This article was first published here
Employee experience is, like many things, a product of its time. Throughout history, the relationship between employer and employee has constantly evolved, reflecting the values and beliefs of each period.
For a very long time, this relationship was in fact one-directional, akin to that of a master-servant relationship. With the advent of the industrial revolution, this relationship started to change, albeit on a few levels only. Industrialisation brought with it new values that we today associate with modern capitalism, such as achievement, individualism and meritocracy. It also helped to popularise the idea of reward in exchange for more productivity. In the 1920s, Ford and Taylor took these values to the next level and developed tools and methods that allowed assembly lines to function with maximum efficiency and productivity (our concept of waterfall project management comes from this period). But while successful, this also came at a cost: a continued ‘de-humanisation’ of the employee, who although sometimes better financially rewarded, was in fact a simple performer of a series of repetitive and mundane tasks within an organisational system that could be understood as a machine.
In the 1950s, Douglas McGregor, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, developed Theory X and Theory Y to show that the ‘traditional’ belief that employees are lazy and will try to do as little as possible, only capable of doing good work when supervised and controlled closely by their manager (and only responding to a clear system of reward and punishment), was out of date and no longer appropriate for companies wanting to remain competitive. Instead, he suggested, companies should create an environment of trust, allowing employees to work in the interest of the company with initiative and autonomy.
Thus, our understanding of employee experience was starting to change. The idea that employees had stronger needs than just existential safety and money, and that these needs needed to be addressed for the employees to be engaged and motivated, started to take hold, albeit slowly. The concept of engagement became a recurring theme of discussions in HR circles and within companies.
The agile revolution of the past 20 years or so, has continued, even accelerated, this shift in perspective. The agile manifesto and the agile values not only placed the customer firmly at the centre of all work (in a way that had rarely been so prominent until then) , it also recognized that teams and the people in these teams needed to be given autonomy and trust to do their best possible work and to deliver the quality that the customer required.
Our world is changing at an exponential rate. New technologies bring ideas to market faster than ever before. Competitive advantage is being re-defined. New generations of employees come to work with different values and expectations. In short, uncertainty has become the new normal. Therefore, companies that hang on to traditional ways of managing employees and responding to customer needs run the risk of falling behind (many already are). Innovation, agility, adaptability, customer-centricity, and purpose are all essential components of the successful organisation of the future. And to achieve this, companies will need to change their understanding and approach towards employee experience.
