Resources for employee experience research

We’ve curated this list of resources for people getting into employee experience research. It includes our most relevant Insights posts as well as several templates and tools.

Our employee experience philosophy

At Habanero, when we work on an employee experience project, we always start by getting a deeper understanding of the current state for all employees. This means working with representative groups of employees in a variety of workshops, interviews, and listening labs so we can gain a clear and deep understanding of the diversity of day-to-day experiences.

We strongly ascribe to the principle of “storycatching” (as described by Brené Brown); and our research activities include a comprehensive methodology for exposing as many employee stories as we can, which we can then mine for patterns and actionable insights.   

Resources: our curated list 

To further support this journey of organizations seeking to understand their current employee experiences, we've curated this list of resources for researchers.

Articles

As a starting point for your EX research, here are some of our favourite articles and resources to help you with your projects: 

• Going global with empathetic research   
• Getting started with employee experience
• Gamestorming: using co-creation tools to find opportunity
• 10 signs you have a design thinking mindset

Templates and tools

These templates and tools will help you get started on the journey to understanding your employee experience:

• Get a clear and concise about each of your research activities: what you're doing, why, and who needs to be involved. Habanero research plan template (Doc)
• Capture the high-level details of each workshop you complete: give yourself an easy-to-reference source of your thoughts from right after the workshop with things like key quotes you heard and themes. Habanero workshop summary data template (Excel)
• Collect all the details from each exercise, for each participant, for each workshop. This template allows you to add in demographic or archetype data for great quantitative analysis later. Habanero detailed workshop data template (Excel)
• Bring together a tangible and actionable vision for the future experience in one place. Habanero EX roadmap template (Excel)
• A classic workshop activity for exposing the highs and lows of an experiential journey. Journey map workshop toolkit (ZIP) 
• Thanks to Dave Gray! Here's our take on the empathy maps so many of us know and love. Empathy maps (PDF)

And of course, if you’d like to learn more about how to apply these inside your organization, please reach out!