Experiencing experience

This episode featured a chat with a friend of the show Dr Dan Wakelin who was asked about any advice he would give other aspiring workplace leaders. He offered this little nugget:

“Personally, I think the hospitality industry as a whole spends a lot more time thinking about the experiences that they provide and the touch points where they can keep improving on that service and the experience that they're delivering, and I think they do that much, much better than most workplaces.

… I think we've got a lot that we could learn from the hospitality industry, and I'm sure there are others as well where they're really thinking about that journey”

I loved this.

Now, the idea of ‘hotelling the workplace’ is not a new one but what Dan’s suggestion stirred up in me was the constant frustration and disappointment that I have when an experience doesn’t live up to the expectation.  

Booking a holiday, returning an item, claiming on the insurance or using a self-scanning checkout. All of them should, on paper, be a relatively easy process but there are so often moments when you’re left screaming at the universe. The time you’re on hold, having to repeat yourself to several different operators, finding documentation that you’ve long forgotten about.  

Sorry, I was exorcising some demons there.

Long story short, if we think about it, we’ve got plenty of experience of experience. What we love and hate but how often do we apply that thinking to workplace experience? Do we put ourselves in the shoes of our employees and the ordinary, repeated tasks they go through each day and whether it’s a frictionless experience?

If you were to ask your people to describe their everyday experience of the workplace, what would they say? Booking meeting rooms, seeing who else is in the building, submitting expenses, booking holidays. How easy is it?

The one that irritates me is signage. The number of times I follow a sign only to be dumped into a section of space with multiple options and NO SIGNAGE! Surely someone walked the route and was only allowed to follow the signs. Surely!?!

So why is this such an elusive idea? My take is that quite often these experiences are designed based on the experience of the person designing the experience. At best it’s easy to slip into not realising that you’ve got knowledge of a process that others won’t have; at worst it is a dangerous ignorance of other people’s differing needs and lived experience.  

Sometimes it’s the systems or processes, but if everything is built around the ‘consumer’ experience then decisions and business cases for this should be framed around that. I mean, how much extra work is generated through badly designed experiences?

I’ve moaned a lot about this so let me tell you of an AMAZING experience I once had at UBS’s head office in Liverpool St. I arrived to meet with the workplace team there. I went through the usual exchange at the reception desk and was pointed towards a colleague positioned by the stairs. As I approached, they said, “Hello Mr Moriarty, you’ll be getting lift H today” …as I approached lift H, it opened and took me to my floor. As the doors opened there was a member of the team there to greet me “Hello Mr Moriarty, you’re in meeting room 12, follow me”. And when I arrived, I was offered tea/coffee.  

Now, you might sit there and tell yourself that is what is to be expected from a global financial institution, they’ve probably thrown money at that solution.

I’m not so sure.  

Yes, there will be some decent systems underpinning that work, but I reckon that the investment was in walking the process step by step, mapping out what they wanted to happen, and how it can be supported through a mixture of process, systems and communication. Credit to Portico who runs the front-of-house services!

That mindset can be applied to almost every interaction, action or process in the workplace. It will take some time and will always evolve but isn’t that what the workplace team should be focused on? We’ve talked for so long about the shift from managing buildings to enabling communities, well this is what we’re talking about.  

And if something isn’t right or you can’t quite work out why something isn’t working what can you do? Well, ask people and listen. So often our clients tell us that the big insights weren’t about sweeping workplace design changes, in fact, it’s the smallest tweaks and adjustments that go a long way to minimising these clunking, jarring experiences. Replacing coin machines for female hygiene products with a basket of free products. Allowing employees to book desks for both them and their colleagues. Circulating communications about how to use certain workspaces. Reminding colleagues not to do Teams meetings in the open plan office without headphones (seriously?!?!).

So, take Dan’s advice, keep your eyes and ears open as you go through our super-connected, ever-active world spot those magical moments of experience, decode it and think about what you can learn to support your workplace experience.

‍