Total Experience (TX) is a fast-emerging market trend. Recent Gartner research tells us that “60% of all nonexecutive boards of directors rank TX (digital) capabilities among their Top 5 business priorities for 2023-2024”. Customer experience has long been a focus for retailers, bankers, marketers, and technology service providers. TX acknowledges that our experiences of services are not easily captured through siloed labels. TX seeks to bring together customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), user experience (UX), and multiexperience (MX) to understand the interactions better. TX seeks to put people (customers and employees) at the centre of service design.
But is TX just the newest meta-label that draws our attention away from what experience is and why it is important?
Experience is everything and nothing
Our experiences are important because they connect everything we think, feel, and do. Our experience is an integrator that begins with our senses and ends with behaviour. In simplified terms, we take in sensory cues, which are processed as sensations, which we integrate into perceptions, which interact as cognition and emotion, which are processed as judgment, which leads to behaviour, which comes in two behaviour responses: approach or avoid.
Influencing the experience pathway has been driven by understanding customer experience with a focus on cognition and emotion. And, as the idea of experience has spilled over into the workplace to address retention or performance, the emphasis on cognition and emotion remains.
But experience, like culture, is a slippery idea.
Experience can describe how we participate in an activity; it can be expressed as a barely understood emotion; or an outcome of learning a new skill. For the person, it can be active or passive. Sometimes experience leads to a visible change in behaviour; sometimes, it is just a thought.
Experience is everything and nothing. But we can say everything is experienced through behaviour, and people experience everything.
Consuming experiences
The barrier between the virtual and real worlds is now exceptionally porous. In this informed, networked, empowered, interactive and active world, we consume and integrate our experiences. In our working lives, the combination of a monumentally disruptive pandemic and technologies that give us pause to think carefully about what is real and what is not, and what the implications are, has made understanding and integrating how we consume our work experiences interesting and challenging.
We need a way of thinking about how we experience. One approach values experience as something that comes from an exchange between producer and consumer or manager and employee but also values experience as useful and practical, such as a critical driver of workplace behaviour and performance.
In consuming experiences, we often focus on outcomes like enjoyment, happiness, or nostalgia. But the real challenge, particularly in our workplaces, is how these outcomes can be reinforced, enhanced, or amplified and expressed as behaviours that create a positive work experience and high levels of collective performance.
Experience in the workplace
Wouldn’t it be great if every day you went to work was a pleasurable and rewarding experience? We give up on this aspiration too easily.
Our experience is built through micro-moments as we interact with our workplace, leaders, colleagues, stakeholders and customers, technology, and work. Our work experience is people and place, but it is also a destination for our career aspirations, sense of ourselves, personal security, and families. A lot is going on when people go to work.
For leaders wanting to create a positive workplace experience, some key questions are:
- How do I capture the people’s attention, individually and collectively, such that work and life are mutually reinforcing?
- How do I engage people’s imagination to inspire them to improve our work?
- How do I create a workplace experience that educates, informs, and entertains?
- How can I ensure our work together is enjoyable and memorable?
- How can I make the experience of work personal and positive?
Retention is king in a competitive labour market where critical skills are in short supply. So, while it is easy to discount or minimise the aspiration that work should be pleasurable and rewarding, it is likely that employees will try to get as close to the experience of that aspiration as they can.
Today, experience may well be everything
In our workplaces, we are experiencing increasing demand, reduced resources, and greater uncertainty. Our working lives are marked by persistent low-level strain that culminates in burnout.
Quietly reducing the amount of effort employees devote to work by not going beyond the job description is called quiet quitting. It is a response to increased strain and a buffer to burnout. Quiet quitting is a direct reflection of our experience of work.
But we know that a positive workplace experience leads directly to higher employee engagement, greater employee willingness to give discretionary effort, and better individual and team performance. Experience, health, well-being, engagement, and performance travel together as we integrate work and life.
Solving for X
There’s so much to be said about the last few years about the ‘experience’, TX is just the latest label.
After an unprecedented global shift in how we see each other, our political views, our sense of identity and each action we take, there is a fundamental need to rethink how we connect at every level.
The experience each of us faces daily impacts the experiences we create. Whether at home, on our commute, or in the office. And it’s this experience that should be of interest to all leaders.
The state of experience is ever-evolving and shifting. Our experiences constantly shape our behaviour and lives. Each message, interaction, and instance are micro-moments in our experience.
Across 2022, we captured our insights, discoveries and observations of this landscape and have released our first edition Solving for eXperience annual, which captures key insights and practical applications to help you apply some of this thinking in your organisation, project, or life to create and shape positive experiences for your teams, leaders, and everyday people.
Download Synergy’s Solving for eXperience Annual as an eBook to learn more about the changing world of experience.
