Everyone seems to be focusing on employee experience (EX) rather than employee engagement these days. It’s important to understand why people are job hopping and how to retain your top talent. In this episode employee experience strategist, Lucy Kemp, talks to Jenni about the employee experience and why it’s vital that you understand how important the line managers’ role is in translating your external brand into an authentic employee experience. They discuss why we need to give line managers the tools to develop their team and improve EX, as well as the importance of knowing what your people really want, and leadership buy-in.
Lucy supports The Field Model and project work for us, working with clients to help them get to the root cause of chaos and facilitating workshops to find out what they need to help them move forwards. Lucy has supported communication teams find the right technology for their organisations, conducted focus groups and 1:1 interviews and she has played a key role in our research projects.
Learn more about the risk of ignoring the employee experience.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Line of Sight report by Redefining Communications
Remotely interested? 2019 Report by Redefining Communications and SocialOptic
The Field Model for internal communication Redefining Communications
Get in touch with Lucy via LinkedIn
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript for this podcast
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be joined by Lucy Kemp, who is an employee experience strategist and part of our collective team. Lucy has over 10 years experience working across companies from different sectors and sizes, and she really focuses on strategic challenges while helping people look at overcoming rapid growth and also specialising a little bit in the tech sector, I would say, Lucy, would you say?
Yes, I would say you’re right. I would say that is true.
So, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you. Thank you for coming.
And in this episode, where we’re going to talk about the chaos to come, focusing on that employee experience piece, I think it’s something that we’ve talked about a lot over the last six months to a year. It’s something everyone seems to be looking at now as opposed to employee engagement. So I want to explore a little bit about the chaos that can come if you’re not looking at the employee experience or if you’re getting it wrong. And then what’s the tips to help people move from chaos to calm in that space as well.
What is employee experience?
It’s a funny one, employee experience, because so many people think of it as being so many different stages. But really, it starts the moment someone decides to either look for a job in a company or apply for a job in a company. Like we’ve all been on LinkedIn or Indeed or any other, you know, jobs board. I thought, oh, that job looks fantastic. Let me see what the company’s like. And then you go and find out that’s the start. And then it finishes when you exit. And exit is always a bit that people forget. So a lot of people like to say it’s like cradle to grave, but it makes me feel like, oh, when I hear that. So it’s just like you’re born and you die. And it’s not like that. Cheery. Cheery. Yeah, really delightful.
But it’s just all the different stages. And done really well, a great employee experience or EX should help you retain really, really great talent and develop them and progress them, but also attract really great talent so that your company will just perform really, really well. But done badly, people won’t stay and people don’t want to join.
So it is really important, especially in this day and age, to get it right. Because when I started the workforce 20 years ago, no one really cared about EX because the loyalty was there. We joined a company and then we stayed there for a long time and then we got a pension and we left.
But it’s different now because we have more information. We see on LinkedIn or we see on Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok what people are doing in different companies. Like, for example, my sister used to work at Facebook and she got £500 a month for well-being. Now, it should have been spent on the gym. She spent it on hair and nails. That’s her well-being. I mean, fair play. But when I heard about it, I said, why isn’t my company doing that for me?
And that’s what happens now. We look and the grass looks greener. So people are job hopping more because they see what else is out there. And also, like, the pandemic has played a massive part in it because now we’ve seen what it’s like to work in a different way. So whereas before I would have to work in London or work somewhere close to me so I can commute there, I don’t have to do that anymore. I could work for an American company. So we don’t, we’re not as loyal to companies that are near us or in a commutable distance.
And also new generations coming in. They want completely different things to what we want. So, to attract that talent, which is going to be the Gen Z is going to make up a third of the workforce by 2025, we need to get our EX right to attract that talent and keep that talent.
And when it comes to the chaos, a week, this podcast could go on for hours. I can tell already, but we’ll do it in 15 minutes. There’s lots of things for me when we’re looking at employee experience where the chaos can come from. So, whether that’s not looking at the experience at all, you know, doing it badly, like what does that look like? And, and I, and it’s so where does that chaos really come from? Because you, you can have some organisations who are just not looking at it, don’t care, you know, got that sort of, you know, people just, you know, living off the brand reputation possibly that people just want to come here.
It doesn’t matter. So, not investing at all, but surely there’s also some that might be doing things wrong, and then that would be leading to chaos.
What is the chaos around employee experience for you? What do you see?
It’s with that first point you mentioned about living off like the, almost like the external brand. I’m actually working with someone at the moment that’s happening with, and people are joining because the external brand is so good. And because the external brand is so good and people like, well, I want to come work with you. They are ignoring the employee experience. And then people leave, some people leave within four weeks. Because it’s such a mismatch.
So, the employee experience is almost like the employer brand has to be a real authentic showcase of what it is like to work there rather than just relying on the shiny external brand. But when it comes to chaos, really in general, I always think there’s two things that make it really chaotic when it comes to employee experience.
1. You don’t listen to your people
So often, EX comes down from the top. Comes from the people team or the founder or the CEO. And they’re like, we know what people want. This is it. I’ve seen something shiny somewhere. We’re going to implement it. But that doesn’t work. You can really have to listen to what people want. And it’s like what you do in the field method. Yeah. You go in and you listen and you understand what the, not only what the symptoms is, but the root cause, because that’s how you’re going to fix it. You’re not just going to fix it by, some people say to me, can you just come in and do a party? And I’m like, would love to. But they will not fix it. Or someone says to me, can you just do me a new employer brand?I don’t care what it is, but can you just make it sound really good? And I’m like, no, that isn’t going to fix anything. I put a sticking plaster on it. So it’s listening to your people and crafting your EX around that. \
2. Are managers properly trained?
But also managers play such a big part. And I think managers get left in the dark so much because whenever we’re dealing with anything, we always find that the managers aren’t being given training. So even if you have amazing people teams and they are implementing all these great initiatives everywhere, if the managers aren’t doing it, then it’s going to fall flat because those are the ones that the teams trust.
Like we always say, managers are your most trusted form of communication. But it’s the same with the EX. If they’re not doing it, if they don’t know how to progress their team, if they don’t know how to develop their team, what sort of learning and development opportunities there are, what culture they want within their team, how they’re going to recognise all that stuff. They don’t know it. Then there isn’t going to be a culture, a great EX culture anyway.
And how do we fix that? Because we’ve talked about line managers for years. And when, you know, in 2021, I think we did the line of sight report about the role of managers. And I’ll pop a link to the report in the show notes.
But managers has been something for years. It was the first remotely interested I did in 2019. We came out and said, managers are so important to communication. You’ve just talked about it then for employee experience. And I get quite bored of having to have that same conversation again and again and again. And I’m almost like, I don’t know what needs to happen in order for that investment to take place. But are you seeing a change in that investment happening or still?
Do you know what? I’m not. And again, I get really bored about it as well. But I think it’s hard because, for example, I am a really, really poor people manager. I’m awful. I left my last job feeling quite bad about it because I just wasn’t up to the job, basically. It’s just not who I am. I’m a great individual contributor, not a great people manager. But when I became a people manager, I put my hand up and said, “I don’t have any experience. I need some training. I need some support. I need a toolkit. I need something to help me.”
And there was nothing. Yet my husband, Dan, is not a people person at all. He’s become a manager, and he’s great. And I was so shocked because I was like, how are you good? And I’m not. He has had no training, but he’s taken to it like a duck to water.
Interesting. And companies think that everyone is a Dan. Yeah, but they’re not. Most people are Lucy’s. So, they think it’s fine. Give him a team of 10. He is going to rise to the challenge. He’ll carry on doing his normal job, but then he’ll find time to mentor and develop his team. And he’ll find time to do all the stuff he needs to do. That’s not true. It’s almost like when you become a manager, you need to be able to have that chunk of time to actually manage. And also, I know you talk about this a lot, defining what it means to be a manager I don’t think companies do that. So, in this company, being a manager means this: this is what we expect of you rather than being like, “Go for your life.”
Do what you want because there’s no consistency there. So if you work in the marketing team, you’re going to have a different experience if you work in the finance team. And that’s again, going back to EX, someone in one team, if they have a great manager who’s had this support and they know what they’re doing, it’s going to have a very different employee experience to someone in a team where the manager is me. No experience, no support, don’t know what I’m doing, don’t really like it. Just don’t want to. Just don’t want to do it.
But actually, EX is managers. So that is who we should be concentrating on. That’s how you should be putting your money into and your time into, but we don’t.
No. And sort of one final piece maybe around the chaos before we go into sort of the tips and advice. Is there anything else that’s causing that chaos?
So, I’d say managers is number one. Not knowing what your people really want. Yeah. It’s going through the audit phase, doing like focus groups, one-to-ones, all that lovely stuff to find out exactly what you want. And also it’s leadership buy-in because it does come down from the top. Yeah. Even though we always say, oh, it’s bottom up and you can start it and you can start it. Like if we see someone in the leadership team in the C-level doing something, then we’re like, well, he does it. It’s fine. He’s talking a different language in front of the English colleagues.
So, it must be fine for us all to do that, even though that really makes the atmosphere a bit strange.
Yeah. It’s that sort of thing. So they need to be bought into it. But they hardly ever bought into it, unfortunately, because at the moment, EX is where I think internal comms was, say, five years ago. The pandemic hit, internal comms became extremely popular. They went through the roof because people understood then the importance of communication because we had to communicate with people a different way and not everyone had the skill set to do that. And I think that EX is going to be like that because we’re going to start seeing more and more people leave, look for different job opportunities, and people understand how much it costs to lose people.
And the culture goes down. Again, that costs more money. So I think the leadership teams will start to see that. But at the moment, it is really linking it to revenue. Yeah. Like an unengaged employee will cost you this much, whereas an engaged employee actually makes you this much. Makes this much. Yeah. But it’s hard. And they’re not seeing the importance. They’re not, you know, doing it now. And it’s like when I was talking about the Gen Zs earlier, companies need to start making changes now.
Yes. To be ready.
Exactly. But a lot of them aren’t. So they’re going to come to a point, and it’ll be like the millennials, where all of a sudden they’re like, oh shit, all these millennials are joining and I hate them.
I don’t know what to do. And all the managers are struggling. We should learn from that, that we shouldn’t be going down that path and then calling people lazy and, you know, we should be starting now to be like, right, how are we going to create the workplace for the future? What does it look like? So when we do get this real influx, we are ready. Yeah. I love that.
And it’s that triangle, isn’t it, that you’ve talked about that employee experience of, you know, listening to people, leadership buy-in and managers. And those are the three things that you need to look at if you’ve got some chaos. So that kind of nicely takes us into the things to make it calm. It’s a bit like, just look at those three and then you kind of got it. But is there anything else around that experience?
I mean, you talked at the beginning about that, that cradle to grave, which is the expression we don’t like, but that seems fine when you’re in the organisation. Like I can, we can control that once you’re in, but if it starts from before then and after then.
Is there anything else that people should be looking at to really help with employee experience?
So the employer brand is so important and we see lots of really fun, shiny employer brands. And I think, oh geez, I’d love to go work there. But a lot of them aren’t real and aren’t true. And sometimes on Glassdoor you see these glowing, and I’ve been, I’ve worked in companies and I’ve seen these glowing, you know, and you know that HR or the people team have been like, “Oh, go and please write something or please do this or get referral if you do this.”
So I’m not saying don’t believe employer brands, but there are, you need to be doing it authentically because before, like I said, when we all first started, you could have a fake employer brand because you wouldn’t be able to check. Whereas now when I look at roles, I will reach out to someone, a contact of a contact and be like, you currently work there. What’s it like?
And so if I’ve looked at the employer brand, I’m like, “Oh wow, it looks amazing.” That person’s like, “It is awful. I distrust the company.” And I’ve worked with someone recently, an agency, and we spoke to some of their customers and they said, “One of the reasons we work with this agency is not because they’re the best, but it’s because their culture is so good.” So, it’s not even just prospective employees need to see that authenticity. It can affect your customers as well. Your customers know that what you’re selling, you know, may be great externally, but you’re treating your employees like crap. You can lose customers and money that way.
So, a really authentic employer brand will attract the right people, but also put off the wrong people because that’s the worst thing in hiring someone who doesn’t fit in. And then I always call them well poisonous. I’m not sure that’s a really good piece of term, but then they’re in there and they are, you know, spreading this trust. I hate it here. I’m really not enjoying it. She said, he said that sort of thing and it can make everyone else feel bad, to make the culture take a dip. Yeah. So, I’d say the authentic employer brand.
And then exit. And this is a bit that always, people always forget because once I’ve handed my notice in, really people don’t care about you anymore and people feel like they don’t care about the company. They’re just sitting there treading water for the next three to…
One months, whatever. But what I would recommend, I think that when we do exit interviews, we tend to do them on the last day with the head of HR, which is just completely wrong. I mean, of course, go chat to HR, but they should be anonymous. Almost a day you had your notice in. You get anonymous survey through and because obviously you’re more honest when it’s anonymous. And then that should go to the right people, whether it’s the people team, the founders, whoever is looking after the COO. And then they should look at what’s going on.
And then a month later, if it’s like a three month, let’s say, notice period, do another one and see what themes are coming out of that. Rather than it being at the very end, if you do it at the start, you can start to make some changes. You can start to talk to the person. You can say, here are some things that are coming out. Here are some things that we are going to do about it. And that makes the employee leave on a really good mindset, which then goes back to the employer brand.
They will say good things about it, making more people want to join. But also some of the best employees you will have are employees that have returned, who have gone off to do these amazing, wonderful things, got some new skills and then come back. So, you almost want to, it sounds awful, I always say you always want to keep them warm.
Yes. But it’s true. Yeah. And you reach out to them and say, here’s some things that are going on in the company, which we want to let you know, part of our alumni association. So I think the exit bit is almost as important, maybe even more so than the first bit.
Yeah, I agree. And I think it’s so important to look at the life cycle and the work we’ve done where we’ve looked at the field model and applying it to employee experience and how you sort of, you know, like you said, you diagnose the root cause, you get into that, you look at that leaving piece and you get the data early on enough to make changes.
We spoke to Benjamin Ellis on a previous episode this season where he talked about measuring to take action. And that’s exactly it.
What you’re saying is you’ve got to get the data to make changes. Don’t get the data so late that you’re not changing anything because that’s not helpful.
No. And also we’ve all been in companies where they’re like filling this anonymous form and then you do it and then nothing happens.
Yeah. And that’s the worst thing. You want to know that I, you care about me enough to make changes based on my feedback. So that person leaving, even if you do nothing while they are there, you can say to them, here are some things that are coming up and they’ll leave us.So, we want to let you know that here are some things we will be doing. Yeah. Perfect. Love it.
Thank you for listening!
Thank you so much for coming along today. Thank you. And if people want to get in touch with you, where’s the best place for them to do that?
It is on LinkedIn, but I do swear quite a bit on there. So if you’re offended by my swearing, I like your caveat of your brand. It’s like, “follow me at your peril.” Yeah, exactly. Perfect. We’ll pop a link in the show notes for that as well.
So in the next episode, I’m going to be talking about mental resilience with John Humphrys, who is also part of our collective team and he brings his military experience into organisations to help them build resilience with their teams. Thank you for listening, and I’d love to continue this conversation. So, please do join our community and mailing list from the link in the show notes.
