What Are Your Employees Really Experiencing?

How the ECI and GOES help leaders listen, understand, and take meaningful action.In the previous edition of The Ei Edge, I wrote about what can happen when leaders guess what their employees need

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Leaders can unintentionally create frustration when they rely on assumptions, introduce changes without understanding the employee experience, or ask for feedback without creating safety and following through.
This raises an important question:
How can leaders develop a clearer picture of what their employees are actually experiencing?
Conversations, check-ins, and meaningful relationships all provide valuable information. An effective assessment can add a broader and more honest picture, especially when employees feel safe responding anonymously.
Two assessments I use with organizations are the Emotional Culture Index (ECI) and the Genos Organizational Effectiveness & Employee Engagement Survey (GOES). They answer two different questions.

 The Emotional Culture Index:
How does it feel to work here?The Emotional Culture Index, or ECI, measures three dimensions of employees’ emotional experiences:
🔵 Current emotions: How often employees experience certain emotions at work.
🔵 Expected emotions: How often employees believe it is fair and reasonable to experience those emotions given the nature and context of their workplace.
🔵 Ideal emotions: How often employees believe they should ideally experience those emotions to be effective at work.
The gaps between these areas can reveal a great deal.
Employees may want to feel valued, connected, confident, or supported more often. They may be experiencing more stress, frustration, uncertainty, or exhaustion than leaders realize.
The ECI gives organizations a focused picture of their emotional culture and helps identify the emotions that may be supporting or interfering with engagement, well-being, teamwork, and performance.
🌀 The assessment provides the information. Meaningful progress comes when leaders share what they learned, develop an action plan, and follow up to see what has changed.

 The Genos Organizational Effectiveness
& Employee Engagement Survey:
What is shaping the employee experience?The Genos Organizational Effectiveness and Employee Engagement Survey, or GOES, provides a deeper look at employee engagement and the organizational factors influencing it.
The GOES combines eight benchmarked employee-engagement questions with a customizable bank of 184 questions across 26 areas of organizational effectiveness. Organizations select the areas and questions most relevant to their goals, so each survey is tailored to what they are trying to understand.
Organizations can explore areas such as:
🔵 Leadership
🔵 Communication
🔵 Role clarity
🔵 Teamwork
🔵 Decision-making
🔵 Learning and development
🔵 Collaboration between departments
🔵 Managing change
🔵 Vision, mission, and values
🔵 Career development
🔵 Working conditions
GOES can help leaders see where the organization is functioning well, where employees are encountering obstacles, and which areas deserve attention first.
It is especially useful when leaders sense something needs attention but are unsure what is shaping the employee experience.

 Which Assessment Makes Sense?The right starting point depends on what you want to understand.

Consider the ECI when you want to:
🔵 Take a focused pulse of how people feel at work
🔵 Understand morale, stress, trust, or emotional culture
🔵 Support a team through change
🔵 Measure the effect of a leadership or culture initiative

Consider GOES when you want to:
🔵 Conduct a broader organizational assessment
🔵 Measure employee engagement
🔵 Identify the systems and leadership practices affecting the employee experience
🔵 Prioritize development efforts across several areas
Some organizations may benefit from both assessments. They can also be used separately or at different points in an organization’s development.

 The 3Es in ActionCollecting information is only the beginning. My survey process is built around three steps:
Explore: Gather honest information about what employees are experiencing.
Engage: Make sense of the results and involve people in developing a practical action plan.
Evaluate: Track progress, follow up with employees, and measure whether the actions are making a difference.
This final step is paramount. When people take the time to provide thoughtful feedback, they want to know that someone listened and that their input led somewhere meaningful.

 What Would You Like to Better Understand?
If this sounds intriguing, send me an email with ECI, GOES, or not sure.
​My email: [email protected] 
I’ll ask a few questions about your organization, share additional information or sample results, and help you determine which assessment, if either, fits what you are hoping to learn.
There is no cost for that initial conversation. Sometimes the most useful first step is simply getting clearer about the questions you need to ask.