The employee experience is key to the success of your individual employees and your organization as a whole. Keep reading to learn more about employee experience and discover three ways you can enhance it so you can benefit from happier, more productive employees.
What Is the Employee Experience?
The employee experience is a holistic term that encompasses everything about a person’s experience working for your company throughout the employee lifecycle, and their perceptions of their own experience.
Some primary aspects of the employee experience include the company culture, the tools available to employees, and the working environment.
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The Importance of the Employee Experience
One survey found that employee experience was a top priority for 92 percent of HR leaders in 2021. This makes sense, considering that the employee experience your company cultivates directly affects employee recruitment, engagement, retention, and performance.
Think of all the ways an employee’s day-to-day experience in your company shapes their attitudes and their overall success. Even routine activities like requesting time off, handling paperwork, or looking up a question in a knowledge base all add up to influence an employee’s experience.
According to research by Jacob Morgan, companies that invest most heavily in enhancing the employee experience are included 11.5 times as often in Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work. These companies also produce more than four times the average profit and more than two times the average revenue!
Clearly, optimizing the employee experience is a worthy goal that deserves prioritization.
How Can Companies Improve the Employee Experience?
How can you make an effort to enhance the employee experience at your company? Try these employee experience strategies.
1. Get input from employees to see what’s lacking.
You won’t know where to start unless you get an accurate picture of what the employee experience looks like right now for your workers. Use surveys to ask about specific aspects of the employee experience. For example, you may ask employees to consider how helpful (or unhelpful) they find the HR technology tools you currently have in place.
You may find that something you thought was working is actually doing your employees—and your company as a whole—no favors. Or, you might identify some areas where you’re excelling in delivering a great employee experience. Without these insights, your efforts to improve the employee experience can easily be misguided.
2. Foster a positive company culture.
There is a powerful connection between your company culture and the employee experience. Some companies put a great deal of thought into crafting their mission statement and core values, but these ideals may not match up with the real-life experience of employees. Be proactive in ensuring your company rallies around your values and these values truly inform the policies and procedures that inform the employee experience.
It’s also worth noting that research has shown that a shift to a remote work model can have a negative impact on your culture if not handled properly. Maintaining a positive corporate culture with a distributed team can be a challenge, but it’s certainly possible, and as more and more companies adopt hybrid and remote work models, it’s becoming easier to find valuable advice and practical tools to make this possible.
Don’t forget the basics, either: Give time to social interactions, whether your team is in-person or remote to foster a sense of comradery among your team. Here are some quick ideas to consider:
- Hold biweekly team meetings with a fun activity planned—when’s the last time you played Scattergories?
- Host monthly happy hours by region (not team) to foster interdepartmental relationships.
- Leverage your company’s messaging software to create interest and hobby channels, and let anyone in the organization join. Try starting with channels for book sharing, plant lovers, and sports.
3. Upgrade employee-facing technology.
Technology has become a fundamental part of modern life, and this holds true for the employee experience. Employees today are used to using technology in other areas of their lives, so they come to work with expectations for the same sort of consumer-grade technology they’re used to elsewhere.
Modern HR service delivery tools and resources can go a long way in giving employees the streamlined convenience and personalization they want. For example, self-service portals allow employees to conveniently handle HR paperwork, request time off, or perform other tasks without having to email back and forth with the HR department or deal with cumbersome manual processes.
When employees can handle some processes on their own with minimal intervention, this frees up time for your HR department to focus on enriching the employee experience in a variety of valuable ways.
Want to learn more about the connection between technology and the employee experience? Read our white paper, How Technologies Enrich the Employee Experience to Drive Higher Engagement.
