Designing the Employee Experience

"In a world where money is no longer the primary motivating factor for employees, focusing on the employee experience is the most promising competitive advantage that organizations can create.

- Jacob Morgan, author of “The Employee Experience Advantage"

Everything Has Changed

Money is no longer the primary motivator for employees. To stay competitive, I’ve seen firsthand how important it is for organizations to prioritize the employee experience. The pandemic has made this especially clear - burnout is real, frustrations are high, and people are seeking change. To retain top talent, we must understand our employees' needs and motivations.

During the early phases of Covid, I saw our employee experience as a design problem and found that human-centered design could improve the work experience for our teams. We identified touchpoints along the employee journey, prototyped, tested, and validated our hypotheses, and iteratively improved the work experience for our team. As we hired for distributed teams, we realized that recruiting fresh talent was a different ballgame. We had to find, attract, and retain talent we had never seen in real life.

Now, as the talent landscape continues to shift, we must empathize with the needs of our customers and employees. As Design Leaders, we are uniquely positioned to help our people thrive and succeed in a hybrid work world.