As an executive coach, I have worked with some remarkable leaders – people with outstanding achievements and unbelievable wealth. Any outsider would assume they were happy.

They'd be wrong. Even these fortunate people often struggle to find happiness. Like so many others, they succumb to the great Western disease—I will be happy when. When I get promoted. When I reach the next professional milestone. When I make a certain amount of money. In reality, while it feels good to buy a fancy car or get the corner office, that joy wears off pretty fast. That's why I tell my clients not to hold out for prizes. Be happy now.

Jacob Morgan understands this fundamental truth—which is one reason I find this book so compelling. He makes a strong case for the value of jobs that create happiness, satisfaction, and well‐being in the present.

He's right that extrinsic rewards (like pay or bonuses) don't really motivate workers. Once they reach a certain baseline salary, money is no longer the main driver. They need something more. Reams have been written about the Millennial generation's hunger for impact and meaning at work. In one way, I think Millennials (and Generation Z, coming up after them) are not so different from the rest of us. They just voice desires the rest of us have learned to keep quiet.

We don't want to suffer through an unpleasant job so that we can get a reward on payday, or when we at long last reach retirement—especially now that the borders of the workday are blurring. With flexible work arrangements and technology that follows us home after the workday has officially ended, our personal and professional lives are no longer truly separate. If we wait until work is over to start accruing satisfying and meaningful experiences, we might end up waiting an awfully long time.

In my seminars, I argue that employees don't have to depend on a boss or an organization to make their working lives better. They can bring about positive change all by themselves. I recommend a process called the Daily Questions, which involves asking yourself a series of questions every day to see how much effort you put toward your main priorities. (I pay a colleague to call me every day for this very reason!) This way, the individual can be an agent of change, creating meaning, happiness and engagement from within.

Employees can engage themselves much better than an HR program can. And yet it's in the interest of organizations to improve levels of employee engagement, so they try. Given the stiff competition for top talent, it's easy to see why. Yet the billions they've invested haven't yielded much, as Morgan rightly notes. His explanation: they are looking at effects (engagement) without causes (the experiences that lead to certain levels of engagement). He recommends focusing on the root cause: the technological, physical, and cultural environments around the employee.

By looking closely at how environments affect workers, he offers some fresh and timely perspective. Most of us go through life unaware of how powerfully our environments shape our behavior. Because of another Western predilection to assume that we are in control—of ourselves and of our circumstances—we often fail to see that our environments rule us instead of the other way around.

My book Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts, Becoming the Person You Want to Be (with Mark Reiter; Crown, 2015) explores our triggers—the people and situations that often lure us into behaving in a manner unlike the colleague, partner, parent, or friend we hope and imagine ourselves to be. These triggers are relentless, constant, and omnipresent. The smell of bacon wafts up from the kitchen, and we forget our doctor's advice on lowering our cholesterol. Our phone chirps, and we glance instinctively at the glowing screen instead of looking into the eyes of the person we're with. Without a plan or a structured approach, these distractions can easily send our careers and lives off course.

Environmental triggers have profound implications in the workplace, which Morgan explores in admirable depth. His research reveals what cutting‐edge companies are doing to create environments that are helpful and stimulating, instead of taxing and draining. He has done his homework, and as a result he's able to show a wide range of fascinating new ideas and strategies. Whether you connect with all of them or just a few of them, this book is worth a read for the insight into what the future portends.

In our age of rapid technological advancement and unprecedented volatility, the only true certainty is change. The Employee Experience will arm leaders and organizations with future‐focused intelligence about how to get great people and keep them inspired and motivated.

When I wrote The Collaborative Organization, I was engaged. When I wrote my second book, The Future of Work, I was married. Now, with The Employee Experience Advantage, I'm a dad.

Each book thus far has been accompanied by a major life event and amazing new experiences. I am grateful for all of them and am excited to see what will happen when I write my next book!

My wife, Blake, has been my biggest source of inspiration, encouragement, and support. We spend most of our time together working and playing, and I'm so fortunate to have married my best friend. She makes me a better person. My family both near and far, I love you very much and appreciate your continued support and curiosity for what I do!

Writing a book is certainly a journey, and this one has been no exception, especially when considering the extensive research project that was conducted. I want to thank the John Wiley & Sons team for helping make this book possible: Lia, Peter, Shannon, and Elizabeth, you have all been a pleasure to work with (again!). Serge da Motta Veiga from American University, thank you for your support and guidance during the launch of this project. Steve King from Emergent Research, your advice, e‐mails, and phone calls really helped shape this project; thank you so much for your brilliant insights. Connie Chan, my business partner at The Future of Work Community, thank you for your continued support. A big thank‐you to all the members of The Future of Work Community, who continue to graciously share insights, ideas, and interesting topics for me to explore and think about. I've interviewed hundreds of senior executives at organizations around the world; thanks to all of you for being so open and transparent with me.

A big thank‐you to my team, who do an awesome job supporting me. Allen Mendoza, you're the best creative designer I have ever worked with; thank you for creating the book jacket and all the images in this book! Megan and Jen, thanks for keeping me on track and organized and for all you do to help make sure my ideas and messages keep spreading! Vlada, many thousands of people have listened to my podcasts and videos that you helped put together; thank you. Trisa, Teresa, Stacy, Alexis, and Erica, thanks for helping me research the hundreds of companies for this research project. Jeffrey, you are an awesome data scientist and analyst. Thank you for the hundreds of hours you contributed to help make sure all the collected data was accurate, reliable, and something that I could actually understand!

Two organizations graciously agreed to sponsor the research that is shared throughout this book. Those two organizations are Lever and Cisco, which you will learn more about in the following chapters. Francine Katsoudas, Gianpaolo Barozzi, and Leela Srinivasan, thanks for your continued support and for believing in me and in this project!

Life is short, very short. We might as well make the most of it while we have it. This is why so many of us want to explore the world, try new things, and otherwise venture off the beaten path, because as humans we are by nature curious. This is also why many of us focus on creating experiences instead of simply owning material things. We save up to eat at fancy restaurants on special occasions, go skydiving, visit exotic cities thousands of miles away from where we live, climb mountains, and do all sorts of other experiential activities. Nobody makes us do these things; we do them because we want to, all for the sake of getting that experience that will hopefully last us a long time or a lifetime. Most people don't stop to think about it, but experiences are really one of the main things that make us human.

Research done by Cornell University psychology professor Dr. Thomas Gilovich, University of Chicago postdoctoral research fellow Dr. Amit Kumar, and Dr. Matthew Killingsworth, who studies human happiness at the University of California, San Francisco, found that when people spend their money on experiences, over time their satisfaction goes up whereas when people spend money on physical things, over time their satisfaction goes down. The research also found that waiting for an experience elicits more happiness than waiting for a material good. Finally, they found when we spend money on experiences, those purchases are also more associated with our identity, connection, and social behavior. People who spend money on experiences instead of things are just happier all around.

In the past year, how many times have you spent your time or money on creating experiences for yourself or for others? A hundred times? Fifty times? What about in the past six months or the past week? What about in the past 24 hours? I'm willing to bet that you spend quite a bit of time and money on creating experiences regularly. Experiences stay with us throughout our lives. Not only do they shape who we are as human beings, but also they help us connect with and build relationships with others.

Clearly we as human beings care about experiences because we are willing to spend our hard‐earned time and money on creating them. We don't do this simply for the experiences themselves and for the feelings we get during a particular moment but because they create memories. The experiences themselves may be ephemeral, but the memories they create last far longer. So if experiences are so vital to our existence as human beings, then what happened to experience inside of our organizations? When you consider that we spend about 30 percent of our entire lives working (assuming you work only 40 hours a week, which many of us go far beyond) this becomes a scary statistic. We can even take this one step further and ask, “What happened to the humanity inside our organizations?” These experiences and their subsequent memories help shape the type of relationship we want (or don't want) to have with a coworker, manager, or organization as a whole.

As the world becomes more fascinated with discussions of robots and automation, this experience aspect is more important than ever! While many futurists and business leaders believe that robots and automation are taking jobs away from humans, I believe that it's the humans who are taking the jobs away from robots.

Decades ago before the Internet, when modern management was just getting started, we didn't have any type of connectivity, and these discussions around robots and automation weren't even an afterthought. It was perhaps a much simpler time when the role of humans was simply to show up at the same time every day, do the same job over and over, wear the same outfit or uniform, report to the same person, take a break at the same time, not ask any questions or cause any problems, and work like a robot basically. But we didn't have robots or automation at the time so what did we do? We used humans. Basically we have designed perfect organizations for robots and automation, but because we didn't have those at the time, we used the next best thing: people. Now, when these technologies finally exist, they are claiming the jobs and responsibilities that we designed for them to begin with. Humans were simply placeholders like bookmarks in a novel. Today organizations around the world are trying to figure out how they have to redesign themselves to focus more on people…more on humans. Robots don't care about experiences at work but humans do.

The experiences organizations design are ultimately what shape the actions that employees take and the relationships or associations that they want to have with your organization (if any). The challenge we have to overcome today is how to shift our relationship with work from feeling like a physical purchase, where satisfaction starts to decline over time, to an investment in an experience, where our satisfaction increases over time.

This is further supported with research done by career website Glassdoor. On its blog Mario Nuñez posted an article titled “Does Money Buy Happiness? The Link Between Salary and Employee Satisfaction,” which revealed something quite surprising. According to the article:

One unexpected finding is that there is a clear relationship between years of experience and happiness at work. In short, older workers tend to be less satisfied. For example, a one‐year increase in years of experience is associated with a 0.6‐point decrease in overall employee satisfaction, after controlling for all other factors. This might reflect learning about the quality of work environments over time. Or perhaps workers become more jaded with their employer as they progress throughout their career.¹

This was based on a sample of 221,000 Glassdoor users.

In my last book, The Future of Work (Wiley, 2014), I shared that synonyms for employee include cog, servant, and slave; synonyms for manager include boss, slave driver, and zookeeper. Synonyms for work include drudgery, struggle, and daily grind. This is quite literally how we have structured many of our organizations over the past few decades. We have actually designed the humanity out of our organizations. However, today we are starting to realize that this way of thinking about work no longer makes any sense.

The one big assumption we have always had about our organizations has now proven to be completely wrong. Organizations have always assumed that people needed to work there. After all, you have expenses, bills to pay, a family to look after, and things you want to buy. The organization has a job it can offer you to help you take care of those things so it's clearly a good fit. This has been the traditional relationship between employer and employee, and organizations have always had all the control and the power. Again this was the simple equivalent of purchasing a physical good. Oftentimes these same organizations were simply able to rely on their brand power to attract and retain talent.

Today that is no longer the case. The war for talent has never been fiercer, and in an effort to attract and retain the best and brightest, organizations have to shift from creating places where they assume people need to be to creating organizations where people truly want to be. This shift in approach from need to want is also causing organizations to move from utility to employee experience.

UTILITY

Decades ago the relationship we had with our employers was pretty straightforward. Employers had jobs they needed to fill; we had bills to pay, things we wanted to buy, and certain skills we could offer, so we tried to get that open job. This basic relationship also meant that work was always about utility, that is, the bare‐bones, essential tools and resources that an employer can provide employees to get their jobs done (see Figure 1.1). Today that is typically a computer, desk, cubicle, and phone. In the past this may have been a desk, pen, notepad, and phone, or perhaps just a hammer and nails. That was it. Can you imagine if someone were to bring up health and wellness programs, catered meals, bringing dogs to the office, or flexible work efforts in the past? Give me a break! They would be laughed at and the employee most likely fired on the spot! These things are all relatively new phenomena that are now only starting to gain global attention and investment. Granted, there are still plenty of organizations out there that are still stuck in the utility world.

PRODUCTIVITY

After the utility era came the productivity era. This is where folks like Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henri Fayol pioneered methods and approaches to optimize how employees worked. Managers literally used stopwatches to time how long it would take employees to complete a task to shave off a few seconds here and there. It was analogous to trying to get a sprinter or swimmer to improve his or her lap time. All of this was designed to improve productivity and output while emphasizing repeatable processes, such as the famous factory assembly line. Unfortunately at the time, we didn't have robots and automation to do these jobs (which they would have been perfect for), so instead we used humans. Today, we finally have the technology capable to do the jobs they were designed for, and the humans who were simply acting as placeholders are now in trouble. Robots aren't taking jobs away from humans; it's the humans who took the jobs away from robots. As with the utility era, there also wasn't much focus on creating an organization where the employee truly wanted to be. Productivity was simply utility on steroids!

ENGAGEMENT

Next came engagement, a radically new concept where we saw the collective business world say, “Hey, maybe we should pay more attention to employees and what they care about and value instead of just trying to extract more from them.” And thus, the era of engagement (or enlightenment) was born. This was actually quite a revolutionary approach that shifted some of the focus away from how the organization can benefit and extract more value from employees to focusing on what the organization can do to benefit the employees and understand how and why they work. The more engaged an employee is, the better! This is where we stopped and where we have been for the past two or three decades. There have been all sorts of studies that have shown engaged employees are more productive, stay at the company longer, and are generally healthier and happier.

I'll admit that when I first started writing this book, I was convinced that employee experience and engagement were at odds with each other. I mistakenly believed that experience must replace engagement. In fact there were thousands of words originally devoted to that very rationale that I had to scrap from this book. I've since changed my tune. Employee experience doesn't need to replace engagement. The two can actually work together, and in fact, they have to. Instead I view employee experience as something that creates engaged employees but focuses on the cultural, technological, and physical design of the organization to do that. Still, our current definitions and understanding of employee engagement need to evolve before that can happen. Many of the questions and frameworks used to explore engagement haven't changed since they were first introduced into the business world, which creates some challenges.

EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

Let's say you buy an old car at a junkyard and then spend thousands of dollars on new paint, upholstery, rims, and interior upgrades. Even though the car will look beautiful, it will still drive like the same car you brought home from the junkyard. If you want to improve how the car performs, then you need to replace the engine. Organizations around the world are investing considerable resources into things such as corporate culture programs, office redesigns, employee engagement initiatives, and well‐being strategies. Unfortunately these things make the organization look better but have little impact on how it actually performs.

Many organizations today use employee engagement and employee experience interchangeably without any distinguishable difference, which is incorrect. Employee engagement has been all about short‐term cosmetic changes that organizations have been trying to make to improve how they work. If this approach doesn't work for a car, then it certainly won't work for an organization.

If employee engagement is the short‐term adrenaline shot, then employee experience is the long‐term redesign of the organization. It's the focus on the engine instead of on the paint and upholstery. Chances are you've heard of the term customer experience, which is typically defined as “the relationship that a customer has with a brand.” Most people reading that would say, “Well, of course that's what it is. Isn't that obvious?” Yes it is, which is why I think it's really a meaningless definition that provides no context or direction for what that actually looks like. This is why I wanted to avoid simply defining employee experience as “the relationship between an employee and the organization.” That doesn't help anyone or provide any value, and as with the customer experience, it's rather obvious. So then what is employee experience?

There are a few ways we must look at this. The first is through the eyes of the employee, the second is through the eyes of the organization, and the third is the overlap between the two. When reading through these you may decide to lean toward the side of the employee or the organization, but since two parties are involved, it is in both the employee's and the organization's best interest if we view employee experience as something that is created and affected by both.

For the people who are a part of your organization, their experience is simply the reality of what it's like to work there. From the perspective of the organization, employee experience is what is designed and created for employees, or put another way, it's what the organization believes the employee reality should be like. This, of course, is a challenge and one we see in our everyday lives. Have you ever said or done something to a loved one or friend that was well intentioned yet was perceived as being rude or disrespectful? This is the same scenario we see play out between organizations and employees all the time. Just because the organization does something doesn't mean the employees perceive it in the intended way. Naturally this causes problems not just in our personal lives but also at work.

You may have seen The Truman Show, a film about a man who is living in a world that was designed for him by an organization. His entire perceived world was constructed from a massive stage, and although he didn't realize it, every action and event that took place was planned. Regardless of how hard the organization tried to keep Truman from leaving the world that was created for him, he eventually did break free. In some ways this is how our organizations operate. They tell us when we can work, what tools we should use, what to wear, when we can get promoted or learn something new, whom we can talk to, and when we can eat or take breaks. Not only that but they also control the environments we work in and pretty much anything and everything else that happens within the walls of the organization. As an employee you have virtually no say in what happens for around 8 to 10 hours of your day. Although our organizations aren't exactly Truman‐izing our lives, there are parallels that can be drawn here. So where does that leave us?

The ideal scenario is the overlap between the employee's reality and the organization's design of that employee reality. In other words, the organization designs or does something, and the employees perceive it in the intended way. This is possible because as you will see in the following chapters, employees actually help shape their experiences instead of simply having them designed by the organization (aka the Truman approach).

Taking that viewpoint, one can define employee experience as “the intersection of employee expectations, needs, and wants and the organizational design of those expectations, needs, and wants.” You can see this in Figure 1.2 below.

However, what resonates more with people is saying “designing an organization where people want to show up by focusing on the cultural, technological, and physical environments.” Phrasing it this way essentially encapsulates the entire relationship and journey that an employee experiences while interacting with an organization, but it also breaks it down a bit into three distinct environments, which makes it easier to understand than saying, “Employee experience is everything.”

One crucial thing to keep in mind is that employee experiences can't be created unless the organization knows its employees. The word organization is broadly used as a way to represent executives, managers, and the collective workforce. If you've ever booked a trip through a travel agent, you know that he or she spends an extensive amount of time getting to know who you are. That way he or she can plan a trip for you that is sure to give you a memorable experience. In the same way that travel agents truly know who their customers are, the organization must truly know who its workforce is. As you will see later in this book, that means not only leveraging people analytics but also having a team of leaders who have the capacity and the desire to connect with people on a truly individual and human level.

Experience is also subjective because human beings have emotions, different perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors. If we all behaved the same way and thought the same way, then it would be quite easy for organizations to design perfect employee experiences all the time for everyone. Of course, this is not the case. Does this mean that organizations should simply give up? Clearly not. As you will see in this book, employee experiences are made up of a specific set of environments and variables, and the leading organizations have invested considerable time and resources into making sure they are implemented properly. Every organization in the world has employees who have their own experiences. Whether you help create them or not, they still exist. Employee experience is simply too important and too key of a business differentiator simply to be left up to chance.

As I mentioned earlier, though, this employee experience design process isn't just done for employees; it's done with them. That's a very important point to keep in mind because many organizations get stuck in the design for mentality, which kills their efforts.

The majority of this book will explore how to design and create employee experiences by building what I call the Experiential Organization. Let's define what this actually means:

An Experiential Organization (ExpO) is one that has been (re)designed to truly know its people and has mastered the art and science of creating a place where people want, not need, to show up to work. The Experiential Organization does this by creating a Reason for Being and by focusing on the physical, technological, and cultural environments.

From here on out we will take a deep dive into what these environments are, the variables that shape them, and how to go about creating an Experiential Organization that outperforms the competition.