The Employee Experience. Wride Matthew

14 For CHG, “Putting People First” was more than just a catchy phrase that served as a clever double entendre to their missions of placing candidates in healthcare positions and taking care of employees. Engaged employees, who were clearly the top priority at CHG, created engaging Customer Experiences.

      As for results, CHG is the most profitable company in the healthcare staffing industry. Turnover has dropped to less than half the industry average, and the company even managed to grow revenue and profits during the 2008 to 2011 recession while industry peers saw profitability plummet. CHG knew where to dig.

      EX = CX

      Organizations like CHG understand that you can’t build a transformative Customer Experience directly, solely by throwing resources at CX initiatives. You can redesign stores, roll out cool new products, and engage customers on social media; there’s nothing wrong with those steps. But without employees who care about customer service, a beautiful store is just a pretty shell. Without people incented to take risks, where are those cool innovations coming from? Don’t even get us started on the dangers of having jaded or clueless staffers meeting customers on Twitter. In other words:

      To create a sustainable, world-class CX, an organization must first create a sustainable, world-class Employee Experience (EX).

      It all begins with your employees. In the next few pages we’ll define what we mean by EX, and we’ll lay out a framework to build the right EX for your organization. For now, think of it this way. Creating a wonderful, profit-boosting CX is like gardening. You can’t order up the results you want – healthy plants – just by waving your hand. Gardening is a process-based activity; you attend to the components that create the desired outcome and then hope for the best. That means using soil amendments, watering, and weeding. The gardener can’t do much more than that, but if he or she does it well, the odds of a strong, plentiful harvest are high.

      Growing an organization works in the same way. Success comes through quality products, sensible pricing, strong customer support.. and employees who care personally about delivering an extraordinary experience every time. When an organization creates a top-notch EX, the likelihood of a superior CX increases exponentially. When EX is poor, chances are the customer will see the effects. So, here’s the bottom line:

EX = CX

      Your employees are the soil and nutrients in which your Customer Experience grows. If you have a workforce of engaged people who feel respected and appreciated, and if they trust their leaders enough to take risks and invest emotionally in the organization, your CX will take care of itself.

      Conversely, if you don’t have that foundation of great people who care about providing a terrific experience and making customers’ lives better, all the technology and systems in the world won’t keep your CX from being a money-losing mess.

      Engaged employees are the soil and nutrients in which your Customer Experience grows.

      CONGRUENT EXPERIENCE

      Despite this, too many organizations try to dash past EX in favor of CX. Why doesn’t it work? For starters, CX is an outcome. For decades, managers have treated customer satisfaction as though it were something they could conjure out of procedures, perks, and pricing. Wrong. That’s like deciding to lose twenty pounds by taking weight loss pills while ignoring a healthy diet and exercise. Even if you get results, they won’t last – and you will waste a lot of money in the process.

      A winning CX is the direct result of the attitudes and behaviors of your employees. Employees should come first, with results to follow, not the other way around. Think of it this way: When you went through your most recent customer service trauma, did you ask yourself: “What type of experience are we providing for the employee(s) who were involved in the problem?” Probably not. But was the crisis a direct result of someone failing to step up to keep a promise, identify and resolve a concern, or provide one small extra bit of service? We’ll bet it was. The point? For most organizations, their awareness of the EX does not match up with the important role it plays in determining the CX.

      Employees are the face of your brand. They’re on the front lines and in direct contact with your customers. Sure, customers are also seeing your website, marketing, and real estate, but those do not outweigh a salesperson who goes out of her way to solve a problem or a school counselor who stays late to help a student with college scholarship forms. Consumers are human, and humans intuitively respond to human interactions more than they do slogans, packaging, or discounts.

      That’s why the Employee Experience (EX) has far more potential than the CX to move the needle for your organization, by whatever metric you choose: revenue, growth, retention, customer satisfaction scores, number of students registered, patient satisfaction, and so on. But putting EX before CX also serves as a way to prevent your organization from diving down expensive, time-consuming rabbit holes.

      Think about the costs, financial and otherwise, of implementing a CX management program where employees’ hearts and minds aren’t fully engaged. Some organizations spend a fortune on elaborate customer service safety nets designed to keep employees from damaging the customer relationship. Why? Because their employees don’t care. They’re having a lousy experience, so they’re not motivated to provide anything more than that to the customer. We call this the Law of Congruent Experience.

      THE LAW OF CONGRUENT EXPERIENCE

      Employees will deliver a Customer Experience that matches their own experience in the organization.

      Indifferent employees mean indifferent customers. Angry employees put in minimal effort to take care of the customer. Customers respond in kind. In contrast, employees who are engaged and trust their employers will provide a great CX because they choose to. You don’t need call scripts or a patients’ bill of rights to keep them from damaging your brand. You can turn them loose, knowing that they will solve problems on their own, increase value, and breed customer loyalty. A terrific EX equals a superb, loyalty-winning, profit-creating CX.

      DEFINING THE EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

      We’ve been clear that in order to create a superior CX, an organization needs to first take care of its EX. But what, exactly, is the “Employee Experience”?

      Some mistakenly confuse the EX with popular terms like “Talent Management,” “Human Resources Development,” or “Employee Engagement.” While EX is certainly related to those terms, it’s not synonymous with them. EX is much broader in scope. So, for our purposes, here’s how we define EX:

      The Employee Experience is the sum of perceptions employees have about their interactions with the organization in which they work.

      In the introduction to this book, we mentioned a trend leading many HR executives (and even marketing departments) to take on titles like “Chief Employee Experience Officer.” On one hand, it’s wonderful to see because it makes us think they get it. But then we ask them to describe what “Employee Experience” means, and they bring out charts and models that are really describing the Employee Life Cycle (ELC).

      While it certainly is a part of EX, the ELC is distinct, made up of all the steps or processes in which an employee participates during his or her relationship with the organization. An ELC is chronological and sequential, and assumes a beginning and an end. For example, the ELC includes important events and processes like recruiting, onboarding, employee development, promotion, and exit interviews. The ELC is an important part of the human resources process, because it takes into account the steps that occur from an employee’s first contact with the organization to the last interaction after termination. However, the ELC differs from the EX in two very significant ways: perceptions and expectations.

      Consider this. Two friends, Ingvar and Edvar, start new jobs on the same day with the same company. For the first year, they are assigned to the same boss, work in the same manufacturing facility, and have similar job responsibilities. Their compensation is identical. In fact, nearly every step of the ELC is identical. Yet their EX is very different.

      Ingvar has two children, both involved in football. When he joined the company, one of