Thinkers50 Curated LinkedIn Live with Ben Whitter | Employee Experience

Ben is the founder and CEO of the World Employee Experience Institute, an independent employee experience company. He is the author of the “Employee Experience” book and works at the forefront of the employee experience movement. His mission is to create organizations where people belong, find meaning, and co-create astonishing human achievements. In 2017 and again in 2018 Ben was named a top global influencer and expert within employee engagement.

Transcript:

Des Dearlove:
Hello. Welcome to Thinkers50 radar 2021 series. Brought to you with LinkedIn live. I’m Des Dearlove.

Stuart Crainer:
And I’m Stuart Crainer. And we are the founders of Thinkers50, the world’s most reliable resource for identifying, ranking, and sharing the leading management ideas of our age. Ideas that can make a real difference in the world.

Des Dearlove:
Our belief in the power of ideas has been the foundation of our work since we launched the first ever global ranking of management thinkers in 2001, and we’ve published a new Thinkers50 ranking every two years since, and it remains the premier ranking of its kind.

Stuart Crainer:
So we’re excited that 2021, a year in which fresh thinking and human ingenuity are more important than ever is also a Thinkers50 year. We have the rest of the year ahead of us to identify and promote the new, the brilliant, the world changing ideas coming from our global community of thinkers.

Des Dearlove:
Nominations are now open for both the ranking of management thinkers and our distinguished achievement awards, which the Financial Times very helpfully calls the Oscars of management thinking.

Stuart Crainer:
And in the summer, we will have the award short list to savor. The year’s finale on 15th and 16th of November. We’ll bring all the excitement to a new ranking, and the naming of our Thinkers50 2021 award with us.

Des Dearlove:
But we start the years over with the Thinkers50 radar class, the 30 up and coming business thinkers to watch in the coming months.

Stuart Crainer:
In this series of 30 minute webinars, we want to showcase some of those ideas to bring the new voices of management thinking. We want to inspire you to seize this moment to create a better future for you and your organization.

Des Dearlove:
Our guest today is Ben Whitter, described as the world’s Mr. Employee Experience. Ben is the founder and CEO of the World Employee Experience Institute, an independent employee experience company.

Stuart Crainer:
He is the author of the Employee In Experience book and works at the forefront of the employee experience movement. His mission is to create organizations where people belong, find meaning, and co-create astonishing human achievements.

Des Dearlove:
In 2017, and again in 2018, Ben was named as a top global influencer, an expert within employee engagement alongside Simon Sinek, and Sir Richard Branson, among others.

Stuart Crainer:
The format today is that we have 30 minutes. Ben will present his ideas for a number of minutes, and then we’ll have time for some questions. We want to use the chat function to make the session as interactive as possible. So please share where you are joining us from today.

Des Dearlove:
And please post your questions as we go along. Now, we’ll hand over to you, Ben. The virtual stage is yours.

Ben Whitter:
Thank you very much, Stuart and Des. And it is a great privilege to be included in the Thinkers50 radar class for this year. It is kind of a milestone in my journey really with employee experience. I’m not going to share any slides to that. I just want to speak really directly around this idea that has taken on a life of its own over the last few years. From when I started on stages in Asia, talking about employee experience literally for the first time, in terms of the audience hearing about this term, employee experience. To what it’s become now and this great recognition in 2021 with Thinkers50.

It’s been a phenomenal thing to be a part of this globally. So my work has taken me all around the world, talking to different people, different companies, different clients around this concept of employee experience. And the thing I began to realize quite quickly about employee experience, and why I took lot of time to really dissect it, and look at examples from across the economies. Global economy, large enterprise, medium size businesses, small businesses, start-ups, high growth companies. I want to understand what is the absolute key? What’s the key to employee experience? And what are brands, and people, and colleagues really focused on? And what’s delivering really good success in return?

So with that… I mean, employee experience really is about human beings. That’s the first thing. It’s the most obvious thing, and you can call it common sense management. Employee experience is not about employees. It’s about human beings. That seems to be something that we take for granted within the field. But actually, when you look out there and certainly through the pandemic, we’ve seen examples of organizations not treating the employees like human beings. You know, terminating people on mass zoom calls. You wouldn’t really do that to your friends, your family, your loved ones.

So why do we continue to do it to people who are maybe perceived as being expendable, kind of payroll numbers? So this humanity and employee experience, these two ideas come together like hand in a glove really because it’s that important to treat people and the workforce like the human beings that they are. Now, you can be forgiven for thinking, “Well, this is fluffy stuff. Is this HR stuff?” Well, that’s the other thing about employee experience. A lot of my research has found that employee experience is a very strong strategic business approach. It’s a philosophy within a lot of organizations that embrace it, and it comes right from the top. It comes up from the bottom, and it kind of meets in the middle. And that’s the beautiful thing about employee experience in that there’s a high level of core creation across the workforce that creates better experiences in work.

And if you are looking about the return of experience for employee experience, it really is that you create better experiences that connect people more closely to your brand and to the outcomes that you want to represent in the world. For me, this year in particular, we’ve had to really question, what is progress around the world in terms of business progress? Is it acceptable now for businesses to deliver growth? To deliver high financial performance at the expense of everything else that surrounds their business? Whether it’s the environment. Whether it’s people. Whether it’s the planet as a whole. Is it still acceptable to deliver results at any cost? Reflecting on that, it takes you into some really profound and deep discussions for our management lines. Certainly in terms of how we approach the world, how we approach organizational development, how we approach management generally really.

So this is where employee experience takes you. And I’ve been on a many year journey into this field. And the more you go, you start to realize that the employee experience is so much more about the human experience. As we’ve been through the pandemic, we’ve seen examples from across the economy of organizations thriving. They’ve been growing their bottom line. They’ve been delivering impacts across society, and they’ve been standing for something that is beyond what they thought was possible. They’ve been standing for the truth as they see it. The truth, as I kind of lay out in the book, first time round for the first book was very much around purpose. We want to believe in our employers. We want to believe in the companies that we work for. They have to stand for something deeper than just profit. Therefore, if they want to do that, they have to treat us more like partners on that journey, as opposed to people who can leave the business at a whim. We have to be connected to something like a purpose.

We need a strong mission to help us unify all our efforts, and activities, and outcomes across an entire enterprise. That’s absolutely critical. And some of the great organizations on the planet really have this strong sense of mission. They’re moving forward at an urgent pace. They want to achieve something. They want to deliver better results for all their stakeholders. And then the values that get you there. So, it’s not just about what you do, but very much about how you achieve these things in practice.

I walk into some organizations, and they really don’t know how to interact with each other. They don’t know what to expect of each other. And therefore there’s a lot of confusion and misaligned work and outcomes. So values becomes massively important with the employee experience and certainly within the holistic employee experience if we think about things much more holistically across the business. So this really was fascinating to understand. And you start to look at this purpose, the mission, and the values. It becomes the brand truth. It’s what people experience on the outside of the business. And it’s what people experience on the inside of a business. But if isn’t installed within the employee experience, it’s not a truth. It’s an absolute lie.

And yeah, it could be just fancy marketing. Let’s put it that way. And we’ve seen that a lot within the pandemic as well. Brands writing big checks that they can’t really cash. And a lot of that has to do with the mission that, and the way they value the relationships in the business. So that was a big finding for me for the first one, which was about the holistic employee experience. This hex, which has kind of grown a life of its own with the practitioner community and some of the work that we do around the world to extend this idea.

But essentially, it’s about doing the right thing by our people. Building great experiences for all stakeholders. And delivering real, genuine value to planet society and humanity, which takes me into what the next book, which is coming up from May 3rd, which is the Human Experience at Work. Because as employee experience leaders, as management people, as leaders, corporate, whoever it may be, we’ve had to question what it is we stand for at a level we’ve never done before. Have you noticed over the past year how you’ve changed, or responded, reacted in your personal life? What have you changed? What are you doing differently? We’re seeing that the workforce and people in general, they want a different type of work life now. They’re don’t want to go back to what they had before. And they want to address this deep level of anxiety that’s propping up now because we’ve been through several iterations of this new economic model and this new work life model. And some of it’s working, and some of it isn’t quite working.

So the organizations that certainly we work with… They’re starting to question the very foundations around, “Okay, what’s working? What’s not working? And how can we co-create better experiences, not just for our remote workforce, but for our essential workforce, for all of our colleagues? How can we personalize at a deeper level to help people thrive, not just in work but in life?” And I think that comes down to a serious conclusion about what employee experience really is all about.

It’s not just about brand success, but it’s about the success of people in their life journey as well. Because we have such little time on this planet to get to know ourselves, to get to know our companies, and to get to know our relationship in connection with nature and the planet. All of that now is starting to come into the employee experience in the richness, and the environments that we create. And all of that good stuff we create with our people, for our people, through our people, within our organizations.

It’s fascinating. One of our colleagues, at the very onset of the pandemic, she’s a holistic employee experience practitioner. She’s been on our programs. But I hadn’t met her at that point. She came on a live feed. And when everyone else was kind of running around saying, “What do we do? And what do we have to respond to in the moment right now to deal with this crisis?” She was already thinking about that. But she was already thinking about how do you welcome people back to the workplace once they’ve been at home for a significant period of time. So this level of foresight around the experiences we create and how we can become more caring, more respectful employers of that human experience. This becomes a telltale sign of a great practitioner and a great leader. When they’re looking at things that haven’t even happened yet, and stand to put a design plan in place, or an experience strategy that addresses that before it even happens.

It’s been inspiring in many ways to see the level of detail that practitioners are going into that leaders… The seriousness they place now on the experiences. But that’s not the same story for everybody. We’re seeing a lot of companies who sometimes they may have good intentions, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they’re completely management centric. That they can’t see the humans for the trees. They just, can’t see it. They don’t understand really why we should connect things to the human experience. Why we should treat our workforce with respect and design great experiences for them.

I remember after a speech… I think it was in London actually. I gave a speech about employee experience, lots of different corporations in the room. And I was packing up the books after the gig. And this guy walked past me. He was like, “Hm, bright yellow book. What’s that all about?” And he kind of came over, and I picked one up and I said, “It’s about employee experience.” And he looked at it and he said… He went “Employee experience. Why would I want to focus on that?” Well, you create a great loyal, sustainable, effective, powerful, strong workforce. And he was scratching his head, and he was like, “Well, I’m a hedge fund manager. Why should I care about that?” And it’s kind of the attitude of some leaders out there and some managers where employee experience is a department somewhere else, someone else’s business. And I think this is the big thing about employee experience now is that it’s not a HR thing. I think it’s not just for a certain group of people to consider.

It’s about an entire organization building this intentionally with thought and consideration for all of the people. Leader level, senior leader level, and all the support functions lined up and doing a great job to serve their organization and their people. So I think that’s what employee experience is about. I’ve had a few people laugh in my face when I start to talk about employee experience. But as we’ve grown this movement, and it truly is a movement. Lots of organizations and managers are pivoting towards humans and experiences now. You start to see what happens as a result. And no one ever goes back to what was. Once you start embracing human centricity, once you start seeing the results, once you start living the atmosphere around you and the teams and the relationships you create, no one goes back to what it was. And that’s a great indicator of the full power of employee experience when it’s in full flow. So with that, I’d like to just give us plenty of time for questions and a good chitchat with Des and Stuart.

Stuart Crainer:
Thanks very much, Ben. Welcome to everybody’s joined us from India, Iran, Canada, Austria, San Diego, and even Trevor from London. And nice to see you, Trevor. Thanks very much for joining us, and somebody from Berlin as well. What always strikes me about your work, Ben, is what took us so long? Why are organizations not… Why are people laughing in your face at this concept? And it seems absolutely fundamental to the success of many organizations.

Ben Whitter:
Yeah. I mean, that’s becoming less and less an occurrence. I’ve got to say. But when you start talking about… When you go into a hard core business meeting and you start talking about the experiences that our workforce are having, what the people are having. Yeah. People do look at you, like, “Well, hold on a second now. We’re talking about business now.” But what we learn from some of the great organizations out there, some outstanding brands, is that they naturally place the people agenda at the top of their business agenda as well. So there’s no disconnect between the idea of business and looking after your workforce. It’s just part and parcel of a great admired, respected, trusted brand.

So I think that’s the big thing. And the organizations, they have been focused more on profit. They have been focused more on that one stakeholder at the top of the organization. We’ve had some great developments in that with the business round table in the last year or so saying, “Look, let’s put purpose first. Let’s treat all of our stakeholders with respect and give them the due attention they deserve.” So I think slowly but surely things are starting to change because they have to. Business and managers don’t have a choice now because if you want to be an admired, respected, and trusted brand you really can’t afford not to get this right anymore.
Des Dearlove:
So, I mean, as Stuart says, it’s amazing that it’s taken so long for the penny to drop, but it’s just what happens. How does the concept of… Your concept, if you like, the employee experience, how does that relate to employee engagement? And this was the magic word a few years ago. Everyone was talking about it then. How are the relationship between the two?

Ben Whitter:
Yeah, I remember… Again, I walked into a conference. And again, it was an employee engagement conference, and I gave a speech. And again, people were looking at me like I had two heads or something because I was talking about employee experience rather than employee engagement. I don’t buy into this nonsense that we have to categorize and label things. For me, engagement has always been an outcome of experience. So what happened with employee engagement is that management took it, and they built departments and functions around it. And they kind of turned it into this organization centric thing, which employees hate it, by the way.

All these surveys… It’s great to get intelligence from your workforce on a regular basis. But this once a year annual survey is a standalone thing saying, “What could we do? How proud do you feel to work here?” It was more like a tick box than any meaningful action. So I think this is where employee experience has changed things in that this is continuous. It’s real time. It’s really focused on things that we can transform right now to improve the experience that you deliver to your people and your key stakeholders.

Stuart Crainer:
Please send in your questions at any time. One thing that occurred to me, Ben, as you were talking about work life, the separation between work and the rest of your life, and which has been confused perhaps by the pandemic over the last year. But I think kind of merging the two, work and the rest of life, creates a lot of ambiguity and confusion for some people. In the past, it was black and white. And now, there’s a lot of gray areas. And that needs a hell of a lot of management personally.

Ben Whitter:
Yeah, exactly. And a greater level of appreciation, I would say from corporations and managers, in particular. Simply because the balance may be deserting. Because in some respects, people… They’re actually working longer hours now than they’ve ever worked. And the lack of communication, the lack of contact with people in the workplace is starting to take a toll in that people are feeling more anxious, stressed. They stand to second guess what’s going on in terms of communications. So I think it is. And I think it’s time we address this now as a critical business issue. Rather than just saying, “Okay, let’s put it in HR, and then leave it there.” And it becomes this HR thing. I think it’s time to stop that nonsense, and say as a business we’re accountable for all of this stuff. The anxiety levels of our people, but also the outcomes of our people when they’re performing to their fullest potential.

Why not own that completely and run it right through your business like a lot of companies are starting to do. Certainly the ones that we worked with in the past and other companies that are starting to really embrace this idea as a holistic and strategic business approach. As opposed to, “Okay, yeah, we need to do this. Let’s create some roles, and shove it in HR or another support function.” I think we really need to question some of the fundamentals of that. One example I’ll give you, a tangible example, Dave, and this is for the new book in… Comes out in May. They actually got rid of HR completely, and put in a working life team to better kind of design and work with people around this idea that work and life is starting to converge. And we need to manage this in a much more sophisticated and nuanced way.

Des Dearlove:
It’s interesting. When you were talking earlier, you used a phrase brand truth, which I think sort of really resonated for me that you… There’s a sense of the authentic person that you might be dealing with and that they haven’t necessarily got this large organization looking over their shoulder. But even… I was talking to somebody today, I was trying to sort something out with my telephone system, and it was very, very helpful. The guy was really, really good and really helpful. But at the end of our experience, our sort of shared experience, he said, “Oh, you’re going to get a survey from the company.” And you could tell that… I immediately started to wonder how authentic it was, and whether he had got someone breathing down his neck actually. And what that’s like from his side. I mean, it’s easy for me. Again with hand on heart, I could just say, “Yeah, he was really good.” But he’s still being watched. He’s still being monitored. His experience in that sense. It’s not one of total trust. Let’s put it that way.

Ben Whitter:
Yeah. This, I suppose in the future, is going to really differentiate the strong world class brands from all the rest. Because there’s just going to be, a deep level of trust that’s built into the business. And they’re not going to be part of this surveillance economy business where 600% increase in surveillance technology within the workplace over the past pandemic is just… If we go down that direction, I don’t think it leads to good things. If we build genuine trust with people, I think you can only get good things from that.

Stuart Crainer:
There’s a question from [Minor] and [Porio] in Brussels about employee experience and the customer experience. It’s common to kind of understand the customer experience in terms of life cycle management and presumably employee experiences. They go through life cycles. Life, I suppose… Are there parallels which can be usefully extracted?

Ben Whitter:
Yeah, they go through life. And I think their employee experience is over when they’re dead. I think that’s the bottom line. And, in reality, that is the bottom line simply because we never truly leave an employer because we will go with the experiences we’ve had. And we will go to other places, to other networks, and we will talk about them forever. So if we have a fantastic experience, we’re going to be telling our networks. We’re going to be sharing about it every opportunity we get. Likewise, if we’ve had a terrible experience, toxic workplace, toxic management, we can’t wait to tell those stories. We cannot wait. And, we’ll keep on doing it until the cows come home, really. So, that’s why it becomes massively important I think in terms of… The relationship never ends. The contract may end. That’s a different thing, and that’s the legal side of it. But the relationship will never end. It’ll stay with us. And, if you think about your best employer and your worst employer, I think you’ll immediately find some examples of why that’s absolutely true. Because, I’ve certainly got loads of them, to be honest.

Des Dearlove:
Great. We’ve got other questions from Asher [Navid] from Tehran. How can gamification improve employee experience?

Ben Whitter:
Yeah, I think for this one… I did a gamification conference a while ago. And again, some really interesting technology coming into the employee experience now. Gamifying things like customer service scores, and learning and development is being gamified all over the place. I mean, some organizations… They certainly take incentives to the next level. So they’re starting to incentivize certain behaviors and to generate certain outcomes. But I think, yeah. Absolutely. It can create some value.

But we need to be mindful of Stuart’s points and your points earlier around… You can go too far with that in terms of is that really authentic? Are we playing to win for the right reasons? And I think that’s where corporations historically have maybe gone around… Run their houses on… Potentially taken a wrong turn here and there. Because they gamify the wrong things, they get the wrong behaviors. And then, you end up with corruption and scandal as an afterthought of some of that stuff.

Stuart Crainer:
Ben, you spent time in China with the University of Nottingham at Ningbo, I think. How did that inform your ideas because the employee experience in China is very different from the employee experience outside of China?

Ben Whitter:
Well, I loved it. Just because it was… I mean, year one, super challenging. Different culture, different sector, different style of working. I had to work directly with the Communist Party in China as well too. So every iteration of the employee experience I made, I would be working with political stakeholders. So, that’s not… It wasn’t new to me, but it was a different side of the politics. So yeah, I think it was challenging but exciting. We delivered a lot of great stuff there. We improved engagement. But some of the ideas that I have had were covered quite extensively by publications like MIT, Sloan. Getting some really good research out there to say, “Look, this stuff even works in international organizations, in Chinese organizations.” So it was good validation of some of the work that we were doing on employee experience because a lot of people will turn around and say, “Well, you can’t do this in China.” Well, what we found out over a three year period is you absolutely can, and you can do this anywhere. And it works.

There’s a great case study in my book, in the first book, from [Haidilao], which is a hot pot restaurant. The best customer experience ever in the world ever, ever. It was… You have to experience this for yourself to understand what I mean. Chinese colleagues on the call will understand what I mean. But they’ve leveled up customer experience with employee experience and the results were sensational. Just absolutely fantastic. And I have another case study in the second book, Human Experience at Work, which they don’t have a HR officer. The CEO takes full accountability for the quality of their employee experience at this multi-billion dollar brand. It’s a great, great story. So China… Yeah, we can do it though.

Des Dearlove:
Yeah. Sorry. You mentioned, your new book’s not out until May the third, I think.

Ben Whitter:
Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. May the third.

Des Dearlove:
[I’d like to] ask about it now. What’s fresh, what’s new in the second book?

Ben Whitter:
I think it’s moving on in terms of I’ve taken my journey into different parts of the world. So both of my books are very, very global in their outlook. Where does this work? How is it working? What’s changing? I think the big thing that I’ve took from it is the acceleration of changes that are happening to support functions, and HR in particular. Even questioning the existence of HR in business is now ripe as an idea. So people are really starting to say, “Okay, if not HR, human resources, what do we move to?” Some are moving to employee experience functions. Some are moving to human experience functions.

I worked quite closely with Ford as well over the last year. And they’re a case study in the book. They’ve just changed from a chief HR officer into a chief employee experience officer for the brand, which is a huge signal of intent that these ideas are breaking through. But it’s all the things that… It’s not just a title change. It’s all the things that they do to back that idea up in practice and filter it through the organization, which has been exceptional to watch. And again, one of the missions now is to become the world’s most trusted brand. And I think they’re using employee experience to do that, which is fantastic.

Stuart Crainer:
But it’s not only HR, which is in your sights, really. It is leadership. I mean, what you’re talking about really is a kind of reinvention of leadership with caring at its core.

Ben Whitter:
And yeah, a true commitment to human centricity. So whereas, just a simple symbol of this, is maybe a one to one meeting. You go in there and the managers, you know “Where are the numbers? Where’s the deliverables? Where’s the objectives? What’s going on here?” It’s not doing that. It’s having the upfront conversation about how are you doing? How’s your human experience? How can I support you? How can I help you? How can I help you fulfill your potential?

It’s having that conversation as a part of the business conversation, just as a natural thing to do. And why wouldn’t you? You want your teams and people performing at their very best. You need to understand their wellbeing. You need to understand what’s stopping them from fulfilling their promise and potential. I think this is the idea that could break through in terms of… And it’s already starting to. Many people are talking about this idea, but it’s not just a case of this brand purpose and these lofty aspirations. It’s about what’s genuine, and true, and means something in those one to one relationships every single day. And that’s how you know you’re working for a terrific brand, like a world class brand.

Des Dearlove:
Okay. I think we’ve got time for one more question. [Sine] asked so-called overhead costs seem not to pay into the direct costs to serve customers. HR seems to hold onto the leg of the business and gets dragged along partially. When is it not seen as shared responsibility?

Ben Whitter:
Yeah. It’s a good point. Often the financials and the overheads… People are our greatest asset and all that kind of stuff. It’s just a dance, isn’t it? We waste so much time on corporate nonsense and corporate language that means nothing. This is why I respect brands like Huel, who they get on the front foot. They use strong language to communicate their point. But you’re absolutely, in no uncertain terms, understand where they stand. They are very, very clear. Similar to Grenade and Gymshark in the UK. These are brands on the up. And they absolutely know what their authentic brand is. And they communicate that’s with the employee experience. I think it’s fantastic. And we need more of it.

Stuart Crainer:
Yeah. We definitely need more of it. As Susan [Fisher] points out. We never truly leave an employer is a powerful, an absolutely true statement. I think it really is powerful. Ben, we’re out of time. We recommend Ben’s new book coming out in May, Human Experience at Work, and you’ve still got time to buy his old book as well. Required reading. The concept for human experience is really, really important. And the pandemic has brought it under the spotlight as never before. Thank you very much for your time and insights today, Ben. I’ll encourage you to check out Ben’s work. Next week, we’re joined by David Nour. Thank you all for joining us. Goodbye.

Ben Whitter:
Thank you.