In recommendations for business success, information about employees tends to focus on what they bring to the table regarding skills, talent, and fit. Talk of salary and benefits revolves around what you need to provide to get them to join you and stay. But this conversation is changing.
Employees need more from their employers than the standard package, and it’s not just easy stuff like foosball tables and snacks. Rather, they are looking for intangibles like balance, trust, fairness, and respect. And in the current employee-driven job market, they have the power to only work for companies that provide it.
Is your business one of them? In the following sections, we discuss how to find out, as well as how to improve the way employees perceive your company, known as the employee experience. But first, we delve a bit more into exactly what employee experience is.
What Is Employee Experience?
According to a research study conducted by the IBM Smarter Workforce Institute and the Workhuman Analytics & Research Institute, employee experience is “a set of perceptions that employees have about their experiences at work in response to their interactions with the organization. [It is] a positive and powerful — and ultimately human — experience, in which employees are able to invest more of their whole selves into the workplace.”
The notion of “perceptions” is tricky because you can’t directly affect anyone’s perceptions. But you can provide an environment that makes positive perceptions more likely. The first step is examining where they are now.
Evaluate Your Company’s Employee Experience
The Harvard Business Review states, “Leaders need tools that allow them to efficiently, effectively, and rigorously learn what their diverse group of employees actually needs so that they can craft policies accordingly.” Use the following suggestions to get started with your research.
Gather Data
Look for internal documentation that can provide clues about employee preferences. For instance, what policies are already in place regarding flexible work? Do you have a process for employees to submit suggestions, even if it’s inactive? If so, what kinds of things have people suggested in the past? How do your salary and benefit packages compare to those of other companies in your industry? What is your retention rate versus what you would like it to be?
Conduct a Survey
A good way to start understanding how your employees experience your company is with a confidential survey. According to Great Place to Work, an organization that awards companies that employees love to work for, “Conducting a confidential employee survey at least annually gives employees the opportunity to provide candid feedback about what matters to them and what they need to feel valued and supported.”
Follow Up With Interviews
To support the survey, conduct in-depth interviews with a few representative employees. The Harvard Business Review explains that such discussions “allow you to get a sense of the stories behind the quantitative data…. The idea is to have semi-structured conversations with employees to gather their perspectives, interpretations, and ideas.” Interviews can also be conducted initially to get ideas for what topics to cover in the survey.
Analyze the Findings
Take all the information you’ve gathered and form some big-picture observations. For instance, you might come up with the following conclusions:
- Employees like working from home but also want the opportunity to come into the office occasionally for things like brainstorming sessions and client meetings.
- Team members don’t feel supported in their professional development.
- Pay and insurance are good, but workers would like more PTO and better mental health resources.
- Women expect pay transparency and pay parity with their male colleagues.
Use your findings to design new initiatives to improve the employee experience.
Understand the Employee Journey
According to communication software provider Simpplr, “An employee experience is not defined as a singular moment, but instead should be seen as a journey. And your employee experience strategy influences this journey.” The employee journey might include onboarding, the employee’s team, their workspace, management, their use of company benefits, and many more elements.
The employment journey can be understood to take place in stages. Companies must create positive momentum in each one:
- Find. When you are searching for new employees, remember that they are searching for you as well, and you want to make a good impression when they find you. The key is to create lines of commonality between you and your ideal employees. The best way to do so is to create a list of qualities you want to attract and be attractive to candidates who embody them.For example, say one of the qualities you want all your employees to have is friendliness. Think of ways to express friendliness yourself so that friendly people will naturally be attracted to see what more your company has to offer. Friendliness can be in the form of fun social media posts or videos, offers to have “virtual coffee” with employees, or the chance for a no-obligation informational interview.
- Explore. To keep potential hires engaged, you must make the exploration (hiring) stage as simple and easy as possible. Consider things like an easy-to-navigate employment website section that provides thorough information, a smooth job application process with no technical glitches, prompt responses, fast interviews, and quick hiring decisions. Remember that — similar to customers — employees give you a ding every time they experience frustration with your process.Other components of this stage include transparency around background checks and how you communicate with candidates who aren’t selected. Keep in mind that today’s interviewee who didn’t quite have the experience you need may be the perfect person to fill a role a year from now. Keeping in touch with them can be well worth the effort.
- Train. Onboarding and training can be hard for everyone involved, but there are things you can do to improve them. Remember that you’re still on trial here. A poor experience could send a new hire out the door with the logic that it’s better to leave now than get further involved with a company that can’t get its act together on the first day of their employment. The key to avoiding such a scenario is to have well-planned procedures that list the steps to take.
- Remain. You may think that, with the exploration and hiring phases over, you’re in the clear. But such is not the case. You’ve done everything you can to attract, hire, and prepare your new employees. Now you need to take steps to keep them. This part of the process is multifaceted because many factors influence an employee’s decision to stay with a company.Consider things like fulfilling work, support for professional advancement, competitive salary, healthy benefits, plenty of PTO, flexibility, appropriate and useful feedback, competent management, fair promotion criteria, and recognition. Additionally, each employee should understand their role within the greater company mission. With these elements in place, employees are more likely to stay than seek out alternative options.
- Progress. The “support for professional advancement” element mentioned in the previous section is highly important. Most professionals don’t just want a job — they want a career. If your company can’t provide them with opportunities for growth, it’s likely they will find one that does. The Simpplr blog post recommends the following actions:
- Provide internal skills training.
- Give employees a continuing education budget.
- Develop a peer tutoring system where team leaders share their talents.
- Discuss career objectives.
- Conduct regular reviews so employees can understand the quality of their performance.
- Reward successful employees with bonuses, raises, and promotions.
The following video discusses the importance of training opportunities.
- Depart. No matter how hard you try to elevate the employee experience, employees will leave for a wide variety of reasons. But you can make even this final stage of the employee journey a positive one for all concerned. A well-thought-out exit interview conducted with each departing employee will not only give them a sense of closure but also provide valuable information about how to make the employee experience more positive for those who remain.
How to Improve Employee Experience
Each company will differ regarding its employees’ needs, but every company can discern those needs and develop processes to support them. The following are sample suggestions for initiatives to deploy.
Ensure Smooth Onboarding
First impressions matter, which is why you need to provide a smooth and easy onboarding process for new employees. Onboarding includes things like training, getting set up in the new workspace, and becoming familiar with resources and benefits. It should be considered a process that occurs not just on the first day, but for three months, with check-ins every 30 days.
Focus on DEIB
Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) is a concept that’s important for employees who don’t fit outdated ideas of what team members look like and need. For example, people of color (POC) want a workplace where they can thrive, get paid what they’re worth, and be considered for promotions readily.
DEIB should not be an add-on to company policies, but rather baked into the way a business operates. For example, the promotion process should be based not on subjective notions about who “deserves” it but on objective criteria that can’t be argued with. Further, all employees should be given access to resources that provide them with an equal opportunity to meet those criteria.
Keep in mind that mentioning DEIB — at gatherings and in internal and public-facing written and spoken statements and reports — isn’t enough and can even backfire. Employees can recognize hypocrisy, including when companies talk about DEIB but don’t practice it. Such insincerity may contribute to employee defection, which is exactly what you should seek to avoid.
Offer Flexibility
Some forward-thinking companies have always provided a positive work-life balance with realistic expectations, work from home options, and the ability for employees to come and go as needed as long as the work got done. The pandemic forced many more companies to provide these options, and the post-pandemic period has served as a test for which businesses would keep them in place and which would revert to strict requirements and expectations.
Smart organizations have taken the lessons of the pandemic to heart and have reaped the benefits of greater trust in many forms, including the following:
- Flexible scheduling
- Job sharing
- Part-time work
- Compressed workweek
- Shift work
Contribute to Employee Well-being
Your workplace should provide as much support as possible to ensure employees remain healthy and happy. For example, it is becoming much more common for companies to provide mental health services, financial counseling, and ongoing learning opportunities. Businesses that offer substantial PTO are also contributing to worker well-being.
Incorporate Technology
The needs of remote workers when it comes to technology are obvious. They must be able to reliably connect to company networks, communicate with coworkers, and perform assigned tasks. IT teams must have solutions ready for the increasing number of employees in this situation.
But every employee, including those who work on-site or on a hybrid (remote and on-site combination) basis, relies on technology. This element of employee experience is so important that it has its own name: digital employee experience (DEX). Workers, especially those of younger generations, have quit positions over poor DEX alone, so this area is one employers should spend considerable resources on. Some specific areas of concern are as follows:
- Communication tools. Being unable to reach others within the company can be highly frustrating. Reliable communication tools such as email, messaging, and teamwork applications are essential.
- Video conferencing tools. In today’s dispersed work environment, there is a chance anyone could need to use video conferencing for meetings, client calls, or quick conversations at any time.
- Specialized applications. Workers must be able to depend on applications they use constantly, such as medical record applications for healthcare workers.
- Customer care resources. Customer care representatives too often must switch between two or more applications to find the right information to help customers. This process can be tiresome and frustrating, adding to poor DEX for these team members.
- Data analysis tools. No longer the realm of data professionals alone, data analysis must be accessible by everyone in the company. Such tools can help managers and team members make smart decisions and move the company ahead of the competition.
Use Personas
Employee experience is not monolithic. Each team member has their own experience of working for your company, and you must do your best to improve all of them. One strategy is to borrow a method from marketing known as personas, which are characters that represent common customer groups. But in this case, they will represent employee groups.
For example, you might create Laura, a dedicated manager in her 40s who has been with the company for 7 years. Another might be Juan, a promising salesperson in his 20s who has expressed an interest in leadership. Personas may include more details, such as family status and other information like being a person of color or identifying as part of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Personas can then be used within the context of determining policies. For example, you might decide to initiate a career track mentoring program to help people like Juan meet their professional goals. But ask yourself how this benefits Laura. Perhaps she could serve as a mentor to Juan, but how will the company help her meet her professional goals? In this way, personas serve as a shorthand for groups of employees who have similar needs.
Does Employee Experience Sound Familiar?
Does the phrase “employee experience” ring a bell? That’s because it’s very similar to another concept popular in the business world these days, customer experience (CX). According to the Harvard Business Review, it can be useful to turn the techniques used to improve CX inward to help organizations “gain a nuanced understanding of their employees’ needs and preferences in an efficient and cost-effective manner.”
The two concepts are related in another way as well. Better employee experience leads to better CX, which leads to better company results, enhancing the employee experience even more.
Consider the difference between employees who are unhappy with their work and feel unsupported by their company and happy employees who feel that their company has their back. These emotions come through in all touch points with customers. They become the difference between poor to moderate customer care and the outstanding service consumers have come to expect from a wide range of companies they do business with.
That’s why employee experience isn’t just the latest buzzword in HR. Rather, employee experience is a notion that can help you save on costs, retain institutional knowledge, provide better customer care, and improve your bottom line.
