Human Rebellion Founder | Disrupting Traditional Workplace Culture | Helping Leaders Build Empowering, Human-Centered Organizations.
HR is NOT EX. Nowadays, it feels like HR has been rebranded as Employee Experience, although they are different. While HR traditionally focuses on policies, compliance, and administration, EX dives deeper into the holistic journey of employees within an organization. 🤝 Human Resources: HR serves as the backbone, ensuring organizational compliance, managing benefits, and handling personnel-related matters. It's the engine that keeps the workplace running smoothly, maintaining a balance between legal requirements and employee needs. 🌟 Employee Experience: EX, on the other hand, is about crafting a positive, meaningful journey for employees throughout their tenure. It encompasses everything from recruitment to offboarding, emphasizing culture, engagement, and personal growth. EX recognizes employees as individuals with unique needs and aspirations, aiming to create environments where they can thrive. Understanding the nuances between HR and EX allows organizations to create synergies, fostering a workplace culture where employees feel valued, engaged, and empowered to contribute their best.
Stephan Vincent — My team is designed as you describe — Employee Support (e.g. HR) and Business Partners (e.g. EX). They have different sets of tools and focus on different things on a day to day basis. My challenge with this model is maintaining balance and not just focusing on HR.
That’s an interesting perspective. In this scenario, I think HR - as a function - should report to a Chief Employee Experience Officer. Employee Experience and HR alongside Talent Development and Internal coms. That would be a great role! What I see as a challenge, is that most companies are struggling to do the basic foundational HR and are under-resourcing all corporate functions roles. So they continue on a hamster wheel of blocking and tackling. I agree that EX is something that all companies need foundationally. Are foundational EX hires also willing to do the HR stuff? Who gets hired first when building teams? 🐓🥚
You make an interesting point.. How would you define HR? Can a Chief People Officer or CHRO own both? At what phase of growth is EX its own function?
This is a really helpful distinction, thank you. Curious your thoughts: these feel separate enough to be housed under two entirely different departments, but I often see EX still under the umbrella of HR. What are the benefits of still keeping these two intertwined in a company org chart, as opposed to dividing them entirely?
An eye opener for sure. Excellent distinguishes highlighted for broader understanding.
I was astonished by your title at first.
Each department under the larger HR umbrella contains both elements.
I could not agree with this more!
Great commentary to specify the differences. HR has been looking to morph into EX for years (as it really drives employee engagement). However, we often get our time usurped by the inevitable compliance, legal, and operational items. You clearly specified how both are important to an organization and we must create time, space and resources for both to succeed. Thanks for sharing.
Maverick, Futurist and Mom : PE, VC, Health, Tech, Banking, Main Street | Parallel Thinker - Building bridges between the CSuite and the People that make them successful.
7moI like it the idea of having EX - but I think that means it needs to be a first hire for a start up or small company. This would assume that EX needs to know HR, just like OPs needs to know OSHA and Safety as Operators on a small team. At least enough to be compliant. In my experience, it is very difficult to pivot a foundation built on policy, procedure and compliance to a people centric culture and decision making framework. I guess what I am saying is HR needs to be EX, so therefore EX needs to know HR. 🫰