Introduction

Engagement is a fundamental human need. It is a power that resides in most people, waiting to be unlocked. People want to be engaged in what they do. If employers build the foundation, employees will do the rest.

-FROM MAGIC: FIVE KEYS TO UNLOCK THE POWER OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

The idea of handing a stranger the keys to the front door of your home sounds a little fishy. Even with a quick email introduction, renting out your apartment on the Internet for a few days to some guy you've never met challenges common sense. But it's an even greater stretch to set up an entire company based on the idea that you could entice millions of people to rent out their private abodes to strangers. But that's exactly what "sharing economy" superstar Airbnb did, becoming the largest lodging provider on the planet and earning it the title of Inc. magazine's "Company of the Year."

Admirable as this new, disruptive business model is, it's not why we have a big man-crush on the company. We admire Airbnb because it's the first high-profile unicorn-and one of the first companies, period-to create the position of chief employee experience officer.

The exact title is global head of employee experience, but you get the gist. Since that time, we've noticed a number of business cards claiming similar titles. Creating such a position legitimizes the growing importance of the Employee Experience, or EX, to organizational success. Not just in a corporate setting, mind you, but in healthcare, academia, the nonprofit sector, and even professional sports.

If you hail from the command-and-control, "All that our employees should expect from us is a paycheck!" school of business, you might be tempted to dismiss chief employee experience officer as a glorified title for the person in charge of Hawaiian Shirt Fridays and foosball tournaments. That would be a mistake. As reported by Forbes:

At Airbnb we are focused on bringing to life our mission of creating a world where you can #belonganywhere, by creating memorable workplace experiences which span all aspects of how we relate to employees.1

That thinking reflects the new reality of which many organizational leaders are just becoming aware. The long-sought "secret sauce" of rising profits, stellar customer satisfaction, and sustainable growth has one key ingredient: an outstanding EX. For decades, executives and managers have sweated in their corporate kitchens, trying to cook up profits and growth by blending together every imaginable ingredient of the organizational recipe.

They've radically redesigned products and rolled out one innovation after another. They've implemented extensive survey and customer satisfaction measurement systems, mined data for possible insights, and reached out to customers with terabytes of personalized messages and offers. They've slashed costs and waved around discounts. And, with a few exceptions, most of those efforts have died an expensive death-and taken a few careers to the grave with them.

Meanwhile, other organizations (including a few we'll highlight in this book) chug along quietly, building transformational workforces, and surpassing their goals year after year because they understand something that's just now becoming evident to their less successful counterparts:

Every important business outcome lies downstream from the experience and engagement of the people who make the organization go.

This is a bold claim, and we stand by every word. Time and time again, we have found that every business outcome has its root in an individual or a group of people. This observation has led us to realize that success does not begin with a spreadsheet, a slogan, or even a piece of game-changing technology. Success begins and ends with human beings.

That's what the EX is about: creating an operating environment that inspires your people to do great things.

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

With all due respect, we picked up on this concept a while ago. Our firm, DecisionWise, has been leading the "employee engagement" charge for years. Our database of tens of millions of employee survey responses shows an unmistakable correlation between how deeply employees are engaged in their work and everything from retention to revenue growth to customer satisfaction scores.

The secret is out . . . in some organizations. That's a good thing, because the workforce is changing faster than at any time in history. Until very recently, and despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, most employers clung to the outdated view of employees as interchangeable parts of a business machine. Some have even stopped referring to people by their names and have started calling them "assets" or "human capital." That's not necessarily a bad thing (at least they're starting to understand and see value in the human component of business), but it does tend to highlight the impersonal manner in which organizations see these "assets."

Ego? Stubbornness? It doesn't matter. What matters is that fewer and fewer workers are yoking themselves to the old employee model. They're driving for Uber. They're using tools like Upwork and Thumbtack to become freelancers. They're earning spending money on TaskRabbit and paying the bills with what they make renting out their houses on VRBO (or Airbnb). They're hitting sites like AngelList and Indeed to find open jobs at the hottest startups. They have options they've never had before.

These trends lead us to another important observation:

Because success starts with talented people, your most important role as a leader is to give them a reason to join your cause, a reason to stay, and a reason to engage.

Don't just take our word for it. Consider what The Future of Work author Jacob Morgan wrote in Forbes:

Decades ago nobody cared about the employee experience because all of the power was in the hands of employers. . . . (P)ower has now shifted into the hands of employees.2

That's the sound of a microphone dropping. It's also your call to action. Are you ready to challenge the conventional wisdom about what makes an organization great? To stop wasting millions on what doesn't work and do what does-and in the process, create and enjoy your own EX more than you ever thought possible? Good. Keep reading.

ENGAGEMENT MAGIC®

In 2014, we published MAGIC: Five Keys to Unlock the Power of Employee Engagement. It was a popular and successful book about our five-part approach to creating engagement in any organization, which goes by the acronym MAGIC:

• Meaning
• Autonomy
• Growth
• Impact
• Connection

In that book, we wrote a great deal about the theory and methodology of employee engagement. While it was important to establish the way in which engagement can be fostered within organizations, we also realized that for our next book we needed to take readers to a different level: We needed to tell them how to create MAGIC within their companies, schools, hospitals, or nonprofits.

The reason is that employee engagement has never been something leaders can create by decree. You don't roll in a few arcade games, start onsite Pilates classes, hand out environmentally friendly employee handbooks, and announce, "Hey, everybody! We are now an engaged company!" Engagement grows organically from a fertile soil of culture, purposeful work, respect, and trust. As a leader, you can introduce initiatives designed to promote meaning, autonomy, and more in the workplace (and we'll spotlight some organizations that have done exactly that). But whether the seeds of engagement take root is out of your hands.

In approaching The Employee Experience, we saw that while we had told organizations what MAGIC was, we needed to tell them how to make MAGIC happen and how to create that authentic engagement that drives success. But by what means? Remember, engagement is a choice. Organizational leaders don't decide if engagement happens; employees do.

It occurred to us that while we couldn't offer a simple, plug-and-play engagement how-to system, we could teach executives, managers, supervisors, department heads, and directors the HR equivalent of tilling the soil, fertilizing, weeding, and watering-creating the right conditions under which engagement can, and will, flourish. So that's what we've done.

BEYOND ENGAGEMENT MAGIC

Since releasing MAGIC, we've been knee-deep in additional extensive research, including adding over 10 million responses to the 14 million responses already in our massive employee survey database. That's a lot of data. When we took a closer look at that data, we saw a clear pattern: The most engaged organizations were those where leaders took the greatest care to manage employee expectations and build trust. Even if work was demanding or times were hard, employees always felt like they were dealt with honestly, openly, and respectfully. Values and expectations were aligned. Accusations of broken promises or hypocrisy were rare, if they occurred at all. There was a "band of...