I certainly didn't coin the term employee experience, but I did create the frameworks and approaches that you will find in this book. As far as I'm aware, I'm the only one to create a structured framework of employee experience that is based on actual data and organizational analysis of hundreds of organizations, so it only makes sense to share how it all came about. Although new titles, roles, and practice areas are emerging around employee experience regularly, there's a lot of confusion and uncertainty about what this actually is and what it looks like. Part of the reason for this is unlike traditional human resources (HR), which is very clearly defined, employee experience looks quite different depending on the organization, and that's okay. Because this is a very human‐centric role, there should naturally be differences in how various organizations approach this. I reached out to many chief employee experience officers, directors, managers, and even HR leaders who are responsible for employee experience to get their perspective on what this new shift is all about.

Many business executives and leaders I talked to were very candid and said they weren't entirely sure what this role focused on, what experience will become, or even what it will include because it's so new. Naturally this presented me a bit of a challenge in writing a book about this topic. Over the past two years I've had a few hundred conversations with senior executives and employees at various levels. Although I received many responses when I asked, “What makes up employee experience?” or “How do you design employee experiences?” a pattern started to emerge that allowed me to break this down. I started to see that every organization around the world regardless of size, industry, or location was investing in and focusing on three areas, which I like to think of as environments. The environments that affect employee experience are the technological environment, physical environment, and cultural environment.

Once I determined these three environments, the next step was to figure out what the major attributes were within these environments. In other words, what do employees care about most that create great technological, physical, and cultural environments?

This wasn't an easy task because we all care about and value different things. I took the same approach I used with determining the three experience environments. I looked for patterns in the many studies, articles, and research reports I read and added information from the hundreds of conversations I've had with executives and employees at organizations around the world. Based on that I created a series of questions to measure organizational effectiveness in each of the three employee experience environments.

To design great employee experiences and to create a place where employees truly want to show up, organizations must focus on a Reason for Being followed by 17 attributes that are abbreviated as ACE technology, COOL physical spaces, and a CELEBRATED culture (see Figure 2.1).

What I found especially fascinating is that every one of these 17 attributes positively affects the employees and the organization as a whole. This isn't one sided so even by investing in the overall success of the company, the employee experience is also hugely affected positively. Everyone wins.

Together these 17 attributes make up what I like to call the Employee Experience Score (ExS). You can get your organization's EXS by answering the questions that appear in the Appendix. The collective rankings of the organizations that I evaluated then comprise the Employee Experience Index (EEI). You can see the full index as well as get your own EXS by visiting https://TheFutureOrganization.com.

To come up with these attributes and the model of employee experience, I:

• Interviewed C‐level executives and business leaders at over 150 organizations around the world, including:
  • the chief human resources officer (CHRO) of LinkedIn,
  • CHRO of Accenture
  • the CHRO of Marriott International
  • management professor Marshall Goldsmith
  • the chief technology officer of Xerox
  • the co‐CEO of Gensler
  • the chief diversity and inclusion officer at SAP
  • the chief economist at General Electric
  • the chief people officer of Cisco
  • the chief information officer of IBM
  • the chairman of the board at Yahoo!
  • the president of Infosys, and many others
• Reviewed over 150 research articles on culture, technology, and the physical work environment from the likes of Genser, Deloitte, Aon, Steelcase, government agencies, Harvard Business Review, and MIT Sloan Management Review
• Read dozens of media publications
• Analyzed over 250 organizations, including the Fortune 100, Fortune's 100 Best Places to Work, the Glassdoor Best Places to Work, and others
• Worked with an academic institution (American University, with Serge P. da Motta Veiga, assistant professor of management) to help structure the survey and get advice about data collection
• Brought on a research advisor (Steve King from Emergent Research) to provide overall project guidance
• Developed a team of executives to review the attributes and provide feedback and suggestions on the survey

Based on the research conducted for this book, the cultural environment contributes 40 percent to the employee experience, and the technological and physical environments each contribute 30 percent. The total possible score that an organization can receive is 115.5, with 19.5 points coming from technology, 26 points from physical space, and 70 points from culture. Note that the point allocation doesn't reflect the percentage allocated to each environment.

I encourage organizations to take the methodologies in this book and apply them internally. While I don't claim to have all the answers, I do believe that what I have been able to put together does provide some valuable insights into what employee experience is, why it's crucial, and how to go about designing employee experience to create an organization where people actually want to be.

A NOTE ABOUT THE RESEARCH SPONSORS

Two organizations were instrumental in enabling me to conduct the research required for this book. As you can imagine, hiring a team of researchers and data scientists to review 252 organizations can be quite a resource‐intensive task. Lever and Cisco were the two cosponsors of my research. Lever is best described as a modern recruiting technology that dramatically simplifies the hiring and applicant tracking process. I met with Leela Srinivasan, the chief marketing officer of Lever, in its San Francisco office when I started writing this book. She was intrigued with the research and decided to support it. Cisco is the world's leading IT company on a mission to help connect everyone and everything. I've been fortunate to have a relationship with Cisco that has spanned a few years. After hearing what I wanted to do, Francine Katsoudas, Cisco's chief people officer, and Gianpaolo Barozzi, Cisco's senior director of HR, agreed to sponsor this research. I'm grateful to both Lever and Cisco for believing in this concept and for wanting to shed more light on employee experience. Both of these organizations had no say, influence, input, or decision‐making ability of any kind on any aspect of the research to make sure it remained 100 percent objective.