Engagement
7
min read
What is employee experience?
Employee experience is a buzzword for many fast growing organizations. Increasingly, you must also be looking at your employees more as the end assets than simply as means to an end. Here, employee experience can be your greatest tool to attract, retain and develop the best talent in the marketplace. According to a report by Deloitte, 80% of HR and business leaders believe that employee experience was “important” or “very important” to them. However, only 22% of these leaders said their organization was “excellent” at establishing a differentiated employee experience. The gap in these two figures clearly creates a case for you to step up your efforts with a comprehensive employee experience strategy and best practices to achieve the same.
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Decoding employee experience: Meaning and definition
Before jumping into the detailed approach on how to improve employee experience, its importance and impact on different business verticals, you must understand what employee experience is. According to Denise Lee Yohn, “EX (employee experience) is the sum of everything an employee experiences throughout his or her connection to the organization.” Looking closely, this suggests that employee experience entails every encounter for an employee from the time they first interact with an organization as a potential candidate to the day they formally leave the organization. Thus, it is not a one off observation or feeling, but encapsulates everything an employee experiences at work.
Why is employee experience so important: The business impact
Why is employee experience so important or why invest in employee experience has been a question that would be in your mind for a long time. For many of your business leaders, investing in employee experience may be a good thing to have, and not something pressing for your organization’s sustainability and scalability. However, studies and surveys have time and again illustrated the business impact to answer why is employee experience so important.
1. Engagement and performance
You can directly link a positive employee experience to satisfaction, happiness and engagement at work. While these may not be directly quantifiable, their impact surely is. According to a study, happy employees are up to 20% more productive at work. On the flip side, actively disengaged employees cost the U.S. between $450 billion to $550 billion per year. Thus, if you create a conducive experience you will be able to engage your employees as well as augment their performance and productivity.
2. Talent attraction and retention
You can also answer the question on investing in employee experience by throwing light on its impact on talent attraction and retention. Invariably, if you offer a positive experience from the first step of the employee lifecycle, you are able to attract and retain the best talent. At the same time, poor culture and experience is what pushes top performers to look for a change. 47% of people actively looking for a new job pinpoint company culture as the main reason for wanting to leave. Therefore, employee experience is a great resource for employer branding and getting the best talent.
3. Profits and bottom line
Finally, employee experience focusing on satisfaction, engagement, wellbeing, belongingness, etc. has direct business repercussions. Research shows that companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147% in earnings per share. Thus, employee experience can have a positive impact on your organization’s bottom line.
How to measure employee experience: Key milestones and employee experience metrics
On learning the business impact of employee experience, you must be excited about identifying the right employee experience strategy and learn the best practices on how to improve employee experience. However, it is important to take a pause to actually measure their experience score to identify the gaps and challenges. Here are the top employee experience survey questions that can help you answer the question, how to measure employee experience:
1. eNPS
You can start measuring employee experience by calculating the employee net promoter score. Like customers, you can understand whether your employees are willing to recommend your organization to others. Employee experience survey questions may include, on a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our organization to your family or friends to work?
Depending on the cumulative score, you can have a decent understanding of the overall employee experience. Anything below 6 reflects poorly on the experience and above 8/9 is a good score.
2. Employee referrals
While employees might display a willingness to recommend others to join, if they are actually walking the talk is one of the employee experience metrics that you must track. Here, tracking referrals is important. The number of quality referrals which an employee brings in which actually convert to successful hires illustrate employee satisfaction and a positive experience. It is vital to note that simply focusing on the number of referrals is not enough as they might be just a sign of incentives attached to referrals. You should majorly focus on successful hires.
3. Ratings
Finally, not all employees might be vocal or open about their experience. But, that doesn’t signal a positive experience. Therefore, you must constantly track and monitor employee rating and feedback sites like Glassdoor. Here employees anonymously share their experiences at different organizations. While you may not get the name, however, a broad sentiment becomes clear by analyzing such surveys.
What is employee experience management?
Employee experience management at the very basic level ensures managing employee expectations and providing the right resources, support, tools, etc. to create a positive experience. Here, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs can be a foundation for employee experience management and garner a better experience. If you look closely, there is a clear match between the needs of individuals that Maslow states and what employees seek at work. The 5 major needs namely physiological, safety, belongingness, esteem and self- actualization all can be realized through organizational offerings to augment employee experience.
1. Physiological Needs
You must make an extra effort to focus on employee wellbeing and ensure that the basic necessities, like food, rent, etc. are taken care of, even in the face of salary cuts. You need to constantly monitor employee pulse in terms of their physiological needs and offer reassurance accordingly.
2. Security Needs
Job security has been one of the top stressors, time and again, for almost all employees and a direct threat to the second rung of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. There is a lot of anxiety about losing one’s job, which is coming in the way of creating a positive employee experience at work. You can cross this bridge by facilitating transparency to the largest extent possible. It is important to keep the communication channels open and constantly educate your employees about the state of affairs, instead of hasty firing to prevent ambiguity and confusion among the employees which creates a feeling of insecurity.
3. Belongingness Needs
Next, you must focus on fostering belongingness by helping employees gain a sense of purpose. Here helping employees realize the impact they are creating at work and giving them a purpose to strive for is important. Additionally, facilitating communication and collaboration to build strong bonds between colleagues can bridge the belongingness needs to create a worthy employee experience.
4. Esteem Needs
To address the esteem needs, you can step up the appreciation and recognition game. This involves celebrating small milestones, acknowledging even the smallest of contributions and constantly appreciating employee performance. This employee experience management practice will help you boost motivation and, thus, create a desirable experience for all team members.
5. Self Actualization Needs
To contribute to the final rung in Maslow’s hierarchy and empower employees to unleash their full potential, you should ensure that the work being given to employees contributes to their growth and professional development. Mentoring, training, coaching and development in a personalized avatar can further actualization.
Employee experience strategy: The employee journey
Managing and fostering a positive experience requires creating a comprehensive and robust employee experience strategy which addresses each step of the employee lifecycle.
1. Pre-employment: Attract and hire
The first step towards creating an effective employee experience strategy starts in the pre employment phase. Here, you should consider having a seamless application and hiring process. Firstly, the application form must be easy to comprehend and relevant to the role. A cumbersome form which is difficult to access and complete will negatively impact experience. Secondly, the whole interview and hiring process must involve constant communication and touchpoints. Make the process entirely employee centric and evolve it constantly based on feedback.
2. Employment: Onboard, engage and develop
Once the employee is in the system, onboarding is the next touchpoint. A pleasant onboarding experience can do wonders and the opposite can make blunders. According to a study by Gallup, 88% of organizations don’t onboard well. Additionally, companies lose 25% of all new employees within a year. The right onboarding experience involves proper induction, expectation setting and giving the new hore time and space to absorb all the new information. Upon successful onboarding, you must focus on constantly engaging employees via different initiatives as well as investing in their development. Such development programs are likely to augment employee competencies, creating a win-win for all stakeholders.
3. Post employment: Depart
Finally, the last stage of the employee lifecycle is when employees move to a new organization or retire. While they might be leaving the organization, it is very important to have them depart with a positive experience. In any scenario, you should focus on having i an exit survey to encourage them to share their experience and areas of improvement. At the same time, helping them depart on a positive note, with no delays, left dues, etc. are signs of a positive employee experience.
How to improve employee experience
With an understanding of a robust strategy in hand, you are now ready to understand how to improve employee experience. Well, improving employee experience is closely related to augmenting the experience across every step of the strategy mentioned above. Here are some best practices that you can leverage to improve employee experience:
1. Communication
You should start with improving your internal communication. This has multiple layers to it. Firstly, communication must be clear to ensure that expectations are clear and employees understand every word. At the same time, you must encourage all your managers to practice active listening to ensure two-way communication to improve employee experience. According to research, 85% of employees are most motivated when internal communications are effective. A robust communication strategy is likely to augment collaboration, decrease conflict and, thus, increase belongingness and augment experience.
2. Recognition
Any answer on how to improve employee experience will definitely focus on appreciation and recognition. Research shows that recognition is the most important motivator for 37% of employees. Your leaders and managers must appreciate and recognize employee contribution to organizational success. At the same time, encouraging peer-to-peer recognition can be effective. When you acknowledge a job well done, employees tend to believe that they are making a difference which is being recognized and, thus, adds to a positive experience.
3. Technology
You may overlook the impact of technology in improving employee experience. Right from recruitment to departure, technology has the potential to augment every employee experience touch point. Within technology, leveraging gamification to facilitate performance and experience is most important. According to sources, 90% of employees are more productive with gamification, with 72% of them reporting it inspiring them to work harder and 95% enjoying it. At the same time, using technology to promote seamless collaboration and communication, automation, etc. can help you improve employee experience.
4. Culture
You also need to focus your efforts towards building a thriving and inclusive work culture which aligns with employee expectations. Here, offering flexibility and autonomy to employees to experiment and innovation, ensuring all voices are heard and a culture of respect, fairness and transparency are vital. According to a survey, companies with a thriving corporate culture achieve over 4x higher revenue growth. Therefore, to improve employee experience, you must transform the very fabric of the organizational culture and make it employee centric.
5. Development
A critical part of employee experience is the holistic development of the workforce. Here, understanding the unique developmental aspirations for each employee and align its learning and development efforts will help you make a difference. A balanced combination of training, upskilling, mentoring, coaching, etc. can go a long way into creating a positive employee experience. However, according to SHRM, only 29% of employees are “very satisfied” with their available career advancement opportunities. Thus, you must focus more on the professional development opportunities available for your employees.
6. Feedback
You might see feedback is a way of performance reviews, given to employees by their managers and leaders. However, it is time that you invest in employee experience surveys to gauge feedback from the workforce and understand their opinions, sentiments and perspectives. Some of the top employee experience survey questions include:
- On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend the organization to your friends and family?
- Do you enjoy your work?
- How would you rate the company culture on empathy, inclusivity, collaboration, etc.?
- Do you feel that the organization is open to change and feedback?
- Do you feel valued for your contributions?
- How would you rate the communication across the organization?
- How would you rate the engagement efforts led by the organization?
How employee experience impacts customer experience
Employee experience and customer experience are intrinsically linked. On the face of it, you might dismiss this thought and suggest that employee experience and customer experience are mutually exclusive. However, research shows that companies with excellent customer experience have 1.5x more engaged employees than others. Let us quickly explore how employee experience impacts customer experience:
1. People connect with people
While automation and digital transformation is on the rise, customers always desire human connection. This connection they get from your employees. Your employees are touch points for your organization and the only human interface customers interact with.
2. Employees define your brand
An organization not only goes by the quality of its offerings, but also by the attributes of its people. Therefore, it is your employees that have a role to play in defining your brand to your existing and potential customers. By capitalizing on individual employees, you can pull together customer interest and boost experience.
3. Employees are the ambassadors
You might have six figure marketing budgets, but employee reviews like customer reviews have the potential to make or break a brand. Employees define the public image for an organization. Customers generally prefer to engage with organizations that have a non-controversial public image.
4. Innovation and creativity
When an employee feels engaged at work, he or she will go the extra mile to onboard more customers and add a few new tips and tricks to your customer acquisition playbook. Positive experience can also act as a motivator to help the employee come up with newer strategies and techniques to keep the customer satisfied.
5. Building trust and credibility
Trust and credibility builds and breeds on relationships which are based on human connections. Only when your employees are engaged enough to enthusiastically perform their responsibilities will they make an effort to build that relationship of trust and credibility with the customers.
On a macro level, employees are the face of your organization in the market. Customers sense the authenticity of an organization in the way its employees communicate and project it to the outer world. Thus, good customer experience directly links to a robust employee experience.
Towards an effective employee experience program
You cannot improve employee experience in a single day. It requires years of strategizing, implementation, monitoring and refining the strategy based on feedback. The objective is to keep improving the process to augment experience. In such a situation, you can facilitate collaboration with SuperBeings. With a vision to create a conducive work environment, SuperBeings helps fast growing organizations like yours to create a pleasant employee experience. It will support you to gauge employee pulse and opinion, identify roadblocks to a positive experience and provide data backed insights for a seamless employee experience.
Suggested reading:
Employee Experience in remote work
Improving EX : A Road to Better Customer Experience
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