The Employee Experience Pyramid

Abstract

Over the past decades, multiple HR constructs have emerged that organizations strived to adopt and integrate into their daily businesses. The most recent development is Employee Experience (EX). EX is essentially a framework for creating engaged employees. Engaged employees have been linked to multiple desirable business outcomes, such as smoother employee recruitment, increased employee retention, increased employee efficiency and higher organizational profitability. EX can be defined as the sum of perceptions employees have about their interactions with the organization, and how this aligns with their expectations. This graduation project aims to explore how organizations can improve EX. It was carried out for Livework, a Rotterdam based Service Design studio. The project explores how organizations are currently working on EX, what creates excellent EX and how organizations can receive the tools to understand and improve EX. A literature review is conducted on the evolution of HR constructs. Relevant insights from established constructs, such as motivation and job satisfaction are collected and related to EX. To understand how organizations understand and currently address EX, a set of interviews is conducted. This set of interviews yields a three-step model that describes what needs to be done to improve EX. The three steps are:
1. Learning about the value of EX
2. Learning how to improve EX
3. Measuring impact.
To structure the large amount of information available on EX, a model is selected. First, six different models are compared to assess their suitability for structuring EX. Finally, one model is selected and further adapted to create the EX pyramid. The pyramid depicts five employee needs that organizations need to satisfy to create excellent EX: Safety/Security, Rewards, Connection, Growth and Work/Life harmony. The EX pyramid and the EX cycle provide all the information an organization needs to improve EX. Ideas are generated to design the way this information is communicated to Livework, who this project was carried out for, and their client organizations. The problem statement used to guide the phase of idea generation and prototyping is: How can organizations adopt fitting EX strategies? The final design is the EXcellent process: a process towards excellent EX. This process consists of three phases: prepare, understand, and imagine. During the prepare phase, Livework consults the EX pyramid to create a better understanding of the model, which is used throughout the process. During the understand phase, Livework and the client conduct qualitative and quantitative research to understand how well the organization is satisfying their employees’ needs. In addition, the business objectives of the organization provide direction for the pyramid levels that needs to be improved. During the imagine phase, Livework and the organization define interventions that will be used to improve specific levels of the pyramid. A digital slide deck of over seventy interventions provides inspiration for these improvements. The outcomes of the EXcellent process are a better understanding of employee needs, business objective and how they together deliver concrete steps an organization can take to improve EX.