Structure is often one of the first considerations when building or reinventing a company, and the evidence is pointing to increasing experimentation and quite radical approaches to structuring in new ways of working for effective value creation. From companies with no CEO, to companies with no management whatsoever, companies are being bolder in the ways they innovate the organizational struc- ture. Does this matter? Yes, for several reasons. How the company is experienced during the day-to-day operations has a significant effect
on EX and how employees work together. The traditional hierarchy and corporate pyramid has been found wanting for some time. It is slow, disempowering, and great work finds itself stalling due to rigid and energy-consuming processes and management practices. It’s why companies like Zappos! and Haier have embraced head-turning ap- proaches in their quest to better serve customers and create more value. The former opting for a self-managed organization, with the latter splitting a large organization into micro-size companies. For EX, this determines a lot about how we design the holistic experience across the business.
Most employees still work in structures that have been common- place since the industrial revolution and it remains a hierarchy in the traditional sense, which means that authority and formal responsibil- ity increases as you move up the company structure. This generates an up-flow for decision-making practices, and this can negatively af- fect an organization’s ability to out-innovate and out-perform their more nimble and dynamic competitors. Typically, people are required to work their ideas up the structure and back down again. While or- ganizations are placing emphasis on becoming as flat as possible, they are also doing other things to strengthen alignment and account- ability for EX. Of note, committed high-level sponsorship and top- team responsibility for EX projects and cross-functional teams with shared objectives on EX. This is further backed up with targeted in- dividual and community incentives that create a sense of urgency and reward for leading projects outside the normal areas of responsibility.
The ideal is that everyone works well together because of their strong affinity with an organization’s purpose, mission and values. That may be the case in some companies, but is not the ‘norm’ by any standard.
This means companies will need to work harder to ensure that people can experience the benefits of the EX work for themselves and that they are sufficiently incentivized to take full responsibility.
From human ‘resources’ to employee experience
The way HR is structured into the organization has and will continue to experience dramatic change. The adoption of the employee experi- ence department in some cases is replacing HR outright, and in others, is positioning EX within HR as an added dimension and capability of
the function. What’s important here is the roles and responsibilities for EX, and the accountability for it, but it continues to be a major devel- opment of the HR field. The HR profession is trying to make sense of multiple new roles and fields, and it is very exciting to be in the profes- sion right now. HR is at the centre of a lot of conversations across multiple disciplines including digital, people analytics, marketing, be- havioural economics and design thinking, to name a few. With EX, we are talking about a larger team and a more significant amount of re- sources. This will need to be structured well to advance and communi- cate a holistic approach.
The employee experience department is proving popular to draw together all the elements that are vital to a high-performing organiza- tion and provide the requisite control to innovate around EX as a strategic competitive advantage. Many others are or have introduced formal EX roles into and across structures, which signals that EX is not only maintaining its established influence, but that the cases com- ing through are providing evidence that the approach is working in practice and helping organizations meet their growth and perfor- mance objectives. Further evidence is the number of new roles relat- ing to EX that have been created over the last few years, which includes the world’s leading brands such as Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, GE, LinkedIn, Amazon and Facebook. The types of roles being intro- duced include:
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● Chief EX Officer; Vice-President, EX
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● Director, EX; Head of EX; EX Manager
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● EX Coordinator; EX Specialist
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● Digital EX Manager
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● HR Manager (Employee Experience).
What is more impressive is the way in which this new field has grown within high-growth companies and medium businesses across the global economy. In some cases, organizations are starting with EX rather than HR. Roles have also become established within the public, government and not-for-profit sectors. The supporting actors and en- ablers within the tech, training, consulting and research markets have also pivoted, some much earlier than others, but now we see all the
major consulting firms dedicating significant investment and resources into supporting this growing enthusiasm for EX from their corporate clients’ intent on epic transformation to regain, retain and maximize existing client relationships.
It is highly evident that companies are approaching their work with people in a very different manner. In fact, they are actively changing the very nature of their teams to ensure design principles are inbuilt and come as standard with great HR work. As an exam- ple, I met with colleagues at Aurecon, an engineering consulting firm in Australia; one of the first appointments to a new people team was an industrial designer. This is not your standard HR business partner role being structured in. This is committing to high-quality design principles on the inside to effect results on the outside.