If I had my way, everyone would stop referencing Customer Experiences and Employee Experiences and instead would talk about Human Experiences.
The rationale for my renaming preference is twofold:
- You can’t create excellent customer experiences if you don’t provide outstanding employee experiences. (If it doesn’t live inside your brand, it won’t live outside.)
- Our goal should be to engage the humanity of those we serve – not define people by their role in relation to our business.
For this newsletter, I will resist conventional language and talk about ways to enhance the human experience of employees. For our purposes, I’ll stick with evidence-based approaches (those that show reliable and replicable results) and will feature ten actions you can take to enhance the mastery, autonomy, and purpose of your team members:
- Provide frequent, constructive, and growth-focused feedback to your employees.
- Ensure employees have a line of sight between what they do and the impact of their work, particularly as their work supports your company’s mission.
- Develop social support networks and mentoring programs.
- Look for ways to give team members some control over completing projects.
- Create a safe environment for employees to give input on their experience at work.
- In addition to considering job skills, select individuals who will fit your culture and organizational values.
- Create career paths and stretch opportunities that help team members learn and grow.
- Automate repetitive and mind-numbing tasks.
- Review the employee journey to identify and remove pain points.
- Train leaders on skills needed to drive workplace engagement.
Next week, I plan to offer ten more research-based employee engagement findings (inspired by a research review conducted by University of Dallas Professor Blake Frank). I’d love to add your best practices to next week’s newsletter. So, please reach out at josephmichelli.com/contact with your suggestions.
Joseph A. Michelli, Ph.D. is a professional speaker and chief experience officer at The Michelli Experience. A New York Times #1 bestselling author, Dr. Michelli and his team consult with some of the world’s best customer experience companies.
Follow on Twitter: @josephmichelli