In September this year, Gethin Nadin was awarded a lifetime achievement award for his work as an employee experience trailblazer. We caught him at Unleash World Paris for an exclusive interview.
What does receiving the Employee Experience Trailblazer Lifetime Achievement Award mean to you personally and professionally?
It means a great deal. I’ve now dedicated most of my working life to helping organisations develop better experiences for their people and having that work recognised means so much. For me, this job is a vocation. I live and breathe the employee experience, so to have my books, writing, speaking and consulting in this area recognised in this way has been wonderful.
Looking back, what do you consider the most transformative moment in your journey to becoming a global leader in employee experience?
I think I was lucky at the start to have written one of the few employee experience books you could buy in the world back in 2015. As the concept of EX grew, I benefitted from being one of the early authors to be talking about it. That book changed my life in many ways. It was a few months after the book had been published that I received social media messages from HR leaders at the likes of Virgin and Burberry to say that they’d read it, loved it and as a result changed the way they built out their people strategies. That’s when I knew I was probably on to something and within a short space of time the book hit the bestseller list on Amazon and won an award. Without that book and its reception, I wouldn’t be talking to you now.
“For me, this job is a vocation. I live and breathe the employee experience, so to have my books, writing, speaking and consulting in this area recognised in this way has been wonderful.”
You’ve spoken at major events across the Middle East, USA, and Singapore – how do cultural differences shape your approach to employee experience?
That’s a really interesting question. Culturally, different global regions are at different stages of how they view and are investing in the employee experience. If you take the Middle East for example, they’ve recently been making huge strides in investing in employees and their well-being in ways they weren’t doing just a few years ago. In places like Japan where overwork was rife and employees were dedicating their lives to work, they are starting to look at how they better care for employees.
The intersection between the employee experience and employee well-being – where people are recognised for a job well done, have benefits that support their lives, have a voice and are listened to etc. is where most global companies are now investing their resources. Organisations now (on the whole) recognise that they won’t be successful, profitable or innovative unless they invest more in their people. And in the age of AI, all the evidence suggests that more automated workplaces will actually require a greater investment in the EX for those humans that remain.
What role do you believe thought leadership plays in driving real change within organisations?
I think it’s significant. We have a huge body of evidence that people – consumers and business-to-business buyers – trust people and experts at companies, rather than the brands themselves. Increasingly I am spending time with people teams who want to have proactive discussions about where they are and where they are heading. A lot of my weekly tasks are now supporting employers with thought leadership, advice, counsel and future gazing. When people like me are able to work with employers to think about the future, to work out where best to place investment, to link overall company strategies with people strategies, real change happens. And this is almost always to the benefit of both employer and employee.
Your work has influenced UK employment law and shaped national conversations – how do you see policy and practice continuing to converge?
We are at a significant point in time where governments around the world now realise the role that employers and the workplace has in driving better societal outcomes. We can link good employment and great employee experiences to improvements in national health and the economy. The new UK government in particular clearly sees the employer as a key actor in our success as a nation with the advent of the Employment Rights Bill and the upcoming Charlie Mayfield Review – both of which appear to ‘offload’ responsibilities that were once the state’s, onto employers.
How do you balance innovation with practicality when advising organisations on the employee experience?
Every company approaches the EX with different aims and different resources, and it’s important to work out what is going to be most impactful within those constraints. It’s important to understand that some people teams are working in industries with small margins like retail, others have complexities with distributed workforces across regions and countries etc. So there is never a one size fits all approach to EX design.
Increasingly, I am finding that whatever innovations exist in the EX-space and whatever recommendations someone like me makes to an organisation, they have to connect the people strategy with the overall organisational strategy. CEOs and boards are looking to see their EX-investments materialise in positive ways far outside of the people function. They want to see how our investments in people create better outcomes for the wider business, its shareholders, customers and investors too.
“They want to see how our investments in people create better outcomes for the wider business, its shareholders, customers and investors too.”
What do you see as the next frontier in employee experience – and what should organisations be doing now to prepare?
It’s clear to anyone paying attention that we have entered a new frontier at work. AI is set to dominate and change so many workplaces, and so it will clearly evolve the employee experience too. What is interesting is how we will start to re-value the human experience at work when so much of what we do may be taken up by machines. We will clearly lose people and jobs due to AI, but those who remain will need greater investment and attention and the skills they will need to grow and develop will be uniquely human. Paving the way – I think – for greater EX investments.
If you really look at much of what AI is doing to the people function, if you peel back the layers and look a bit harder, this is actually all about culture, people and their well-being. Workplace culture will collapse under AI if not managed correctly. AI will not succeed on its own, it will require our people to come on that journey with us as most AI won’t replace but compliment the humans in our workplaces. Without the will and permission of our employees, we will fail. Which echoes new research from MIT. Just a few months ago, they found that billions of pounds worth of GenAI pilots have yielded no results. In fact, they state 95% have failed. But they identified that it wasn’t AI that was broken, but the resistance shown by people.
If you could give one piece of advice to the next generation of HR leaders, what would it be?
The future of the people function is uncertain, but we do know that it will continue its trend of having to respond quickly and often seismically, to societal changes. For some who work in organisations where the HR leaders have a board position or attention, they will be relied upon to help steer their organisations through this constant state of flux. For others, they will have to try very hard to persuade their organisation to invest in and push forwards with the people agendas.
Who you chose to work for will make a significant difference to your experience as a HR leader. My contact list is full of HR leaders who joined companies hoping to get the time, attention and investment they needed to make a difference, only to find that the HR role was sidelined – or worse, performative. Choose your employer wisely – go where you can make a real difference, but also where you will be celebrated and supported. Always follow the evidence, develop your return on investment skills and make clear links between what you want to do and how the organisation moves forward. And finally, never forget there are people with lives, families and challenges at the end of every EX-touchpoint. Great employers save lives and make lives better – never forget why you chose this great profession.
“Great employers save lives and make lives better – never forget why you chose this great profession.”