Canadian HR Reporter Weekly

2 Canadian HR Reporter, a Thomson Reuters business 2018 CANADIAN HR REPORTER WEEKLY "Employee experience" is a term gaining ground in the field of human resources, and an impending talent short- age in Canada means quality employee experience will be a necessity going forward, according to Alana Free, vice- president of people and culture at GoodLife Fitness. "We have to have amazing employee experience," she said, speaking at the Employee Experience Summit Canada in Toronto on Sept 25. "I don't know what it's going to look like, but it has to be outstanding because we're going to be fighting like crazy to keep our people." Defining employee experience One definition of the term could be "people's perception of the sum of their interactions with (an) organization that lead to their feeling — their thinking — influencing their behaviours and their performance," according to Stephanie Denino, employee experience manager at Accenture in Montreal, who attended the conference. Different lenses exist in terms of viewing employee experience, such as a worker's expected path through the talent life cycle, highlighted by "moments that matter" — recruitment or onboarding, for instance, she said. "I find it interesting to see how wide open this space is, and how many people are grappling to define the term and the mandate. When you think about what's next, a lot of people are talking about the need to break down silos and how we solve for our people more holistically." Various definitions of employee experience exist, though many remain vague, according to Jacob Morgan, author of e Employee Experience Advantage in San Francisco, Calif. "I define employee experience as changing the core workplace practices around your people focused on three environments — which are culture, technology and physical space," he said. "ose are the three environments that every organization can control and shape and design for, and I think that's much more of a tangible way for us to think about it." Shifting the conversation Employee experience can involve a radical organization redesign in an effort to put employees at the centre of all decisions, said Morgan. And companies that have em- braced this shift are "spending much more time in HR thinking about how to transform the business, how to design experiences, instead of just spending all of their time thinking about HR, payroll and compliance," he said. "It's shifting the mindset of the company to focus more on transformation and less on traditional HR." Companies have created job positions around the trend in an effort to attune core workplace practices towards people, rather than simply perks and benefits, said Morgan. "It's definitely caught on," he said. "(But) I still think it's in the very early stages and most companies actually still don't know what that means and are not familiar with the phrase, so (there's still) a long way to go." "is is going to be the greatest competitive advantage for businesses going forward," said Morgan. "I see employee experience as kind of the next arena that businesses will compete around, and the companies that design the greatest employee experiences will be able to attract and retain the best talent, drive innovation, have better financial performance, better customer experiences." Employee experience gains ground 'It's shifting the mindset to focus more on transformation, less on traditional HR' BY MARCEL VANDER WIER Sign up for the Canadian HR Newswire today for free and enjoy great content from the publishers of Canadian HR Reporter. HR News at Your Fingertips THE LATEST NEWS THE BEST COMMENTARY DELIVERED WEEKLY FOR READING ON ANY DEVICE Visit www.hrreporter.com/ canadian-hr-newswire

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