Chinese business tycoon Jack Ma has a famous saying that many people join the so-called "996 overtime culture" is a "blessing". "996" refers to office workers working from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week.
Chinese officials have sternly warned companies in recent days that such heavy-duty work is in fact illegal. Tencent, Kuaishou, and Byte have all canceled 996 this year,Netizens are celebrating nationwide. Although people in the game are mixed with sorrow and joy (Byte just paid their salaries for August, and many people’s salaries have dropped by 17% compared with last month, but their workload has not decreased), but for most practitioners in the Internet industry, it is indeed a good thing.
Byte HR is facing the problem of declining employee income under the premise of the same workload. Of course, Byte’s salary is still higher than the industry average, and the HR of other Internet companies are not so lucky. Assuming that employees' wages are forced to be reduced, but the workload is not reduced, why should employees stay in the company? How can the company continue to maintain high growth and high operation?
With the awakening of the awareness of "job sovereignty", more and more workers have begun to re-examine the relationship between enterprises, work and individuals. "Lie flat" and "refuse to involve" have become popular words among young people, prompting business managers and human resources practitioners to redefine the relationship between work and employees.
Because of this,"Employee Experience"This concept has attracted much attention since its birth in 2016.
employee experienceIt is a collection of interactions between employees and enterprises at the physical site, digital technology and organizational level.
employee experienceIs aCompany-wide initiatives, designed to help employees stay productive, healthy, engaged, and on track. It’s no longer an HR project, it’s an enterprise-wide strategy, often led by the CHRO in partnership with the CIO, but with legal, facilities, administration, operations, and more. It addresses the issues that employees face at workall daily questions.
When employee experience was first mentioned in the 2016 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends report, it was simply an outgrowth of design thinking.
But in 2017, the employee experience was discussed in depth as an independent chapter. The AirBnb brothers were the first company to use design thinking to redefine human resource processes and employee services that year, if not for the black swan of "epidemic". But when we look back at 2017 at today's point of time, we will find that the connotation of employee experience at that time is different from the connotation of employee experience at this time. Investigating its core, it can be summarized asEarly Employee Experience Is Work-CentricFor example, the "life work balance" advocated by IBM in the early days does not look at the problem from the perspective of employees, but calls on employees to deal with the balance between life and life outside of work.
It’s hard for employees to feel like they’re the subject of experience design, so “employee experience” becomes the organizer’s own orgy.
In 2019, Deloitte re-arranged the employee experience from personalization, professionalism, bottom-up and top-down, and extended that the highest-level version of employee experience is humanistic experience. The biggest difference between "humanistic experience" and "employee experience" is that what humanistic experience cares about is the monologue deep in the heart of employees: it is "the meaning of my work", and it is the most important motivating factor apart from monetary incentives.
The case of canceling 996 mentioned at the beginning of this article reflects that Chinese companies have begun to try to allow employees to pursue a "work-life balance". No matter what the underlying social logic behind the cancellation of 996 is, it is always a good attempt. China's Internet giants have begun to assume more social responsibilities and have a good and positive social orientation.
The "employee experience" at the bottom right of the above figure is more about bottom-up innovations based on the demands of the organization. For example, in order to obtain excellent talents, the organization improves the experience of the recruitment process and the onboarding process, and improves the experience of the resignation process for the sake of the organization's reputation. The core focus is on specialization, that is, the organizational perspective.
When the organization really considers the improvement of employee experience from the individual employee, it will start to pay attention to the employee's sense of participation and integration in the organization, so that employees can develop more "ownership" awareness, create a transparent corporate culture, and create more mechanisms and projects for employees to participate in decision-making.
As for the highest level of employee experience, "humanistic experience", we can understand it as helping employees find the "meaning of work." This point is also mentioned in McKinsey's leadership model. When explaining "strong sense of purpose", McKinsey emphasizes that it has nothing to do with making money or not. The most successful leaders focus on or make employees more greedy, their broader purpose is what they want to do, what kind of impact they have on the world.
If this still fails to understand the connotation of humanistic experience, we can look at the case of the Wright Brothers:
In the early 20th century, Samuel Langley was considered the man most likely to build an airplane. He had all the ingredients that we thought would make a successful airplane: a Harvard graduate, knowledge of a lot of top talent, government grants and a lot of talent to hire, and he got a lot of press coverage. It can be said that it occupies the right time, the right place, and the harmony of people. However, it was the Wright brothers who had "no education, no money, and no resources" who finally built the aircraft. Although the Wright brothers had received a good education, they were obviously far behind Samuel Langley who graduated from Harvard. The Wright brothers did not obtain a college degree. Samuel resigned the day after the Wright brothers built the plane. For the Wright brothers, building airplanes was their dream and the meaning of their work. For Samuel, building airplanes was just a job that helped them get good pay and social prestige.
People work with Samuel for money, but people work with the Wright Brothers for their dreams, and the highest form of employee experience is how to help employees find their own "meaning of work".
The goal is not to hire people who need a job , the goal is to hire people who believe you believe.
From the perspective of compliance, the abolition of 996 cannot even be regarded as an attempt by Chinese companies in terms of employee experience, because it is on the edge of the red line of the law. But it has awakened a group of business managers to re-examine their previous management models. It may take several years to go from "work-life balance" to "humanistic experience", but it is "worth it".
