Does your company have a robust system to create an optimal employee experience? Check out our latest blog to find out why employee experience matters and why it's imperative to improve it.

Employee Experience, Why It Matters, and a Systematic Approach to EX

In a world where money is no longer the primary motivating factor for employees, focusing on the employee experience is the most promising competitive advantage that organisations can create.

– Jacob Morgan, author of The Employee Experience Advantage

In the era of employees being driven by purpose in their work, job satisfaction, and growth along with so many other factors, it becomes critical for organizations worldwide to build and sustain the right and efficient strategy and provide their employees with a quality experience at their workplace. It’s safe to say that your employees form the backbone of your organization, and when the backbone is healthy, your body is at comfort. Companies who strive to deliver authentic customer experience now focus equally to strengthen employee experience to enhance productivity, and thereby elevate the company’s growth.

What is Employee Experience?

The journey an employee takes with your company is called employee experience. It includes every interaction that occurs throughout the employee life cycle, as well as experiences involving an employee's role, workspace, manager, and well-being.

Workers are keen to gain your trust and feel a sense of purpose. They want to know that their efforts are valued and appreciated and that their colleagues are faithfully collaborative. They want defined responsibilities as well as opportunities to learn and grow. They desire their sense of purpose to coincide with that of the entity. And they want a suitable environment that allows them to achieve that elusive work-life balance.

Exhausted, irritated, and overwhelmed employees may just quit your company and start looking for better opportunities, and you don’t want that. These are some basic needs and feelings of the employees that you as an employer must consider seriously and subsequently try to wholeheartedly extend them with a congenial experience. A company must prioritize its employees by analyzing and responding to how they perceive their employee journeys, and then deliver calculated initiatives that focus on moments that are essential to optimize contentment, efficiency, and productivity. Organizations may become more uplifting, cooperative, and centered on providing a meaningful and enjoyable experience by doing so. According to research, people who report having a positive employee experience are 16 times more engaged than employees who report having a negative experience and are eight times more likely to remain employed at the company.

Why is Employee Experience Important?

Companies that invest in employee experience are 4x more profitable than those that do not.

– Jacob Morgan

A more flexible and responsive model based on higher levels of connection is replacing a traditional workplace hierarchy. Organizations use this approach to collaborate with their employees to create personalized, authentic, and motivating experiences that improve the individual, team, and company performance. Employee experience considers what people value in the broadest sense, recognizing how different life stages, individual circumstances, and even individual personality types make various propositions appealing to different people. Employees want to have a strong sense of agency—the ability to influence outcomes that are important to them—along with a strong feeling of belonging and identity. That includes agency at work as well as agency concerning work.

We have enlisted three areas that are impacted by employee experience:

Recruitment

Nowadays, most job seekers use job search and career websites to research companies and read reviews about them. The rise in such sites reflects employees' desire to evaluate how their experience with the organization can turn out to be. This is why having a positive employee experience is essential. Otherwise, your negative reviews may scare away top-notch potential employees from your company.

Engagement

Employee engagement is a measure of a company's relationship with its employees. It is one of the feelings that can arise as a result of the employee experience. Most businesses track and strive to improve employee engagement because it is strongly correlated with turnover and how much effort their employees are likely to put into their jobs. It's one of many possible outcomes of a positive employee experience.

Retention

Employees these days are increasingly making decisions to leave companies early in their careers if they don't feel good. A proper beginning of their journey into the organization, such as an effective onboarding, can make a significant difference in an employee's desire to stay, productivity, and perception of the company culture.

McKinsey and Company comes up with the “ EX Factor ”. They have listed the “nine elements to get right” to deliver a good employee experience. They are

Social Experience

1) People and Relationships - Am I seen and treated by my leaders as a significant contributor to the organization?

2) Teamwork - Do the people I work with everyday trust and care for one another to create and collaborative and innovative environment?

3) Social Climate - Am I welcome in this community and do I feel like I belong?

Work Experience

4) Work Organization - Di I have clear responsibilities, interesting work, and the resources I need to be successful in my role?

5) Work Control and Flexibility - Do I complete my work efficiently, with flexibility and positive integration in my life?

6) Growth and Rewards - Am I given incentives and opportunities that help me learn, grow, and provide for my family?

Organisational Experience

7) Purpose - Does my company have a purpose that aligns with mine, as well as to processes to which I can contribute?

8) Technology - Does my company’s technology enable me to work efficiently and without friction?

9) Physical Responsibility - Are my surroundings safe, comfortable, and human centered?

How to Improve Employee Experience?

Generate a model for employee strategy that puts employees at the core of the issues and uses both data and empathy for employers to understand what’s most crucial for their employees. Invest just equal attention to employee experience as customer experience. Several factors contribute to the success of an EX intervention or transformation, beginning with a clear North Star, or success measure. Devotion to assessing the current issues, needs, and feelings of the employees, is essential. At last, these journeys should be made possible by digital tools that allow people to focus on more engaging and creative sides of their job.

The following are three steps, the successful implementation of which may help the employers establish effective and enjoyable EX:

Creation and Development of a Foundation

This first step is a group effort that necessitates the collaboration of senior leaders from all activities, as well as the participation of the entire organization. It begins with a clear, honest assessment of current employee needs, backed up by data as well as tools and assessments based on organizational science. More broadly, leaders must convey the orientation and magnitude of ambition for EX, as well as specify the value at stake. This ensures that a company has a clear vision of the core theme it is driving, rather than just a hazy concept of how it can boost speed with a one-and-done solution.

Identification of Individual Employee Journeys and According Transformation

Design thinking entails a ""discover, design, deliver"" cycle that requires a thorough understanding of a specific employee journey over a relevant period. Most product and customer-service journeys have a shorter cycle than employee journeys and are typically just pertinent to their core aspects. For example, the onboarding journey in a position might very well take up to a year to complete, which is longer than the typical product journey. However, the process is remarkably similar.

Prepare the Entire Organization for an EX Transformation

Following the identification of personas and critical moments, the final step is to implement systems that allow the organization to scale EX—through improved data, quantification, systems, and skills. While HR is an important partner in this, employees and managers are given tools and resources to help them transform their experience. Organizations can assess the financial impact of modifications to business models and performance-management systems by linking them to business performance.

Conclusion

No matter what the industry or geography of the organization is, it can develop a distinct EX strategy by first defining its goals and how EX contributes to the company's business impact. It must also eschew a cookie-cutter approach to worker journeys by combining stringent data analysis with customization, providing suitable personas, and focusing on key moments that resonate with employees.

Additionally, fruitful EX achieves a balance between top-down direction and allowing employees to chart their paths. Everyone is on board, including a coalition comprised of financial services, operations, and information technology, among many other features; these groups have been partners in change implementation and management from the beginning. Finally, data is central to how organizations can continuously measure impact and adjust course as needed. Employee focus is long overdue. Institutions can take this chance to accomplish and be even more friendly to their employees, shareholders, and customers. How each company handles this opportunity could shape its reputation as an employer both internally and externally and attract top talent.