Employee experience

Employee experience has emerged as the guiding star for firms wanting to build an atmosphere that nurtures, empowers, and inspires their employees in the ever-changing terrain of modern workplaces.

Those days are gone when a job was primarily focused on work and income. Today, it's all about creating an immersive journey in which every connection, opportunity, and moment counts. Employee experience is growing into an essential component in driving employee engagement, productivity, and business success.

In this article, we will explore the core of employee experience, including its importance, ways of improvement, and strategies for creating an incredible and satisfied employee journey.

What is employee experience?

Employee experience (EX) is what your employees encounter, witness, and feel during their organizational tenure. It impacts everything from your organization to your bottom line. If you neglect this, you might as well do it at your peril.

Employee experience affects - positively or negatively, depending on what the employees feel - the organization’s employee retention, company culture, employee engagement, employee productivity, and employee morale.

Good employee experience ensures that the workforce is proactive, aligned with organizational goals, contributes significantly to corporate revenue, stays loyal, and is willing to recommend your organization to their near and dear ones.

One way of understanding EX management is to understand customer experience (CX). If you'd like your customers to have an excellent experience with your company, then the same should be valid for your employees. Employees and customers are equally important.

According to a survey conducted by Deloitte, only 22% of leadership believes their company provides differentiated or excellent employee experience.

Why is employee experience important?

Employee experience is critical since it directly affects your HR functions and processes. Below are some key aspects that let you know why it is essential, it helps:

01. Improve the feedback mechanism

Every step in the employee life cycle potentially impacts company culture and performance management. To ensure there is no gap in the said process, you must ask for employee feedback regularly. This will help organizations in realizing how well they are supporting their employees. Your staff is more than willing to provide feedback if you solicit it.

02. Enhance your HR processes

One of the best examples is the employee onboarding process. This is a crucial milestone in the employee journey. It is the start of everything they will experience in the organization. Business leaders and HR management may create employee journey maps to show an individual's organizational route, possibly matched with the employee lifecycle.

It is their very first impression of the organization and will influence how they associate with or feel about it. This is their first real insight into your company's workplace culture. This is an opportunity for them to mingle and understand the company culture and know the people and experiences that will help them decide whether they want to be a part of the organization or not.

03. Develop cross-collaboration

Employees engage and work with various functions, teams, and coworkers over their organizational tenure. All of these contacts and collaborations add up to it. Every team member and action adds something to the employee experience framework in some way. It can be good or bad, but it does affect how the person feels about their job. Keeping this in mind helps team interaction, team management, and making efforts to improve it.

04. Promote new ideas and creativity

By taking care of employee experience, companies can use the creativity and ability of employees. When employees have good experiences, it creates a setting that encourages creativity and innovation. When employees feel safe, supported, and in charge, they are more likely to talk about their ideas, take calculated risks, help solve problems, and develop new ideas.

05. Update management team

The leadership of a company has a massive impact on the environment. They influence and help build a positive (or negative) environment. The top management has a lot of power, but even they need to know about problems or complaints so they can fix or improve things.

They can suggest and implement improvements if they have access to relevant data. They lay the stones for building the foundation of employees that need to come first. Thus, if you need to enhance employee experience management in your organization, you will most likely need to start with leadership.

06. Contribute organizational flexibility and adaptability

Employee experience helps a company be flexible and responsive to change. When employees have a positive working environment, they are more likely to accept change, be hard-working, and quickly adjust to new situations.

An excellent employee experience builds trust, collaboration, and open communication, which makes it easier for businesses to handle problems.

How to improve the employee experience

Your organization needs to have a holistic approach to enhance employee experience, irrespective of the organization's size, nature of the business, etc. Let's look at a few key ways to improve your employee experience.

01. Encourage effective communication

Effective communication is a dialogue, not a monologue. Everyone in the organization needs to know how to connect in terms of communication with each other.

For communication, the employees need to feel safe at work. They should know their feedback will not backfire. Ensure them of that and notice the difference it brings about. There needs to be a common channel for all employees to convey their thoughts, grievances, etc.

If your organization does not have one, you need to create one and make it accessible to all. Listen to them, act on it, and give them the confidence that their feedback is not going unheard. This will provide you with some profound insights into what they are thinking.

02. Workforce experience is a feeling

Don't make the employee experience a rigid process; it needs empathy, and the sooner organizations recognize this, the sooner they can provide it to their employees.

Interaction with employees should be truthful and empathetic. All employees, junior/senior, payroll/contract, etc., have been through similar stages and experiences. Leverage those to make your employee experience more effective, enriching, and memorable.

03. Promote work-life balance

Encourage and help your employees develop a good balance between work and life. When you can, offer flexible work choices like working from home or setting your own hours, and spread the word about how essential breaks and holidays are to avoid burnout.

Provide resources and initiatives that help employees stay healthy, such as wellness programs or workshops on dealing with stress.

04. Educate the managers

If your managers cannot provide that experience to the employees, you need to educate them. Train your managers, and provide them with avenues to improve the employee experience every day.

You may open up a forum where they can interact with employees in groups or one-on-one. This will let them connect with employees directly, make them happy, and give you points and ideas to improve the employee experience.

05. Continuously listen and adapt

Ask for employee feedback regularly through surveys, focus groups, or one-on-one talks. Listen carefully to their worries, ideas, and wants. Use the feedback to make well-informed decisions and improve the employee experience over time.

Here are some additional pointers that you can use to boost your employee experience positively.

Why should you conduct employee experience surveys?

More and more organizations are now realizing the importance and ease of employee experience surveys and adopting them for collecting and analyzing data. Here are some benefits of using staff surveys in your company.

01. Ease-of-use

Employee surveys can come in handy in collecting employee experience data; the feedback is genuine, real-time, and can help improve your existing workforce experience.

02. Analytics

Employee surveys are hassle-free and straightforward, and the analytics on some survey tools are very detailed and helpful. These survey platforms let you create dashboards and share them with other managers and teams, aiding in making informed HR decisions.

03. Informed decisions

Employee experience surveys can help identify specific areas for development. With data from these surveys, you can make necessary and relevant changes to your existing HR processes and improve employee experience management.

04. Employee engagement and satisfaction

Employee engagement relates to how positively employees feel involved with or engaged in their job. Employee engagement and satisfaction can be measured via employee experience surveys.

These surveys commonly cover job happiness, work environment, interactions with coworkers and supervisors, recognition, career growth opportunities, and more. Analyzing survey results helps you measure employee satisfaction and identify potential morale and employee engagement issues.

05. Employee retention

Engaged employees work harder and bring other benefits, like higher retention rates and a more secure work environment. Employees are more likely to stay with a business if they feel heard, respected, and supported.

Surveys allow for identifying potential retention risks and implementing methods to reduce them, such as strengthening leadership effectiveness, addressing workload problems, or expanding opportunities for career advancement.

06. Branding

Survey portals can be customized to suit/match your branding colors and themes. This is important and ensures more responses from employees. Also, customizing things at their end gives them the freedom to experiment and keeps them engaged.

How should you set up Employee experience programs?

Having an employee experience program is a great idea; we believe more organizations should have them. Here are a few things you might want to consider before setting up an employee experience program:

01. Build a team

Not only does it make things easier, but it also brings in fresh perspectives from team members. With a group, it becomes easier to coordinate, manage, and implement activities.

02. Be receptive

Meet with employees, solicit feedback, listen to their issues, concerns, and ideas, and act on them. If you are open to ideas and suggestions, employees will be happy to relay their ideas and grievances. Keep an open mind; that's all you need to do.

03. Management buy-in

Before you design and implement a program, you need to make sure that the management team is aware and has bought into the idea. You need their approval and ideas to succeed, or it may become futile.

04. Employee surveys

You need to get an employee survey tool and start using it. You can use it for pretty much everything, soliciting program ideas, designing the program, implementation, feedback on the program, etc.

Why do you need an employee experience strategy?

Organizations need to realize and understand that excellent and practical employee experience is not the responsibility of HR managers alone. An employee interacts and works with several colleagues and functions over their organizational tenure. They have an equal amount of impact on the employee experience.

Here are some additional ideas and key tips to improve your organization's employee experience strategy.

01. Evaluate employee feedback

Gather employee feedback through surveys, focus groups, or one-on-one discussions. Analyze the data to find trends, improvement areas, and employee experience improvements.

02. Encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion

Make your workplace inclusive, where employees of all backgrounds feel valued and respected. Promote activities promoting diversity and equity within the organization.

03. Use technology

Technology may help to speed up operations, improve communication, and boost productivity. Invest in user-friendly platforms that encourage employee engagement and make work easier.

04. Encourage continuous development

Develop a learning culture by providing educational resources, hosting skill-building programs, and helping employees achieve professional development.

05. Improve communication channels

Ensure that effective communication channels are in place so employees can receive updates, provide feedback, and stay connected to the organization and their colleagues.

06. Enable employee empowerment

Give employees the ability to make their own decisions, give them decision-making authority, and allow them to contribute their ideas and thoughts to the decision-making process.

07. Align employee experience with company values and mission

Ensure the company's mission, vision, and values are reflected in employee experiences. Connect employees to their work's purpose and impact on the organization and its stakeholders.

How can you design an effective employee experience design?

You must be wondering why employee experience design is important. An employee goes through many experiences, from when they interview for a role to when they leave the organization.

These experiences influence their intent to stay, productivity, employee engagement, and whether they would recommend their friends and family to the organization. It is, therefore, crucial to ensure you have an employee experience design that works for all your employees and ticks all the right/positive boxes in the employees' list.

You need to keep the following things in mind:

01. Build a team

Needless to say, everyone is responsible for ensuring a positive employee experience. You need to involve as many people as possible, especially the managers, HODs, and your executive team. HR can spearhead the activity, but everyone needs to participate.

02. Manage goals effectively

Goals management is crucial for all employees, and managers must give it the same importance. Managers must help their team members achieve the set goals, provide regular feedback, and develop new goals regularly.

03. Map the employee journey

Create an employee journey map that outlines the different touchpoints and experiences an employee has throughout their tenure with the organization. This includes the pre-hiring process, onboarding, daily work interactions, professional development, and offboarding. Identify pain points and opportunities for improvement at each stage.

04. Encourage frequent communication

You need to establish multiple communication channels in your organization, monitor them and respond to inputs you get via them. You need to take appropriate actions based on the feedback and ideas you get from the channels; this encourages employees to voice their opinions.

05. Provide growth and development opportunities

Provide employees with opportunities for growth, learning, and career advancement. Encourage people to learn new skills and advance their careers within the organization. Training programs, mentorship initiatives, leadership development, and cross-functional projects are examples of this.

06. Gather feedback

Meet employees, have one-on-ones, and conduct surveys to gather regular feedback. This is crucial to understand the happenings in your organization. This is imperative to check if any processes need fixes and make changes wherever necessary.

07. Keep it simple

You do not need fancy tools or fancy programs to ensure an excellent employee experience. It has to be simple and empathetic, and your employees will be happy and committed.

08. Continuously monitor and adjust

Assess the effectiveness of your employee experience initiatives regularly using surveys, feedback methods, and performance indicators. Use this information to discover areas for improvement and make the required changes to improve the employee experience over time.

Why don’t you refer to our recent blog, ‘Key tips to help you build an effective employee experience design for your organization,’ where we talk about this in great detail?

Final Words

If you want your employees to be vocal, provide them with the right platform. If you want a successful business, give employees the scope to work by giving them the right direction.

How you treat your employees will determine how they will treat your business. It's time to evaluate your employee experience and give it a positive push if needed! Positive employee experience will change the way your employees, prospective employees, and customers see the organization, and that’s a definite step in making your organization a great place to work.

One must not forget that a positive employee experience should and does contribute to your organization’s performance. Improving employee experience does translate into improved business performance and business outcomes.