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Steve:
So if you're a CX professional, then it's highly likely you've been involved in a customer journey mapping of some sorts. But have you taken the time to explore your employees journey?

Cecelia:
We are different teams in EX and CX, but there is so much about our work where we can be sharing best practices across these different areas. And journey mapping, I am seeing it having a really big impact in the way that people think about employee experience.

Steve:
Mapping the Journeys of your employees on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone. I'm Steve Walker, host of The CX Leader Podcast. And thank you for listening. It's never been a better time to be a CX leader and on this podcast we explore the topics and themes to help leaders like you deliver amazing experiences to your customers and employees. Journey mapping that tried and trued exercise of discovering your strengths as a company and the places in your customers journey where things could be improved. It's a great tool to identify pain points and create empathy for your customers. But what about your employees? Seems like it would be a great practice to build some empathy for your own team, right? Well, my guest today is going to talk more with us about EX journeys. And I'm delighted to welcome back to the program Dr. Cecelia Herbert, Principal Catalyst at the XM Institute. Cecelia, thanks for coming back on The CX Leader Podcast.

Cecelia:
Oh, thank you Steve and Team for having me. It's always delightful to have a conversation with you.

Steve:
Well, it's been a while. I actually got to see you there in Salt Lake City for the big X4, right?

Cecelia:
We sure did. I mean, seeing everybody together after what we've been through in the last couple of years, it just filled our cups. I don't know about you, but at XM Institute we went home just beaming, having been able to just physically see each other and realize how tall we all were or how tall we weren't. And and actually just having that time and space together, it was just magic. And we're going on the road, you know, X4 is hitting. We are we are all over the world right now. I've got my teammates are in Amsterdam and Germany and soon we'll be in London. Sydney, I'm heading to the Philippines. I'm, you know, heading to… We're heading everywhere. There is there is no corner of this globe that we're not doing it because in-person stuff is back. Human connection matters, and there's never been a better time to improve human experiences by actually having in-person events. And Man X4 was awesome. I'm already looking forward to next year.

Steve:
Yeah, it was. It was spectacular. And we just had our all company gathering in Indianapolis last week and it's, you know, how could it not be a good experience when people have been working together for a year and maybe have never met ever in person? How special is that? So.

Cecelia:
It's something we kind of took for granted. It's so magic. Yeah.

Steve:
Well, see, we're here. We are already reminiscing, But just for context, let's just make sure that everybody knows who you are. You mentioned XM Institute. And just give us just a little bit of your background and that'll set the context for our discussion.

Cecelia:
Yeah, it's it's interesting because our job titles of Catalyst doesn't exactly explain what we do very well. But, you know, what we're here to do is we wake up every day and we are driven by our mission to, you know, work with XM professionals across the globe to empower and inspire them so that they can go forward and radically improve human experience. And this happens in a whole bunch of different ways. Obviously, employee experience, customer experience. So many organizations are going through experience centric transformations right now and building this into the way they define the success of their businesses. And we're here to help those practitioners who are leading those programs to build those skills and capabilities so that they can do that well. By way of background so I've been with Qualtrics… I joined in 2019 as one of the early, early starters of the advisory services. So we called ourselves XM scientists supporting our customers to implement their EX and CX programs. So I came over from Google to do that work in 2019, setting up that team in the Asia Pacific region before joining XM Institute. But by way of background, I'm a doctor of organizational psychology, so it is all about the people. It is all about scientific methods and statistics with me. So strap yourself in for I usually get a few good research design statistical, you know, lectures from my university academic days usually slip into any of my advice that I give anyone.

Steve:
Well, that is a great background and thank you for sharing that. And you know, the topic of EX is, is more and more important to CX pros as we really move into a true XM approach. And in so many of our businesses, it's hard to separate the employee experience from what the customer experience ultimately becomes. So but I'm fascinated with this concept of journey mapping for employees. It seems like, you know, if businesses are constrained by talent, which I think a lot of businesses tend to be, this is a really powerful concept. So, you know, we all know that it's a popular tool for CX. But what does it look like for for EX?

Cecelia:
Yeah, it's been really interesting to see the the sharing of practices between EX and CX, you know, flowing both ways in organizations because our work is very, very different. The, the responsibilities that we have, what good performance looks like looks very different. So we are different teams in EX and CX but there is so much about our work where we can be sharing best practices across these different areas and journey mapping from the EX side of the fence, I am seeing it having a really big impact in the way that people think about employee experience. The way that I'm seeing it transform is, yes, there's the practice of journey mapping, but there's the thinking or the mindset of journeys, you know, having that journey perspective. When we're thinking about an employees perspective or an employees experience in our organizations. It's really helping shape what we think about in terms of what an employee experience is. We often what we do for ease of implementation and ease of actually getting stuff done, we segment out people's experiences. So think about the employee experience all the way from the moment you even think about working for that company, their brand, you think about the way you interact with their products, their, their reputation, and then you apply, then use your application experience, your interview experience right through to your candidate candidacy and your offer experience. Then you're moving into onboarding, then your past onboarding, and then you're adding value to your team. Then there's everything that happens in between. You Think about that journey of your performance management that you experience internal mobility, changing roles. You think about your benefits, your promotions. If you if you get promoted organization change and restructures. All of these things are really big moments in your employee journey and each one of them is their own journey.

Cecelia:
So even not only thinking about it from end to end, but the journeys within the journey. Because what's even happening I'll give you an example, an onboarding team, they're looking at the onboarding part of that journey, but onboarding is its own journey. From the time you accept an offer and you're thinking about the way the job was explained to you in that interview, setting you up with expectations and how that enables you through that onboarding experience. We know how crucial it is to get that part of the journey right, to set people up and teams up for success. When you have a broken onboarding journey, you break your culture. You have people who come in and then they leave who don't ever get to that point where they are engaged and productive employees. You spend a lot of money getting them in the door only to have them leave too soon. So how do you make sure you don't have bad hires? All of these sorts of things are so critical just in that employee journey.

Steve:
Yeah.

Cecelia:
But then when you when these people zoom out and they think about that onboarding journey and how it fits in to the even bigger journey, then that transforms the way that people are thinking about employee experience. We've come from a background of doing engagement surveys. Like a lot of times people think about employee experience being your annual engagement survey. When you switch to that journey thinking it totally changes the way you think about EX, And we have the world of CX to really help, to really thank for helping us make that transition in EX.

Steve:
Yeah, you could almost do these this overall journey for different personas, right? The candidate, the new employee, the the mid-career employee. So yeah, I like it.

Cecelia:
Yeah. And and even just think about that for a new employee changing roles so the re onboarding.

Steve:
Exactly yeah exactly.

Cecelia:
And when I was at Google, we did a lot of work. I was in the diversity team, not everybody on boards the same way. Not everybody comes from a privileged background where they're able to turn up on that first day with a car and a bond on an apartment and, you know, ready to kind of go on that first day. Some people, it's their first job. And, you know, getting getting through that door on that first day is going to be very, very different for them. So we're even thinking about the journeys before they even step through that door and how that impacts that onboarding journey. It's really, really powerful when you're thinking about the design of that experience. Yeah,

Steve:
Yeah. So I guess if I'm a CX pro, what do I need to be thinking about in terms of this employee journey?

Cecelia:
Yeah, well, there's a few things. So first is your program that you're running, your CX program is an employee experience. There are people in your organization who are using and consuming those insights. They are taking those insights and it's informing their work and how it helps them make decisions. It helps them successfully deliver outcomes for their customers. We know from the employee engagement virtuous cycle that we've developed at XM Institute, we know that great employee engagement leads to great customer outcomes. And when people feel like they're getting great customer outcomes, that feeds back into their engagement. So that part of that process where they're able to deliver great outcomes for their customers, CX professionals play a massive role in that. So what we've been encouraging people to do in EX is getting people to think beyond HR about EX. EX is an employee experience is something that everybody in the business creates. Think about the security team at the front desk when you're walking in. Think about your facilities, teams and your workplace design. Think about your IT teams and your technology experience. All of these teams every day are crafting the employees experiences. So the CX team is also doing the same. How are they enabling people to do a great job? We know in EX that the number one driver of burnout is inefficient systems and processes. It isn't the like Obviously hours and workload is a huge component, but we and CX are run these programs, they run. They are a system and a process that either are easy to use and make my job easier or hard to use and make my job harder. So in that way, in particular, they're definitely impacting the employee experience. And then a second thing which will probably get to in this podcast is who do you think is delivering those customer experiences? It's your people.

Steve:
Yeah,

Cecelia:
And customers value human interaction beyond all other interactions. They value human contact. And so how are how the employees are experiencing their work is having a direct impact on your customer experience outcomes. And that is a whole new world of work that CX practitioners are leaning into now.

Steve:
Wow. When you were talking, I had a breakthrough and I think we've always talked about the connection between CX and EX and how important it is. And then that employees are typically drawn to their organization because of the mission, that that's that's probably one of the most important things in a EX experience is, is the work I'm doing meaningful? Is it making a difference? The way you just explained it now, CX really is a part of the employee experience and it can be a really key, key point of that. So I have in my notes a "duty of care," and I know that's some sort of Dr. Cecelia thing that we ought to all know, so.

Cecelia:
Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know if this is a universally used term, but I found it really, really interesting to help CX and EX professionals understand each other a little bit better. You know, when you're thinking about the work that somebody in HR or someone that manages, you know, EX journeys or versus somebody who's in CX and Manager CX journeys, they've got a different duty of care to different groups of people. In CX we are hyper focused on our customers. They are the people that we care about. They are the people that we are focusing on, ensuring that they are cared for, that they are having their needs met. In HR or in EX, it's our employees that we care about. We have a duty of care to our employees and to the organization as well. So yes, we are engaging in very different practices and we're sometimes doing, you know, similar things in the way that we work. And we're starting to collaborate more. It's really important to remember who's where your focus is and and where your duty of care is. So there's two ways that I like to talk about this in thinking about where frustrations sometimes emerge. You know, sometimes there are friction points between, you know, the CX person totally understands that EX and CX are connected and they want to get access to the data so that they can get insights to better understand which employee experiences are impacting customer outcomes. And they may hit walls, you know, they may hit, you know, bureaucracy or red tape or, you know, HR people who won't let them get access to that data.

Cecelia:
And it's important to reflect back on their duty of care. Their duty of care is to ensure that employee privacy is always protected. That is the absolute number one priority for them. So they're going to want to make sure that they partner with you to ensure that they can maintain that responsibility. They're not going to want to hand it over if they don't know who's going to get access to it, where is that information going to go? How is that information going to be interpreted? Will they be able to still maintain that data integrity and privacy for those employees because they have obligations to make sure that that is consistently fulfilled? So just thinking that through is important when collaborating with people around where our responsibilities lie. And second, in CX, if you're a CX leader, you obviously have your team. You have a duty of care for your team, your employees as well. So does your HR person. You're both sharing that. That is something that you have in common and thinking through how do we give them the best experiences so that they can come to work every day and do their best job. Now that's a spot where the duty of care overlaps between CX and EX, and it's on those individuals that you can really partner with your HR or your EX person to have that synchrony and really double down and think about what you could be doing to improve their experiences so that you can get better CX outcomes and better outcomes as well.

Steve:
Yeah, I was going to go there. It sounds like you're advocating for maybe if you're going to do an employee journey mapping exercise that you might want to make sure that that thing lines up or at least throw it up against the customer journey, right?

Cecelia:
Exactly. And it's also we're not advocating for you know, I'm not advocating for CX professionals to go and start doing employee journey mapping for every employee in the organization. But what they can do is maybe partner with their HR or their EX professionals to either share this practice and show them how to do it and and help them build that skill set and that competency. Because this understanding, thinking about a persona and walking in the shoes of a customer, an employee, they understand it but have the journey mapping is its own, you know, professional practice that you don't get taught. I never got taught it when I was doing my organizational psychology degree. So that's a skill that we can share. But do we expect that CX professionals are going to start to step into the shoes of EX people and start doing journey mapping for every employee in the company? Probably not, because that's kind of outside of their core area of responsibility, but doing it with the employees that have direct contact where there are those high impact, high frequency customer interaction moments. Absolutely. Go and work with your HR person so that you can put that employee and customer journey map together for that segment of your business. And you've got dynamite. Yeah.

Steve:
Remember the CX Now series We just wrapped up not too long ago here on The CX Leader Podcast? Well, we just published a new e-book highlighting each of the essential themes driving CX. You can download it at walkerinfo.com/cxnow. And don't forget about our blog. That's right. We have a blog and we update it regularly. Check it out at walkerinfo.com/blog. There's a ton of great experience management content available and the best part, it's free. That's walkerinfo.com/blog.

Steve:
My guest on this week's podcast is Dr. Cecelia Herbert. She's a principal XM catalyst at the XM Institute. She's also been a guest on the show, and she just one of the smartest people that I know in our business. And I always enjoy talking to her and I always say, I love doing these podcasts, so I always learn stuff. But today I'm learning a lot. What else could we share between CX and EX besides just journey mapping?

Cecelia:
Well, one thing that's I mean, one thing that we always this is an evergreen challenge, you know, in HR and EX: HR is a cost center, right? It's not a revenue generating part of the business. CX is. So when you're talking about return on investment or the value of XM programs, the space between an EX program and that value or that return on investment is a little bit longer than, say, a CX program which is directly related to spend or to revenue. So that connection point for XM to be able to demonstrate that to your senior executives, HR could probably really use your help to help have that integrated XM vision to be able to be talking to your executives about the value of experience management holistically is a real boost for EX programs because it's not easy to get funding to get resourcing when you're talking to your executives about all the things that didn't happen, which is what HR and EX is about. What didn't happen is we didn't hire poorly. We didn't have people leave the organization. We didn't have people disengage. All of those value moments that we're building through employee experience are sometimes harder to see. They're less salient to people, unlike CX, where you can say, if we increased our CSAT by three points in our retail stores, we know that our customer spend goes up, you know, 4%. So there's a direct connection there. So working together on those sorts of narratives, on the the importance of human connection and experience management as a discipline together, that is a very, very powerful way to ensure that you are helping empower that experience centric work in your employee base. So I think that's one thing that people can can really do is to collaborate around that. Absolutely.

Steve:
I'm just fascinated by this just concept that HR in some ways HR is more strategy or they're more impact on the businesses by making sure things don't happen.

Cecelia:
Yeah, you don't get sued like you don't have harassment. And…

Steve:
Exactly. I'm a small business owner. I think about that stuff all the time, you know, And you know, you take it for granted until it actually happens. And then it's a, you know, it's really a terrible thing for the business. So what other things could CX help our HR friends do in terms of just, you know, bringing our knowledge to what what it is that our businesses are trying to accomplish.

Cecelia:
Yeah, we are seeing so I won't say us, you know, as in me, I'm not doing this work. I am merely sharing the message of the incredible work that is going on at Qualtrics right now where we're seeing EX and CX come together in particular parts of different businesses. So we are seeing in those frontline teams these interactions between the customer experience and the employee experience teams leading programs together. So we're seeing what I've been calling them proof of value projects. So what this means is really starting to understand which particular employee experiences are driving the customer outcomes that we care about. So our scientist teams and our product teams have been building the technology to help people do that because as you could understand, if you were doing that manually, the time intensive nature of that is just way too cumbersome. So Qualtrics is building the technology to ensure that this is automated and that the technology is there. So as they're collaborating with customers and the technology is out there, it's being released now. So we're starting to see these incredible impact stories around where investments need to be made in improving employee experience because we know that they connect to the organizational outcomes that lots of executives care about, which is our customer outcomes. And we see that it's different. It's different in every single organization. I wish I could stand here and say every organization across the globe should invest in career development and feedback because that's the number one thing that drives customer outcomes. It is for a lot of people that may be true for you, but it might not.

Cecelia:
It might be something else. You know, when we went and did some work with a, it was an aged care facility. They had a number of facilities that they were managing. And of course, their their product is care. They care for their residents. That's what the employees do. That's what that customer experience is. And they know that when their residents feel cared for by people, that they are more likely to refer friends and family. And it's not even the residents that are referring. It's their family that are seeing the great care that are referring other people. And referrals were their number one source of new business. So what was it about those employees that meant that they were able to provide that level of care that was so great that it made people want to refer? It's not won't surprise you to hear that it was their managers caring about them. It was a focus on employee well-being, on employee self care and managers prioritizing this. That was the differentiator. So that is a big mindset shift for that organization. Suddenly, employee well-being isn't a perk, it isn't a benefit. It is a business strategy to ensure that they're hitting their goals that, well, employee well-being doesn't become a cost. It is actually an investment in our business and the sustainability of our business. So when you're in HR and you're trying to advocate for funding and resources for high impact well-being programs, having this kind of information and data in your hand is incredibly powerful. We're actually seeing some really, really magical proof of value projects getting over the line and delivering these insights.

Steve:
Yeah, you had a really, I think, a really great concept in there, but the, the discipline that we do as XM scientists, as, you know, bringing the science to it, you said it like every successful business is unique. But from an XM standpoint, we can predict some of the things that are common across all of them. And when we take this scientific approach, we can really try to we can figure out where the the best impact or the highest impact is going to be. And you use the well being thing. I think that's a big macro opportunity for most companies, but I'm not sure we would have found that without kind of the discipline of XM and we sure couldn't find it at scale. That's another thing I thought of when I was talking to you. You know, when I talk about what we do for our clients, sometimes my more entrepreneurial friends will say, Well, you know, you don't need software to do that, you know? And I think at a certain level, an entrepreneur can keep all that in his or her head. But once you get past scale, I know my business is too big. I can't keep track of all my customers. I can't keep track of all my employees. So the ability to put that into a system and scale it, that's that's really cutting edge stuff. So so, Celia, you know, we've talked a lot about it, and we don't want to do this kind of it fits all sizes or all types of employees. We really got to segment it more, right?

Cecelia:
Absolutely. And I think this is one thing that journey mapping has really helped us do or even journey thinking is thinking through a persona. I come from a background where I've been a DEI or a diversity equity and inclusion practitioner for a long time, and there has been this ever persistent challenge around creating equitable experiences for people in our organizations. We know what the outcomes look like. We know that there are unequal outcomes for different groups of employees. We know that different parts of the business are struggling to retain staff, to engage staff. You know, quite often as an XM scientist, I would get questions of, you know, we've got really, really high turnover in this particular part of the business and we don't know why. So this is where segmenting comes in and where cohort analysis comes in. And this is a really powerful practice that has helped understand the experiences of particular groups of employees in a way that maybe we wouldn't have access to previously. And we always say at XM Institute, you don't design experiences based on averages, you design it based on cohorts. And what we mean by that is identifying the group of people for whom you're trying to improve or create a great experience for understanding what they're experiencing right now, their moments of delight, their moments of friction, what they need, and helping optimize the journey for them.

Cecelia:
So when you think about it from a diversity, equity and inclusion perspective, this totally transforms the way we think about organizational systems and we think about employee journeys. You may have two of the exact same people going through promotion, for example, but it's entirely possible that the lead up to that moment of being eligible for a promotion, the journey to get there has been very, very different for two different people. You can go into your data, you can start to use some of your data to guide you on some of those assumptions. We know, for example, that women stay enrolled longer before they go up for promotion than men. They often have to stay in their level for longer. Their their amount of their feedback, the constructive feedback that they've been receiving is different. Like the content of the feedback that they receive is different. We know that they are more likely to not self nominate because not because they're not self confident, but they don't feel like that they'll be successful. So they often require the encouragement of somebody else to self nominate. So in an environment where self nomination is required for performance management for promotion, you often get these different outcomes. Now we make huge assumptions based on what we see in those outcomes. We'll often say, Oh, women need to step up, more women need to be more confident.

Cecelia:
But if you actually step back and have a look at their journey up into that moment, you start to understand why those behaviors might be happening or why their expectations or their needs may be different. Or maybe they're not different. Maybe they're exactly the same. They're just not being met the same as others. And then you can start to optimize your journey or that particular experience. I use women here. It could be people from who aren't located in headquarters. It could be people in non frontline roles. It could be people who come from a racially underrepresented or minoritized group, people who don't speak English as a first language. It could be any of these employee cohorts that you need to be looking at and understanding their experience around that promotion experience. So when we start thinking about journeys and, and we start thinking about personas. It can help us understand that full journey. Now, one of the things that happens in practice is that we look at lots of data, right? We look at workforce data, we look at experience data, and we try and piece it together to try and understand the experiences of diverse groups of employees. And what I'll often get is a call from a customer that says, We've checked our engagement data, we've checked our onboarding data. You know, we've checked every single experience data.

Cecelia:
We just not finding significant gaps in experiences between, say, men and women in our organization. Yet for some reason, women are leaving more. We just don't understand why. And the thing is, if you piece together all of those moments and you start to look at them in a journey, you can find that statistically their differences may not be significant, but there is a pattern where there is a certain group. You know, it may be, you know, women from a nonwhite background, for example, who are being the ones they're the ones consistently that have the lower experiences. That's data. That's evidence. And that shows you the pervasive nature of their experiences being suboptimal compared to the average. And that shows you where in the journey it is. Those gaps are the greatest and where you need to lean into that group to try and make their experiences better. If you don't use a journey mindset and if you don't start looking at it from beginning to end, then you're going to miss these things. This is a powerful message to make sure that we're thinking about people's journeys and we're thinking about it in terms of whose journeys, which cohorts, which segments, and doing that work to really seek to understand those people's experiences take a deeply empathic approach to understanding them and take a walk a mile in their shoes.

Steve:
Well, Dr. Cecelia Herbert, you've given us a lot of good content today, but we have reached that point of the podcast where I ask every guest for their one piece of take home value. The concept here is to boil it all down into sort of a, you know, a relatively simple tip or action that our CX pros could take and make a difference in their own program based on our conversation here today. So, Cecelia, what is your take home value for this podcast?

Cecelia:
Go and find that person in your EX or your HR team who are working with employee experience data. Go and have a coffee. Grab lunch. Go and say hi. Listen. Listen to them. What they do, what's important for them, and find spaces to collaborate. They could really use it. They are going to be you together can do incredible work if you collaborate and better understand each other's work. So go find them. Go say hi. Make them your new best friend and just get started on something together and see where it takes you.

Steve:
Great. Dr. Cecelia Herbert is principal XM catalyst at the XM Institute. Cecelia, thanks for coming on The CX Leader Podcast again. You're a great guest.

Cecelia:
Thanks for having me, Steve. Always love having a good chat with.

Steve:
You just in case people want to continue the conversation. I know you're on LinkedIn, but I think they can also find you at the XM website, right? XM Institute website?

Cecelia:
That's right. So if you jump onto xminstitute.com, you can always find anything that we publish. We've always got it there. We also have a LinkedIn group called XM Pro, which is a closed group for XM professionals. We are always there. The whole team is there. We are having Q and A's and virtual meetups. So there's another really great space to connect as well.

Steve:
Yeah, I say it all the time on the program when we have you or one of your colleagues on. Yeah, if you're an XM pro out there and you're not taking advantage of the XM Institute, you're missing a lot because there is just a ton of great content there. So thanks again, Cecelia. We'll hopefully have you on again in the not too distant future. But thank you for again for being such a great guest.

Cecelia:
Thanks, Steve.

Steve:
If you want to talk about anything else you heard on the podcast today or about how Walker can help your business's customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Remember to give The CX Leader Podcast a rating through your podcast service and give us a review. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you, our listener. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, find all of our previous episodes, podcast series and contact information. You can drop us a note, let us know how we're doing. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at Walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening and remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader so reach out and connect with somebody on the EX and HR team and go out and listen to them. We'll see you again next time.

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