Transforming Employee Experience: From Abstract Concepts to Tangible Actions

Since 2013, I have immersed myself in the worlds of Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) in various capacities. My first project involved capturing and identifying insights and moments of opportunity (MOOs) between CX and EX in a large call center. My goal was to weave these insights together to elevate the network to the number one position for both customer and employee experience.

This was, of course, before EX became the buzzword it is today.

Over the years, I’ve heard “employee experience” described in countless ways, most of which sound abstract and fluffy. Terms like belonging, purposeful, authentic, and harmonized are frequently used. While these are great concepts, ask someone to make them tangible, and the clarity often disappears quickly.

Remember, a business speaks in numbers and stories, not in fluffy terms.

I’ve built my career on turning the abstract into action, and today, I’m going to share with you my SPIES concept. This lens has shaped my approach to employee experience since I began working in the field. I only truly named it in 2019, thanks to a tipsy conversation.

The Drunken Chat and a Unicorn

On June 16th, 2019, I had just travelled to Ghent, Belgium, a few days before I was scheduled to give a talk at a conference on the power of experience design (dressed up as a unicorn).

With the sun out and time to spare, there was only one thing for it: drinks.

Fast forward several drinks later (see below), and David (who hosts a great podcast) and I began talking shop about the alignment and differences between CX and EX, learning, and work in general. It was during this conversation that I hit upon the idea of work and learning being a customer’s choice—something they opt into or out of daily, monthly, and yearly.

This model is similar to how you choose to opt into this newsletter, a streaming service, or even your milk delivery.

I can still remember the key moments and questions:

• Imagine if employees paid to come to work.

• What would they pay to come to work?

• Would work be a subscription?

• Subscriptions need customers—who are they?

• Are employees the customers?

• What benefits and perks would a customer pay for?

From there, we explored whether employees would pay for learning as part of their subscription service, among many other questions. Clearly, with the beer flowing, our conversation moved on to other topics.

However, I remember returning to my hotel and jotting down thoughts influenced by the evening’s drinks:

• What are the employee products at work?

• How much and in what currency would they pay?

• What services do we have, like a milkman? (I told you I was drunk.)

• Why would an employee pay for this service versus another?

After that, it was just a matter of applying my background and understanding of product design, services, and experience design. It was then that everything clicked: the EX is an ecosystem of SPIES.

My Evolving Definition of Each

It’s important to note that it’s your customer (the employee) who decides what it is, not you. For example, you as the CHRP, CPO, or Head of may see Leadership as a product, but your customer may see it as a service. You may describe talent attraction as a service, but your customer may describe it as an experience.

For the sake of my sanity, this is how I currently define them:

• Service: Something that helps somebody do something to achieve their outcome. IT support and payroll could be services to the business and the customer.

• Product: Something physical or digital that a customer finds useful. Onboarding and leadership programs can be seen as products.

• Interaction: The moment and space of engagement between two entities. Every time you swipe your phone, click a link on the intranet or open a door, you’re engaging in an interaction.

• Experience: The feelings, perceptions, and reactions that a product, service, or interaction can drive. When designing for experience, we look at the big picture: how does this make someone feel? What thoughts does it provoke? What reaction does it cause? For example, the induction process could be seen as an experience for new hires.

• Subscription: A model of recurring exchange, where a customer agrees to a recurring exchange of resources for access to another resource. This could also be a product, service, or experience.

Why We Need It

Applying the SPIES model to the current experience is like stepping into the matrix. We no longer see the employee experience as abstract words and ask, “Why work here?” Instead, we start to see the DNA code that brings it to life—not 1s and 0s but SPIES.

By questioning whether what you’re building is a service, product, interaction, or experience, you start to see your work differently. Once you identify it through sensemaking, you can capture impactful metrics and measurements.

This model allows you to measure employee experience at an individual SPIE level, which compounds into a holistic view. This shift can be the snowflake that starts the avalanche, helping you see the value in:

• Moving from guessing resources to product resource accounting.

• Shifting from passive team practices to team patterning and tooling.

• Replacing vague HR metrics with a SPIE measurement engine.

• Moving from annual year-end reviews to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).

• Shifting from annual project budget allocation to agile and lean budgeting.

• Transitioning from static strategy to adaptive strategy.

Now, before you end up in a spiral like I have thinking about this, here are a few noodles I had to untangle:

• Yes, a big service can consist of smaller services.

• Yes, a service can consist of products.

• Yes, a product can provide a service.

• Yes, all have interactions and can drive visceral experiences.

• No, not everything is a visceral experience.

• Yes, we can design for experience.

• Yes, only when the foundation of a product or service is in place.

At this point, you may be sitting, rocking in a chair with blood running from your nose. But this is why people use words like belonging—because to make EX tangible, you have to first do the hard thinking work, and not many want to do it… because it’s HARD! This is why we need to see and design the employee experience as an ecosystem of SPIES.

As a builder of the People experience, you have to see all of the above from two points of view:

• The Business

• The Customer

This makes it all the more challenging; however, once you start to see things like leadership, onboarding, rewards, and performance as services, products, interactions, and experiences, you can start to needle and scratch at the value they are truly providing to the business and your customer.