Elevating Employee Experience for Sustainable Productivity and Growth

Fostering wellbeing, authentic leadership, and holistic growth within a modern organisation

How to promote wellbeing, inspire self-leadership, and ensure productivity within a brand?

It goes without saying it starts from the top, and it needs to be lived, seen and heard rather than serving a marketing purpose. Wellbeing has expanded to cover physical, mental, safety, financial wellbeing so it is a fully embracing concept today, and that is a great thing for us! This means people can come to work as they are, be stimulated to live their lives to the full, this is so important today as the border between work and non-work time is totally blurred.

Companies and leaders have to realise, and enable, productivity through a fully human experience at work, if we remain transactional, our output as a business will suffer.

Is it possible to completely reinvent the employee experience at this point, and how?

Most things are possible. Today leadership is much more complex than it was before, however it is not complicated. By listening to everyone, being inclusive, being humble and drive for change extremely hard, the employee experience can be what we would like it to be.

We probably need to realise though, that it is definitely not a one size fits all, but it will not be 100% unique to each and everyone, we need to describe that so our employees and teams understand that.

Personally, I am of the opinion that work shall give much more than it takes, but I have also learnt that it will take a bit, and that’s ok! It enhances our personalities.

How do you see the HR area evolving in the coming years?

I am super excited for how HR has, and will evolve. As we become more diverse, we also need to diversify our leadership, that is one exciting area where HR leads the way.

I see so much more around search for purpose, inclusion as a way to tap into new talent pools, making the employee journey both smooth but also exciting through tech, and just being more human in how we enable people to grow and lead. We will never be done, and it is risky to be comfortable for too long.

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Marie-Louise Ek is a Vice President HR Middle East, Africa & Turkey at Hilton. With two decades of leadership experience across industries and continents, Marie-Louise has acquired extensive experience from renewing the way leaders and HR does business.