CEO Monthly Issue 9 2018

16 CEO MONTHLY / ISSUE 9 2018 , TimOldman is the CEO and Founder of Leesman and has been named CEO of the Year, for ‘Most Innovative inMedia’. Leesman launched in 2010 and has grown to become the world’s largest independent employee workplace experience benchmarking tool, successfully changing the way organisations think about their corporate workplaces. Oldman has built a global reputation for Leesman as drivers of innovation and pioneers of change, all based on robust, unbiased evidence of a statistical vigour never before amassed. Here, Oldmanwrites about the paradigm shift that is occurring in global workplaces. The Workplace Experience Revolution: Unearthing the Real Drivers of Employee Sentiment We are in the midst of a revolution fuelled by an elite group of brands that are resetting our value expectations. This societal swing is changing what we expect of the products, services and spaces we use - including our workplaces. This is the ‘experience revolution’, and our research at Leesman has revealed the mission-critical components needed to respond to that shift. In pretty much every part of the developed world, productivity growth has been dismal since last decade’s credit crunch. Economists are generally perplexed by this trend. Further fuelling their confusion is the fact their cleverly adjusted new measure of ‘total factor productivity’ is also flat-lining. This gauge was designed to account for the increased dominance of corporations that appear to come from nowhere, employ thousands, file huge profits and attract previously unheard-of valuations, yet typically neither make things nor sell things, feeding us instead with stuff we are seemingly allowed to consume for free. In a really short time frame, these brands have changed the way products and services are conceived. As other brands learn, mimic and follow, they are collectively rewriting our expectation of customer experience. Of course, we don’t get these brands’ services for free; we pay them with our data. In return, we get access to services delivered with a new style of immersive and participatory customer experience. In the Participation Revolution, a book by Neil Gibb, it is argued that the best of these brands are built on a human connection and emotional synergy, with an ethos based on the ‘why’ and not the ‘what’, where submissive consumers are replaced by active participants. The countless comparable start- up-to-mega-brand success stories are leading sociologists to focus on a common thread. This is the experience revolution. The global businesses attracting the most attention pretty much all have this new experience at their core. They are participatory businesses. We don’t consume them, we experience them: we are in them. And we’re not talking solely about the ‘social network’ brands. They are typified by brands that are built on the side of the user - not simply for the user to consume but as though the brand is there hanging out with users, fashioning the services the user needs along with them to delight them. For these brands, this means not standing still. Customer-centric organisations are constantly refreshing and developing products, services and solutions not because they need to, but because they want to for the community of users of which they consider themselves a part. You will see this in an Apple store or Tesla showroom. In a FitBit or Strava forum. You can even experience it alone setting up a Sonos speaker or YouTubing GoPro content. But why are we so hooked? Neuroscientists believe it may be that consumers are addicted to the dopamine releases they get by experiencing these ‘exceed the expectation’ brands. Dopamine functions in the brain as a neurotransmitter and throughout the rest of the body as a chemical messenger. Neurologically, it is associated with pleasure and with the anticipation we get from most types of bodily rewards. The experiential, participatory nature of many of the new mega brands is hooking us all on dopamine. Our daily work with global brands reveals that the workplaces where employees report the highest levels of productivity, pride and sense of community consistently deliver a particular