An EX and CX leader walk into a bar

Perspectives part 1 March 27, 2024 and part 2 April 11, 2024 by Stephanie Denino

 

Part 1: An EX leader and an (inquisitive) CX leader walk into a bar…

 

— Told from the perspective of an EX advisor (yours truly), who speaks to countless EX leaders and to more and more CX leaders. —

CX leader:
So what’s your job about, anyway?

EX leader:
Ha, good question. It depends on the day. Sometimes I feel like I lead the special projects team (i.e. do whatever our CHRO throws my way that isn’t owned by anyone else); other times I feel like an advisor pulled in any time someone needs an answer to “will employees like this or will it piss them off?”

Sometimes I feel like I’m making real strides in helping leaders see the power of us improving people’s experiences at work and the practices that allow for this…and other times I feel like I am shouting into a void where ‘EX’ is just another buzzword that people head nod to, but change little to how they operate in support of it.

CX leader:
I hear you… That was my life circa 2013. And actually, some of this is still sometimes true today…

So I’m curious, what part of the overall employee experience are you involved in improving these days?

EX leader:
Well, these days my team is helping improve the onboarding experience…. It’s been a year long effort where my team has yet again carried most of the load because there was no clear ‘experience owner’ in this space.

CX leader:
Onboarding… Interesting. What will you focus on next?

EX leader:
We’ll probably help with internal mobility – it recently became a hot topic for our CHRO, and we don’t really have anyone on point to solve.

CX leader:
Do you always only focus on improving experiences that are largely in HR’s remit?

EX leader:
Actually, yes…

CX leader:
I don’t mean to sound judgmental, but people only spend a small fraction of their time at work in these types of moments. I’m not saying they are not important, but what about leaning in to improving people’s experiences of the actual work? Lord knows I could use some help there given the amount of internal complexity our people face trying to deliver to our customers…

EX leader:
Honestly, I’d love to do that kind of work. I just don’t how to bring this discipline of EX into the business.

———–

This conversation does not have to unfold this way.

These days, we are working with ambitious EX leaders who are determined to turbo charge their impact, and when possible, partnering with CX leaders to serve the business in reducing friction in the day to day work of their most critical talent segments. Not as a one off effort, but in a systemic way.

In the next week or so, I’ll be sharing a very different version of this conversation that reflects how some of the most progressive EX leaders are showing up. Stay tuned.

And in the meantime, let me know what thoughts this provokes for you.

 

 

Part 2: An EX leader and an (inquisitive) CX leader walk into a bar… (VERSION 2*)

 

 *Why is this VERSION 2? I recently wrote version 1 of this post and am now back as promised, showcasing what this conversation looks like with a progressive EX leader.

 

— Told from the perspective of an EX advisor (yours truly), who speaks to countless EX leaders and to more and more CX leaders. —

 

CX leader:

So what’s your job about, anyway?

 

EX leader:

In a nutshell, my job is to help our organization build what it takes to systemically improve our people’s experiences at work. Not in a one-off, project by project way, but in a scaled and continuous way. And not just for the typically HR-led moments anchored to the employee lifecycle, but also the day-to-day work that is inherently business-led.

Achieving that is obviously an enterprise-wide sport. So, through my work I engage, mobilize, motivate, equip, and enable all relevant ‘experience owners’ (i.e. leaders across the business, operations, HR, IT, etc.) with what they need to improve the ‘work experience ecosystem’ (e.g. processes, policies, people, technologies) that shape our people’s experiences at work.

 

CX leader:

I love that… It resembles a lot of how I approach my CX remit.

I’m curious, which employee experiences are you supporting the improvement of these days?

 

EX leader:

Well, these days my team is helping improve the day-to-day work experiences of our call center agents. By day-to-day work, I mean moments like ‘resolving a complex customer issue’, ‘handling an abusive caller’, ‘taking a scheduled/unscheduled break’. As we learned through the FOUNT measurement, these moments were both highly correlated to eNPS and low in satisfaction for our agents, making it imperative that we improve them if we hope to address our high first-year attrition in this role. This naturally also has big implications on the quality of service to our customers, as you know…

 

CX leader:

That’s fascinating. We need to partner on this kind of work… I’ve been doing similar work but starting from the customer perspective in our advisory business, and our work often naturally gravitates to changing and improving parts of the job for select employees, but it’s not yet as structured and scaled as it could be.

Us CX leaders fundamentally understand that superior CX depends on superior EX, but no one has been there to orchestrate this kind of discipline on EX before…until now.

What will you focus on next?

EX leader:

We’ve defined a vision and roadmap with the management committee to scale this kind of work to every high-volume talent segment that is customer-facing and to talent groups that build a significant portion of our products & services. The beauty of this approach is once we enable a part of our business, they can continue with this continuous improvement logic, even once my team is gone.

CX leader:

Wow, I love hearing you describe the path the to scaling this rigorous approach to EX management. I’m even more convinced that our efforts can be increasingly unified to jointly reduce the friction our employees and customers experience, allowing them to interact more seamlessly.

EX leader:

Precisely! Honestly, it wasn’t easy to get here, but now that we are, it’s amazing to see the reception from leaders across our organization. They now fundamentally understand that making work better and easier for and with our people in an ongoing way is a critical tool to unlock so many desired business outcomes – including improved productivity, reduced service costs, increased value to customers, improved operating margin, etc. Our COO even described this strategic imperative as our new ‘secret sauce’ for competitive differentiation.

———–

The best EX leaders are living out this conversation and more (I can only fit so much in 1 post!)

And as you can see, this isn’t only the doing of EX leaders. We work with ambitious business, operations, CX, EX and HR leaders who want to accelerate business results through improved work experiences.

If you’re interested in learning more about how, let’s talk.

 

By Stephanie Denino, TI People.