Employee experience is an employee-centric way of thinking and takes into consideration workers' perceptions about their journey through all the touchpoints at a particular company. The employee experience is bounded by the emotions an employee experiences in all the iterations they have with the organization, from the first contact (pre-selection) until his dismissal.
The company's physical workspace, culture and technology are all important components of the employee experience, which is often abbreviated as EX.
In this article, we’ll get to grips with some benefits of a positive Employee Experience, why it can help you stand out from the crowd, and what you need to do to create a great one.
Table of content
- What Is the Employee Experience?
- 6 Benefits of a positive employee experience
- Why is employee experience important?
- How to create a great employee experience
What is the Employee Experience?
The Employee Experience is the journey an employee takes with your organization and includes every interaction that happens along the employee life cycle. The Employee Experience includes any experience they may have had in the company and, therefore, embrace the sum of all interactions an employee has with an employer, from pre recruitment to post-exit.
EX involves an employee's role, well-being, facilities (the physical workspace), corporate communications (how employees perceive what’s going on, transparency), and IT (the tools to facilitate the job). It helps you align your employees' experiences with your company's purpose, brand and culture, so every interaction they have with their manager is authentic and sustainable.
6 Benefits of a positive Employee Experience.
Boosting the Employee Experience has numerous benefits that are associated with employee job satisfaction. These include the following:
- More engaged employees. Frankly, you can’t afford to have disengaged employees in your company as they can cost companies millions of pounds (euros or dollars) each year due to lower productivity and increased absences. Engaged employees are more productive and bring improved retention rates and workplace well-being. A disengaged employee costs an estimated 18% of their annual salary.
- Attract higher-quality employees. A candidate has likely researched your company thoroughly using online sources. Prospective employees may even want to learn all they can about the daily work environment and how the company is offering a great employee experience. In the UK, a business that has to replace more than 10 percent of its staff leaving each year can be considered to have a poor retention rate.
- Improve your communication and collaboration between employees and managers. Employees want to be heard, listened to and supported while they are working for an organization. Managers and Leaders must be sure they have an open-door policy if they have any questions or concerns. They need to find out when and how to communicate with their workers. Technology helps us to save time and know more about our employee's woes.
- Lower absenteeism rates. Unmotivated employees are more likely to be absent from the workplace, in turn negatively affecting productivity. When you invest the time and effort to engage talented employees, you want to make sure that you can keep them at your company by ensuring that they feel they are doing work that is challenging and rewarding.
- Increased quality of work. Engagement influences job success more than IQ or skill set, according to the happiness expert Shawn Achor. Happy employees want to do their work well and are interested in finding ways to perform their duties better.
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Improved customer relations. The employee experience has an impact on all areas of the business, including the customer experience. This is because engaged employees create a much better experience for customers. Indeed, many industry experts believe happy employees are more likely to work with customers and listen to what they are saying when they face an issue.
Why is employee experience important?
The employee experience has a direct impact on companies. Negative experiences of employees can reflect in business outcomes. With the right employee experience strategy, companies may create tailored, authentic experiences that strengthen employee purpose and help retain them.
Research from the Corporate Leadership Council revealed that happy employees are four times more motivated and less likely to resign.
What’s more, by running polls, pulse surveys or more with easy-to-use employee survey software. you can measure and boost staff engagement and satisfaction. MIT Cisr indicates that those companies scoring high in employee experience are lowering costs and/or increasing revenue to stand out against competitors.
That being said, achieving an effective EX is key to boosting performance and customer success. A customer's experience with an organization is only as good as an employee's experience.
How to create a great employee experience.
With 79% of employees saying their employer has an obligation to support them, the pressure is on for HR to explore what they can do to help boost their experience within the organization.
- Combine your employee experience with your data.
Today, companies collect operational data from employees such as:
- Basic personal data
- health data
- Type of training carried out
- Evolution of salary levels
- Internal communication
This information needs to be linked to Employee Experience data, allowing executives to have a more accurate view of actions taken and their success.
- Gain Support from Upper Management
Although overlooked when it comes to boost the Employee Experience, business leaders are primarily interested in financial results, which are related, for example, to:
- Increased Employee Productivity
- Maintaining Staff Turnover at the lowest levels possible
- Improving business reputation
A positive employee experience can help achieve these goals, and with the help of IT, the outcomes can be processed more easily so that executives can be sure where it is worth investing in.
- Multiple Managers
Since the design and evaluation of the employee experience can be an uphill battle, there must be a team, usually the HR department, that applies the measures of the EX strategies, manages the tools and analyzes HR metrics. This team can team up with executives to obtain the necessary information about the employee.
- Conduct an EX Redesign
Redesign specific Employee Experience touchpoints, such as onboarding or the performance evaluation process. It's about listening to employees, understanding which iterations with the organization are causing them negative emotions, and co-create a new EX.
This is the best way to approach an EX project when the organization is trying to digitalise the HR function and implement HR software. At that point, it is time to redefine the processes that the new software will later support.
- Being Open to Change
HR surveys are useful for companies to find out what their employees need to work in a pleasant environment.
However, it is not enough to ask our employees. We also need to show a willingness to make changes, even though not all the ideas can be carried out for financial, architectural or personal reasons. Not showing any reaction to their wishes can lead to negative experiences.
- Track and Measure Key HR metrics
Annual employee engagement surveys are outdated. So, to measure the Employee Experience, it is advisable to resort to periodic monitoring checks, open feedback platforms, engagement surveys, performance reviews and exit interviews.
HR can also use tools that allow periodic easy-to-use evaluations. The company can have an overview of the problems of the employees.
- Identify archetypes
An archetype is a characterization of the behavior patterns of a group of people. Cultural or personal (transitory) circumstances may influence this characterization, so it lasts 3-4 years maximum.
The differences between each group help us to understand their motivations and expectations. They are used to broaden the vision of employees (beyond categories) to design more transversal projects, based on their behavior, experiences and expectations.
The archetype is a way to start an EX project when we are acquainted with the need to end a one-size-fits-all, since we have identified different groups, with heterogeneous needs and very diverse EX.
