Understanding Employee Experience: Q&A with Paula Brockwell
It was a pleasure to talk to an Employee Experience advocate & psychologist Paula Brockwell. We discussed what entails employee experience, how to create, improve & measure it. Explore employee experience trends and tips for influencing workplace culture if you're only getting started.
1. Paula, you have a long and intriguing resume – could you please introduce yourself to our readers?
Hi, I'm Paula Brockwell. I'm an occupational psychologist and culture shaper with over 20 years of experience working with organisations to create environments where businesses prosper by focusing on supporting their people to thrive. I've worked in the culture industry through various lenses for the vast majority of my career, and around ten years ago, I began to feel fatigued as I noticed that I was continually trying to solve the same problems with the same solutions—ones that never quite gained traction or embedded as hoped. So, I founded The Employee Experience Project with a strong desire to do things differently, along with a whole heap of curiosity about how other industries were harnessing mass behaviour change in much more effective ways than traditional culture change approaches. I've spent the last six years working with clients to use insights from behavioural economics, systems thinking, and herd theory to support them in approaching culture change differently. I'm on a mission to support HR and business leaders in building their capability and confidence in harnessing culture as a core driver of business performance.
2. How do you define employee experience, and why is it a critical focus for organisations today?
For me, employee experience is how we make people feel through their interactions at work. It’s the sum of all the interactions that colleagues have with each other, their manager, leaders, and more broadly, the systems and processes that help or hinder their work, as well as everything that creates their broader work environment.
It’s important for a number of reasons. Firstly, it influences the level of connection, motivation, energy, and well-being that someone can bring to work, which has a really strong impact on their performance and engagement—their desire to do great things on behalf of the business. Secondly, that experience tells people what behaviour is acceptable and what isn’t within that particular environment. One aspect of employee experience that is really underrated but is massively critical when creating high-performance cultures is considering the micro-messages and cues we’re giving people around how much we expect them to give and what behaviours will or won’t get them recognised, rewarded, or into trouble.
Experience not only influences the energy that people bring to work and their efforts, but it also really directs and informs the types of behaviours people display. This can be a massive differentiator when it comes to driving the types of behaviours you need for your business to gain commercial success.
3.1. What are the most effective ways for HR leaders to assess and measure their current organisational culture?
Culture is made up of a number of different factors, including how people behave, what they believe, and what their expectations are from others, to name a few. So when measuring culture, we typically recommend considering two elements. The first is: how do your colleagues feel about work, what drives that, and how that encourages them to act in order to get through the day? Talking to colleagues and understanding their experiences, views, and priorities is definitely important. Using surveys, focus groups, and ideation sessions all help to capture that data. It’s also useful to consider the unconscious cues and symbols of culture within your organisation, so asking a third party not immersed in your cultural norms to review your systems, processes, policies, and communication approaches can give an indication of what they are unconsciously communicating around elements such as power dynamics, behaviour expectations, and standards in action.
Often, this is where people stop, attempting to seek out opportunities to drive improvement or fixes based on individual priorities and desires. In our world, we prefer to assess the measurement of culture against a business-centric definition of what ‘great’ would look like for your business. So we recommend working with your senior leadership team to understand the business context, goals, and priorities, and using that business-centric insight to define how you need your employees to behave in order to deliver that business success. From there, you can figure out what type of experience they need to drive that behaviour. It’s that benchmark of great work that allows you to assess your current culture in a needs-focused, pragmatic, and truly personalised way, reducing the risk of getting distracted by off-the-shelf cultural metrics that may not prioritise behaviours that will drive success and engagement in your unique context.
3.2. How does leadership style influence employee engagement and overall workplace culture?
Leadership style is massively important when it comes to employee engagement and driving workplace culture in more ways than people typically acknowledge. The most obvious is that the individual behaviour of leaders directly impacts colleagues' day-to-day experiences at work. There is a clear correlation between leadership style and people's perceptions of how much they feel trusted, valued, and psychologically safe—all of which influence cultural tone and ultimate behaviour.
What is not always noted is how collective leadership dynamics influence culture. How your senior teams come together to make decisions, and practically, the ways in which the business approaches doing business, have a huge impact on culture. For example, choosing a lean and opportunity-led business model and resourcing structure will mean that people who prefer to work at high pace, with high degrees of trust and a comfort with dealing with uncertainty, will be much more likely to thrive than those who prefer structure, large opportunities for collaboration, or time to reflect and consider how to move forward. Culture isn’t just about how we act; it’s about how our personal preferences and priorities come together as a leadership group to influence the tone of business we create, the types of resources we make available, and the systems and processes we build into our expectations of others’ approaches to work.
4. What would you say are the top 3 emerging trends in employee experience that HR leaders should be aware of?
- Connection and Purpose – Recent reports on engagement show the continued negative trend of engagement levels being generally at their lowest on record. There are clear issues around connection to work and people's sense of alignment to the purpose of their business and their value to that purpose. Businesses are struggling to move on from the era of engagement where people are expected to be 100% immersed and committed to their roles and businesses. There needs to be more concentrated work on supporting people to find meaning in great work in the context of a desire for having a great life, rather than just a great career.
- Distributed Teams and Remote Working – There are still significant challenges around managing motivation, connection, and capacity for collaboration following the rapid shift to remote working during the pandemic. The current models of hybrid working do not adequately address the question of how to evolve our working practices to suit this new dynamic. With many businesses equating the proximity of being in the same office with greater collaboration, energy, and motivation, they are missing the opportunity to learn from the many high-performing teams who have been working in globally distributed teams for decades. Instead, they are limiting their talent pools to those who will accept a hybrid model of work. Desire for hybrid working is tepid and will continue to decline as the next generation enters the world of work, so it would be much more sensible to focus energy on evolving the world of work to meet those needs, rather than trying to suppress the desire from colleagues to do things differently.
- Managing Boundaries – There are continual challenges for modern workers around managing the capacity to be always on and available to work, particularly for those who entered the workforce before the time when we had meaningful access to work data on smartphones, etc. It's clear that people find it hard to change the habits and routines they need to carve out rest and re-energise. Supporting colleagues to make positive choices that will maximise their capacity to work with energy and commitment while focused on work, and integrating life and work in a way that is sustainable for them, will be important.
5. From a more practical standpoint – in your opinion, what are some quick wins that can have a meaningful impact for organisations that are just beginning to focus on improving employee experience?
Often, there are numerous quick fixes that can be driven if people are given the right support, confidence, and permission to make a change. So typically, when driving a positive culture change that seeks to improve employee experience, we ask colleagues to identify the biggest barriers to efficient and easy action at work. Taking some time to support colleagues in addressing and overcoming those barriers, or feeling more equipped to manage the risks associated with them, can quickly build a sense of trust that the business is listening to the things that are important to employees. It also helpfully instils a sense of personal agency and an expectation that everyone can be part of the change that they seek. Supporting teams across the business to treat each other more effectively as customers and help each other to succeed can often be a really useful way to make work feel very different, very quickly.
