'EX manifesto' lays out values, principles of employee experience

The concept of the employee experience (EX) is something that many HR professionals have struggled to define and embrace in recent years.

But a new initiative is addressing the issue head-on: The EX manifesto was launched in late 2022 by a diverse group of global HR leaders, spearheaded by an organization called Excellent, which is a network of EX leaders.

So, what’s it all about? The definitions, values, principles and design of employee experience, says Samantha Gadd, cofounder and co-CEO of Excellent and leader of the EX Manifesto project based in Wellington, New Zealand.

“What we really wanted to do is put a flag in the sand for what employee experience is and how organizations might think about really integrating this way of thinking into their work to drive better business outcomes.”

By providing a written document of standards, there is a playbook on achieving great EX, she says.

“Providing some principles and producing employee experience design is a way forward and it’s a way for organizations to really build enduring companies that are employee-centred, and we really believe that is going to be the future of work.”

Along with Jenny Busing, cofounder and co-CEO at Excellent, the paper is designed to help organizations perfect the way people feel about their jobs.

The manifesto contains three main parts, looking at definitions, values — including the values to reframe conversations and success metrics — and seven principles of EX design. These include finding “mutually beneficial outcomes for both organization and employees” and taking “a human-centred approach that encourages reciprocal trust and understanding, not traditional top-down management practices.”

It contains “the ingredients for success but not the recipe – that’s up to each organization to create,” say the contributors.

Leaders from companies represented are Patagonia, Uber, IBM and Airbnb – the first organization in the world to appoint an EX-person to an executive level.

What exactly is EX?

Before finalizing the document, Gadd noticed there was a lack of real clarity around what good EX was.

“Everyone we spoke to doesn’t really understand what employee experience is, and also how to go about it, and how maybe it’s different to HR, and a lot of people were just interchanging HR or people and culture with employee experience.”

The group was inspired by the Agile Manifesto, which was written in 2001 by 17 contributors and details the best way to achieve software development, says Gadd.

Currently, more than 400 individuals across 24 countries have signed onto the manifesto, including Joerg Staff, chief people officer at Atruvia AG, an IT service provider in Karlsruhe, Germany.

“The HR role is at the end of a life-cycle. It needs a new model because the current models are very old,” he says.

“We all learned during COVID that it is much more impactful to work cross-functional, and to combine efforts in a company towards the employees. And also, from an employee perspective, they’d love to be serviced by a 360-degree approach and not by a functional, siloed approach.”

HR leaders need to focus on EX now more than ever, says another senior executive.

Talk to employees first

By asking employees what they want to see in their own organization’s EX, this will ensure a successful outcome, says Staff.

“I know that 99 per cent of companies do not really execute on employee experience because they only optimize the HR processes and a new branding employee experience to put it on HR, but that did not change anything.”

Principle four of the EX Manifesto says: “Design with, not for, employees. Co-design puts the needs of employees at its heart because no one knows their needs better than they do.”

It’s this employee-centric focus that will bring about the best results, according to Staff, because employees know what they need to be productive more than leaders and HR alone. 

“You need also to think about how you set up the whole company organization, how you collaborate with the company, how you get rid of hierarchies, how you move to a more agile model, how you move to a more cross-functional work together in teams. It needs much more than only to implement it,” he says.

By not focusing enough on exit interviews, the HR department misses an opportunity to perfect EX, found a recent survey.

Because EX affects the entire organization, HR should reach out to all other departments before finalizing a set of principles, according to Staff.

“I would recommend to really connect to other departments and build up collaborations, or circles, where you talk about ‘How can we improve our employee experience? What are the moments that matter from an employee’s point of view?’

“And start with some project work to build up new solutions combined between HR, digital and physical workplace departments and perhaps also the strategy departments and then some other departments — everybody who connects to employees.”

Leaders need to step up

When thinking about designing the in-house EX, the biggest mistakes often stem from leader inaction, says Gadd.

“The first thing is really getting past this fear and actually trusting that employees will have valuable input,” she says.

“I see this all the time from wonderful leaders, who are very experienced; who are scared of asking and they’re scared because they think that employees are going to be unreasonable and ask for things that the organization can’t afford or doesn’t want to provide.”

But many times, it is the employees who are reasonable and their input is valuable, she says.

The goal of the EX Manifesto is simple, but it means there is tough work ahead for senior people leaders, says Gadd.

“I would love to see the feeling of work transformed for employees all around the world. I really believe that work is so important to so many people and the expectations of employees have radically shifted. Engagement has stayed the same for 20 plus years — even though hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in engagement — and so we clearly need a new way.”

The best thing for HR to do is share it with the leaders, and ask them whether they think their organization represents some of these values and principles, she says.

“If they do, how’s that going for them? If they don’t, why is there a gap and just start a conversation,” says Gadd.

“That sets a good starting point because this will be quite new for a lot of leaders, and some leaders will believe they’re doing this already and that conversation is a really good starting point.”