The Mouse that Launched an EX Career
- Mary Beth Crawford
- Jul 20, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Sep 21, 2024
In 1996, I was working for Walt Disney World, Co. (and loving it). At that time, WDW's vision was "To Make People Happy," and WDW HR's was “To Make Magical Memories for All Who Work and Play Here." My experience? Happiness. My memories working there? Magical.
A few decades and a handful of leaders and corporate cultures later, I can see that my "employee experience" had everything to do with my leaders and the culture they created. I put a ton of incremental effort into working for those leaders. Gallup states, "Those who strongly agree with 'I feel connected to my organization's culture' are 3.7× as likely to be engaged at work." Yep. I was, in Gallup terms, "highly engaged." I was living first-hand that Employee Experience Matters.
The recipe was simple: WDW leaders could only have long-term success if they exceeded expectations with Cast, Guest, and Business Results. Two out of three wasn't enough (aka no brilliant jerks!). I didn't realize at the time how exceptional this practice was. The best leaders intuitively knew that a happy Cast led to a happy Guest, which led to financial results, and those leaders prioritized the Cast Experience. The results? Magic.
Foundational to what made it all so incredible was that Walt's legacy was omnipresent, his voice everywhere. Walt knew it takes people to make dreams a reality, and the leaders after him embraced that. And they delivered.
There's much talk today about the future of work, including commentary about how companies need to respond to changing employee expectations post-COVID-19. That may be true for many companies. But as a Disney veteran, I'm here to tell you that the best companies knew that focusing on the Employee Experience was a difference-maker long before 2020.
If your company's leadership team isn't actively focused on the Employee Experience as part of its strategy already, it might have some catching up to do. The good news is, as novelist George Eliot said, "It's never too late to be what you might have been." All you need to know is that success will follow once you focus on the Employee Experience; your employees are the bottom line.
WDW wasn't the first place I worked nor the most recent, but the leadership, culture, and development there shaped me more than any place before or since. I am forever grateful that my career—and everything I know about the Cast and Guest Experience—all started with Walt's mouse.
