived that experience. They do need to offer minority communities platforms to speak.

Panel 2: Employee experience excellence – getting it right.

Martin Fitzpatrick, Employee Engagement Director, Ericsson

Damien Shieber, Head of Culture & Experience, Santander

Highlights included:

• The paradigm has shifted: from need to work to want to work. If you don’t make good on your promises to your people, someone else will.
• Employees are as valuable as customers: apply the same brand voice to your job adverts as you do to your customer website to entice talent.
• Stay, won’t you? The same principle applies when people want to leave – is there anything we can do to change your mind?
• Empathy mapping: map out the employee lifecycle touchpoints with empathy for your people’s different experiences in mind.
• It’s about how it sounds: tone from the top, melody in the middle and beat from the bottom. Look after you line managers as they’re in between it all.

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