I want to introduce you to the concept of designing experiences for your people.

Why is designing magical experiences so important?

You may think that experiences should happen naturally. That if people feel like it is too forced, the experience will lose its magic. Amazing experiences can happen by accident, but this is not the norm – especially in business. There are two types of experiences that customers and employees will remember – atrocious experiences and extraordinary ones.

Most business owners and executives are content with their people’s expectations merely being met. The pros to this could be that the company flies under the radar and maintains the status quo. Extraordinary experiences are memorable, but they could raise the expectations of the people your company is serving at an unsustainable rate. When your experience is memorable, people remember and can spot inconsistencies. There are multiple dangers to being immemorable, however. A. Your company becomes forgettable. B. Employees and consumer expectations will rise anyway, other companies will serve your people better, and your company will suffer including your bottom line.

Employee expectations for the last two years are on the rise. The remnants of the industrial revolution’s influences are finally being challenged. People want to be treated like people – not just another cog in the machine that fulfills a function for your company, and they are walking out of their workplaces in protest. An unadoption of an empathy-based leadership model leads to higher turnover and in turn to the added costs of hiring and training new employees.

According to Scout Logic, the average cost that we can directly tie to new hires in the United States is around $4,000 per turnover. We know this number to be much larger though. As a business owner or executive, I’m sure you know that the costs of hiring someone new are residual. Time and effort are money as well. This is why it is so important to see our people as people to invest in rather than liabilities that cause expenses. Unthoughtfully firing or having people leave out of frustration leads to unseen costs. Unthoughtful decisions on the part of your leadership lead to an unstable culture that operates on fear where people do not trust their leaders. Thoughtful protection of the company’s cause and its people carried out by the leaders is trust-building.

How do we begin to design experiences for our people?

The first thing we must realize is that almost everything we do in life as human beings has a base set of expectations. In their book, The Power of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath call this base set of expectations a script. For example, when you go to a restaurant, you have a base set of expectations that don’t have to be voiced unless they are broken. Who can elaborate? What do you expect when you go to a restaurant? Leave a comment!

Breaking expectations

Creating extraordinarily memorable experiences begins with becoming acquainted with people’s base set of expectations associated with your company or product and then, intentionally breaking them for their good.

Starting with an analysis of the basics ensures that we are providing the baseline experience that our people expect. If we don’t meet the base set of expectations people have of our company, we are breaking expectations in a way that makes people feel unseen and uncared for. This is where a healthy understanding of empathy comes into play. What is the base set of expectations of people experiencing your business?

I’ve worked up a quick worksheet to get you thinking towards design experiences here. If you appreciate this resource and would like to stay up-to-date with Mark’d by design, and the resources we create, subscribe here. We would love to have you.