EP 3: From HR to EX: Transforming Workplace Culture

Adriaan: And when we think about employee experience, we're really thinking about putting employees at the center. Why did you join? Why do you stay? What do you love, and what's getting in your way? If you ask those four questions, you're going to get a gold mine of nuggets. Employee experience is only successful if the executive team, the C-suite, and the CEO really believe that employees are users and they're just like customers. I'll be satisfied when every employee in the world has a voice in the decisions and the experiences that impact them. When we published the manifesto, we wanted to define how employee experience relates to culture.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another episode of the Leaders in Talent podcast. Today my guest is Samantha Gadd. A very, very warm welcome. Samantha is the founder and CEO of Excellent and the founder and director of Humankind. Excellent helps organizations around the world develop employee experience design capabilities through learning, certification, and community. Prior to Excellent, for over a decade, Samantha has been leading the way in e1mployee experience thinking through growing the leading HR and executive business in New Zealand called Humankind. In 2022, Samantha led a group of 34 contributors to write an employee experience manifesto for the world, defining employee experience, the value of exploring employee experience, and the principles of employee experience design. This manifesto has been co-signed by hundreds of leaders in over 30 countries. And if I'm not mistaken, Samantha, you're also planning to write a book around this topic, right? So there is a lot to talk about. You live in New Zealand, but currently you are in New York, right?

Samantha: That's right. And thank you for having me on this podcast, Adriaan. I'm really excited.

Adriaan: I want to dive right into the employee experience. Tell me, why should we care?

Samantha: The reality is for organizations and leaders today that expectations of employees have changed significantly. I don't think there's any leader that would disagree with that. And when we think about employee experience, we're really thinking about putting employees at the center. And that is about deeply understanding who employees are, what they care about, and taking a design-led approach to our HR and organization design. The reason we have to do that is because if we don't understand who our employees are and what they care about, we have no idea how to prioritize our investment resources into building better workplaces to ultimately attract and retain the talent that we need to deliver on our organizational strategies. So it's critical.

Adriaan: Tell me a little bit more about your journey as the founder of Humankind, where you are now, and why you got so passionate about this particular topic and started a new company in this realm.

Samantha: I've been in people and culture, HR, employee experience—whatever you want to call it—for my entire career. About 16 years ago, I left my last permanent job and went out on my own and did fractional Chief People Officer and fractional HR consulting. When I was doing that, there was so much demand for that type of work, it ultimately led me to starting Humankind, which is a consultancy that does just that: managed services for growth companies and fractional CPO stuff.

About three years into starting that company, it was actually like starting a steam train. There was no standing in front of the growth; that was clearly a need for growth companies that couldn't afford to hire or didn't need to hire a full-time permanent person, but needed that support. About three years into starting that company, I really was starting to feel a little bit disillusioned with HR and about the impact that we can make with the current ways of working in HR.

Around about that same time, I listened to a podcast that was Mark Levy, who was the very first Global Head of Employee Experience at Airbnb, talking about how Airbnb thought about HR and the fact that they didn't actually want an HR team. They wanted an employee experience team. And what that meant was really breaking down the silos between many parts of the organization, including real estate, catering, digital, and all those other parts that really impact the employee experience so that they thought about employees as users. And I just loved it.

It really was a very big turning point in my career. At that point, I really reshaped our consultancy to be focused on employee experience. To do that, we needed to figure out: what is employee experience? How is it different from HR? And what are the new ways of working we need to both understand what EX is and ultimately design better employee experiences?

So we embarked on building a bunch of methodology, defining employee experience, and building a framework for us and organizations to look at their organization and figure out what was most important to people. Then we ultimately integrated design thinking with our ways of working, which is really interesting because HR is one of the last fields that have taken a design-led approach. When we did that, it totally transformed my career. Being a leader and knowing that you don't actually have to know the answers because the answers sit within the population you serve—aka employees—was so empowering for me.

It felt so right that in 2020, we were thinking about how to have more impact at Humankind. Building a consultancy and growing it is a difficult business model to scale and to have the impact that you want. At that point, we were like, why don't we actually start teaching other practitioners in the HR space how to take a design-led approach?

I created an online program called Employee Experience Design School, put a couple of things on LinkedIn about it, and then started getting inquiries from Costa Rica, Germany, and the US. I was like, "What is going on here?" I looked up and out of New Zealand and realized that there was actually nowhere in the world that HR professionals could learn how to take a design-led approach. At that point, I decided there was so much opportunity globally for teaching employee experience design that I took EX Design School out of Humankind and created Excellent, a new home for this online education.

At that point, we also raised some venture capital to really start scaling out Excellent into the world. It was really at that stage, when we decided to build a global company, that it took us into the EX Manifesto project, which I think we'll talk about soon. But it's been really exciting to work with people in all parts of the world. We've got people learning employee experience design in different parts of Europe and someone in Oman—really every part of the world where everyone's understanding that human-centered organizations or design-led practices are really the only way that we can solve for the really challenging problems that organizations have today.

Adriaan: And you're still running Humankind, but day-to-day focus is on Excellent, or how do you juggle those two?

Samantha: I'm exceptionally lucky. I have a really strong leadership team at Humankind. I actually replaced myself by putting a CEO in Humankind about three years ago, so I've actually been almost out of Humankind entirely, other than being a director, and focusing on Excellent over the last couple of years.

Adriaan: Let's make that a little bit more concrete. It sounds very logical and it sounds incredible, but how should companies think about employee experience?

Samantha: The challenge with it is that it's everything, which is not useful because we don't really know where to start. How we define employee experience is the combined thoughts, feelings, and interactions that we have at work, which is such a broad definition. When we work with organizations, we help them look at employee experience through four lenses—four types of experiences. This makes it more real and concrete. The model that we use is called PREP.

We look at Purpose experiences, Relationship experiences, Enabling experiences, and Performance experiences. If you look at either an organization, a division, a team, or even an individual and find out: is there a connection to purpose? Do people really understand how their role impacts the bigger picture of what the organization is set up to achieve? We know employees come to work wanting purpose; they want to know who they're making a difference for and how. So purpose experience is key.

Then Relationship experiences: it's about employees having connections, both personal and professional, in the workplace. It's the relationships they have with their peers, their team, and other teams, and it's also the relationships they observe. We know that people join an organization and often leave a leader, so relationships with their leaders are really key. Looking for opportunities to improve and strengthen relationships is a key part of employee experience.

The third bucket is Enabling experiences. This is really people coming to work to do their job. I know, having spent my entire career in HR, that we spend a lot of time thinking about the "core moments that matter." How does it feel to be recruited, to be onboarded, to have a performance conversation, or to be exited eventually? Those kind of key moments are what HR professionals often spend a lot of their time designing, but from back-of-the-envelope calculations, employees only spend about 5% of their time in a "moment that matters." The other 95% of their time, they just come into work to do their job. So enabling experiences is really about: what are the tools, the software, the processes, and the enablement that people have on a daily basis to do their job with ease? How can we set up people to just be really enabled in their work day-to-day? This is where we really need to partner with other parts of the organization, like the digital team, to make sure that people have great ways of working.

The last bucket is Performance experiences. How do we get people role clarity? People know what they need to achieve. It's remuneration and reward, career pathways—all of the things that people come to work for because they want to see where their career could go with this organization.

If organizations are just starting, it's really about thinking about that PREP model and trying to understand: why do people join our organization? Is it because of purpose? Relationships? Enablement? Or is it about performance and growth? And then, why do people stay? When you know your core employee value proposition (EVP) drivers—those attraction and retention drivers—organizations know where they can double down and really focus their investment. It's a really powerful framework.

Adriaan: How do you measure PREP?

Samantha: The first way to understand what's important is doing qualitative employee research. This is a real challenge because the tools that we have currently don't really help us to understand those questions. Why do people join? Why do they stay? What's getting in their way? What do they love? Most engagement tools are actually asking very company-centric questions about what employees think about the company, not about actual employees.

What we recommend is having one-on-one conversations with employees to figure out the answers. By understanding where people are today, you set a benchmark and then measure progress by essentially involving employees in the co-design of employee experience. I like to talk about how we close the gap between the promise and the reality. When we bring new people into our organization, they come into it every day with a promise in their minds—the EVP. It's like, "What is this organization going to give me in return for my efforts?" The day-to-day reality is the employee experience. Our job as leaders is to close the gap between the promise and the reality. There are only two ways to do that. One is to ensure that your EVP and your promise actually meet the reality—that it's not too ambitious or aspirational, but actually talking about the current state. The other way is to co-design experiences with employees to make sure that you close that gap and people aren't disillusioned. That's our job every day.

Adriaan: Let's say this is the first time I'm speaking about employee experience and about PREP. What advice would you give me as a founder of a fast-growing RPO company?

Samantha: Honestly, the simplest thing you can do is talk to your employees. Ask them those four simple questions: Why did you join? Why do you stay? What do you love? And what's getting in your way? If you ask those four questions, you're going to get a gold mine of nuggets where you can really figure out where the opportunities are for you to improve the employee experience. It's just a really simple, great place to start. You can do that on a team, or even just with one individual. You'll get some insights. In a big organization, you don't have to talk to everyone. Even if you talk to a dozen people and you've got 500 or 1,000 employees, you're going to get so many nuggets as long as that dozen people are representative of the people that you're serving.

Adriaan: And is your preferred way to do this one-on-one conversations versus sending out a survey?

Samantha: A survey alone is never enough, particularly the current surveys that exist in the market. They are generally Likert scale questions about the company. If you want to use a survey, use qualitative questions where you're asking for free-form responses. But I would say from experience that people—including myself—are very lazy at filling in surveys. If they have a conversation with me, they're going to find out a ton. So I would say, if you're in a talent team, split up the job. Say we're going to talk to three or four people each across the organization. Ask those four questions, have conversations, take the transcripts, and really develop a strategy from there.

Adriaan: Why do you think that employee experience is going to be the new UX/UI for the talent industry?

Samantha: If you look at trends, CX (Customer Experience) and UX are massive growth spaces because if we want to deliver products to our customers that are fit for them and that they love, it's all about designing with customers. This is exactly the same for employees. We've passed the time where HR as a field could be obsessed with "best practice." There is no more looking over the fence and using what I've done in a previous organization to solve for today's problems, because today's problems are brand new. There is only one way to do it, and that is to really co-design with your people. To me, it's a no-brainer that EX will be as big as, if not bigger than, CX as a field of capability eventually.

Adriaan: Do you have an example of a company or companies that are really leading the field in employee experience?

Samantha: Airbnb is a great example of an organization that really delivers an ethical employee experience. They are deeply curious about their people. They think about the experience of their people like they do the experience of their hosts or their customers. They've got heaps of data about what their employees care about and how they feel. They understand that you can't deliver customer experience at Airbnb without your people having as good as, if not better, experience themselves.

If you think back to the last bad customer experience you had—maybe calling your telco or an airline—I can almost guarantee you that it was driven by a bad employee experience. That employee didn't have access to the right data or systems, or they were under-resourced. That employee was having a bad time, and you then had a bad time as a customer. They are absolutely linked. Organizations that get that—that to improve customer experience, they must improve employee experience first—are going to be the ones that ultimately win.

Adriaan: Next to Airbnb, are there any other examples where you feel they've really nailed that PREP model?

Samantha: In my consultancy in New Zealand, we work with mostly small organizations. If you think about the relationship experiences piece, that's really critical. Employees are coming to work now looking for far more than a job; they're looking for community because we don't have community in any other areas of our lives right now. Since COVID, that connection and belonging piece is huge. I think the key thing is to really double down on those relationship experiences and making sure people feel really connected to each other and their colleagues. If you think about your organization like a community, I think that's a really powerful way to go about it. Often that stuff doesn't cost any money; it just takes a deliberate focus. Some of the best books that I've read on employee experience are actually community-building books because they're very linked.

Adriaan: Let's talk a little bit more about the manifesto that you wrote with Mark Levy from Airbnb and Dean Carter from Patagonia, right? Tell us a little bit more.

Samantha: It was such an exciting project. Both Mark and Dean are now very good friends of mine. Basically, when I started Excellent, I was like, we need to put a flag in the sand about what employee experience is, because unfortunately, that term has become quite overused and almost bastardized, where people are just slapping "employee experience" on what is actually a company-centric HR process.

So we were like, "Let's define employee experience for the world." We took inspiration from the Agile Manifesto, which was written 20 years ago by 17 dudes who decided that project management within IT wasn't working anymore. Now, Agile is an enormous industry. We unpacked the system of how that was written and why it's been so successful. We collaborated with leaders from many organizations, including Disney and IBM. We brought them together in a US workshop where we unpacked what employee experience is, how you measure it, and what's important.

Ultimately, we published the manifesto defining how employee experience relates to culture, the core values, and the design principles. We needed it to be simple. Bloomberg picked up the release of it, and one of the core values—the pointiest value—is Employee First over Customer First. That's been a real talking point, but it's definitely opened a lot of opportunities for great conversations with leaders around the world. We hope that it stands the test of time as a resource to spark conversations.

Adriaan: Why was it a manifesto? Was there something missing, or what was that drive that you experienced?

Samantha: The definition of a manifesto is that it needs to be bleeding-edge and provocative. We didn't want everyone to read it and agree with every part of it; that's not change-creating. We wanted to put it in a way that people could co-sign it and join the movement. That was really what they did with the Agile Manifesto 20 years ago. That's why we set it up as something that people could get behind and ultimately use to develop capability and influence within their own organization. It's really like a new way of working for a new world of work.

Adriaan: You publish a manifesto, Bloomberg picks it up—what do you see happening now in the employee experience field? What have you experienced in the last year or so after publishing it?

Samantha: It's really interesting because we're in quite a challenging global economic climate. A lot of people are saying the pendulum swung; it was very pro-employee, and now it has swung right back to employer. The reality with pendulums is that they do swing back again. There's probably a little bit of a feeling that maybe we did go way too employee-centric and we were just adding all these perks and benefits that weren't really making a big difference for people. What's happening now is organizations are really focused on delivery.

Organizations probably aren't investing enough in employee experience right now. I think it's fascinating. Organizations might think they're going well because there's not many people leaving jobs, but that's because there's not many jobs to go to. My fear is that we've actually got a lot of "retained churn" that just hasn't happened yet. The organizations that are still continuing to invest in employee experience and understand who their people are and what they care about are ultimately going to win. I worry that many organizations think it’s not important enough to invest in that right now. As soon as the climate starts to pick up, they're going to lose a lot of people.

I believe that's true across many different industries. I know that leaders and HR practitioners are wanting new ways of working. They're feeling like I did, which was: I want to make a difference, but the ways that I've been taught and the ways the organization expects me to operate simply aren't working now. I need a new toolkit. And design-led HR or employee experience design is 100% that. We have people saying, "Oh my God, I've done the EX Design School and I've got a new lease on life." For the first time, they feel like they've got the tools they need to actually make a difference. Empowering people with this new way of working is so rewarding for me. We're hoping that the manifesto and our online community really help HR practitioners do what they set out to do in their careers.

Adriaan: So Airbnb was one of the first to really start with employee experience and talk about it. Mark was the very first Global Head of EX there. Many organizations don't have such a big people team. Do you feel that organizations should have a dedicated person on employee experience, or at what scale? How does this fit into the overall people function?

Samantha: It's a really good question. I think the reality with employee experience is that it can't just be the responsibility of one person. So even if you're an organization with one people person, that's a great place to start: have your people person learn design-led ways of working and take an approach just as the product team would. Be really curious about the users.

Ultimately, though, employee experience is only successful if the executive team, the C-suite, and the CEO really believe that employees are users and they're just like customers. We need to be curious about them to design something that's going to work for them and give employees the experience that they would give their customers. Often it's like one grade for the customers and another grade down here for employees. No matter what size organization we're talking about, we need to have the executive team and leaders buy into employee experience as a key strategy. We need people with the capability and tools to take a design-led approach, which is just a new way of thinking.

There's a lot of unlearning to do for people in the HR and talent space. It's a lot of unlearning of old ways of working that we need to do before we can become design-led practitioners. That can be quite a hard process and it does take time. Investing in learning these new mindsets, trying them out, and building confidence is key. Start with something scrappy versus the perfectionistic stuff that we're all used to. Be scrappy and iterate, iterate, iterate. All of those things take time to do, and it's just investing in that new way of working that's going to help organizations to ultimately thrive.

Adriaan: So where does your company then come in? Do you come in as a consultancy or an advisory? Tell me a little bit more on how you help companies that want to embark on this journey.

Excellent: Excellent provides the tools, platform, and resources to become a certified employee experience designer. We have a 12-month certification program where people come and do a bunch of online learning. We give them the tools and confidence to put EX in action in their organization, ultimately write a case study, and then become a certified designer. We’ve got people from all over the world doing that. We also have a community where we run event programming. Every month we're having a couple of awesome speakers showcase what employee experience looks like and what tools and mindsets are needed. That's what we do; it's really an education piece. Humankind does consultancy, but that's predominantly a New Zealand-based business.

Adriaan: What about yourself? I know you've been an entrepreneur for quite some time, but what's the best employee experience you've ever experienced yourself?

Samantha: Oh my gosh, that's such a good question. It's been over 16 years since I was an employee. Feeling like I can really be myself, that I'm fully understood as a unique human, and also that I can play in my "fast lane." So understanding where I'm really good and I feel in flow, and being able to surround myself with people that pick up things that aren't in my fast lane. That's my best employee experience.

I think early on in my founder journey, I thought I had to do everything and I thought I had to be good at everything. You realize pretty quickly that you're not. When you're playing in lanes that aren't your fast lane, it's actually no fun. You feel like you're not winning and things are going slow around you. It's about having the confidence and the environment that enables you to look at yourself and go, "This is who I am. This is what I'm really good at. I'm going to play in that lane and surround myself with other people." To me, that's a great employee experience.

And also being obsessed with purpose. I'm very purpose-driven. The reason I get out of bed every day is I really believe that every leader in every organization should treat employees as key stakeholders. We need to understand that employees have really valuable input. We need to understand who they are and ask for that input to ultimately design the best organizations. And I'll be satisfied when every employee in the world has a voice in the decisions and the experiences that impact them. Because ultimately I want that. I want agency—that's why I'm a founder—but I also want that agency for every other employee, no matter what job or industry they're in.

Adriaan: Amazing. So if I want to start, I either go to you or at least I have an interview with my employees asking: Why did you join? Why do you stay? What do you love? And what's getting in your way?

Samantha: If you ask those four questions, you're going to unlock a bunch of stuff. And if you want to know more about how to take that next approach and take discovery into really defining the problem to solve, and then ultimately into designing better solutions—come and check us out at excellent.io. We'd love to have a chat.

Adriaan: What's the best way for people to connect with you? Is it through LinkedIn?

Samantha: Yes, please. Love LinkedIn.

Adriaan: Amazing. We'll share your LinkedIn in the show notes. It was such a pleasure talking to you. I learned tons. This was very good, tangible advice, which is my favorite. Thanks for taking the time to speak to me.

Samantha: Thanks so much for having me on the podcast, Adriaan, and excited to collaborate in the future. Thank you.