By Madlena Pozlevic, Employee Experience Lead at Perkbox

 

In this day and age, company culture is more important than ever before. It has a crucial role to play in attracting and retaining employees and ensuring they stay happy and productive. It’s therefore only natural that we move towards a new era where there is a designated person in charge of this within a company.

 

An EX leader, or as it’s more formally known, an Employee Experience Lead is defined by the Chartered Institute of People Development (CIPD) as someone thriving to create, ‘engaging working environments. Their role is to ‘constantly be fostering happier, healthier, more fulfilled workforces, which are driving both productivity and innovation.’

 

When it comes to the characteristics that this role should encompass, they should include: being a people advocate at heart and deeply caring about making their organisation a great place to work. This is often reflected in personality traits such as having a growth-mindset, resilience and being open to new ideas.

 

We’ve discussed the essence of what Employee Experience Specialists do and what they should look like. But what is it that they really do to improve organisational culture and engagement?

 

Let’s find out!

 

  1. They bridge the gap between employees and senior leaders

 

EX leaders have a crucial role to play in bridging the gap between employees and senior leaders in an organisation, facilitating a two-way communication stream. Be this to feedback ideas for new initiatives or suggesting improvements that could make employees’ lives easier, the EX leader acts as an objective intermediary.

 

EX leaders often achieve this with the support of a working group of employees who meet regularly to discuss company culture matters. At Perkbox, we call this group ‘Culture Guardians’, they guide our culture and protect what makes Perkbox a great place to work.

 

To give you an idea, examples of initiatives our Culture Guardians have been involved in during the past year include internal activities for mental health awareness week and they supported the HR team in launching our new reward and recognition strategy.

 

  1. They keep track of the temperature in your organisation

 

Another key role of an EX leader is to keep track of the overall temperature in the organisation – something that has typically been easier to act upon at a departmental level. The role of the EX leader is to do this from a more holistic perspective, spotting company-wide trends and acting upon them.

 

At Perkbox, our pulse survey tool, Perkbox Insights, helps me keep track of this. It allows me, as Employee Experience Lead to send weekly pulse surveys and it’s great to see the feedback updating in real-time on the dashboard. The comments section also enables me to hear what people are thinking of and work out a plan alongside the HR team for any red flags I spot that need to be actioned. Based on how these drivers are looking in the organisation, EX leaders can coordinate activities to improve morale across the business. For example, if more employees than normal are feeling stressed – why not think about organising a workshop around stress management and resilience.

 

  1. They help build an “employee first” company

 

Finally, EX leaders have an important role to play in building an “employee first” company,  ensuring each employee has a tailored experience that caters to their needs. This could be anything from flexible working and unlimited holidays to meaningful perks that make a positive impact on their lives both inside and outside work.

 

Part of the role of this individual is therefore to find incentives for the different demographics in the business. For example, it’s likely millennials will want perks that baby boomers don’t. The same goes for different departments. It’s also about understanding the perks that transcend demographics and departments such as having a learning and development budget or a day off for one’s birthday.

 

Another way an “employee first” company can be achieved is by having values that are relatable to employees in the company, as well as creating ways to recognise employees for their hard work that link back to these values. As mentioned earlier, at Perkbox, we recently launched our brand new recognition strategy to help achieve this. This breaks our recognition programme into three different pillars – ‘On Us’, ‘One Vision’ and ‘We are Perkbox’, encouraging recognition across all levels – on a peer to peer, departmental and company-wide level.

 

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So there you have it, three reasons why having an Employee Experience Leader should be something every organisation should have. Why not use this as motivation to start a conversation with your colleagues or your HR team about company culture in your organisation and how it can be improved?