EmployeeEx Design: 3 Dangers of Doing Nothing

There’s no shortage of information about the business value of a well-designed employee experience.  Plenty of companies are investing in designing a better experience for their employees, from hire to retire.

Plenty of companies, but not all companies.

Companies that are not taking explicit actions to design and deliver a positive employee experience are potentially setting themselves up for some major business setbacks.  When it comes to designing a great employee experience, doing nothing is dangerous to the bottom line.

This wasn’t always the case.  Not long ago, people considered themselves fortunate to have a job with a decent paycheck.  Their employee experience may have been mediocre, but they were willing to tolerate mediocrity for the sake of that check.

Today's employees have become very aware of “what’s out there,” and are less likely to tolerate a mediocre work experience.  And their intolerance can negatively impact the business in the following three ways.

1. Employee Experience affects Customer Service and Loyalty.

When employees have a mediocre work experience, they become less engaged.  Employees or are not engaged - or worse, disengaged - invest less discretionary effort in their work.  This can translate into doing the bare minimum in serving a customer, rather than going the extra mile.

Customers can feel the difference.  And just as employees are less tolerant of a mediocre work experience, customers are less tolerant of a mediocre customer experience.  More frequently, they’re taking their business elsewhere.

2. Employee Experience affects your Brand.

The previous reason explained how a mediocre employee experience impacts the employees’ behavior while at work.  But the bad news is, the behavior of an unengaged, or disengaged employee doesn’t stop when they leave the office.

Those same employees discuss work with their friends, when they’re outside of work (or worse, through social media during working hours!).  And these conversations are received as highly credible sources of information to that friend who has been considering working at “Company X,” or buying their product.

Marketing may control a lot of the messaging that gets communicated from within the company, but it doesn’t control all of it.  What an unengaged employee says to friends and family has can have a greater influence on your brand than your marketing does.

3. Employee Experience affects Talent Retention.

The two previous reasons are externally-focused.  They consider how a poor employee experience impacts the behavior of people outside your company.  But the damage doesn’t stop there.  One of the greatest risks of not providing a superior employee experience is that of losing your best employees.

Talented employees are in high demand, and if they’re not feeling loved where they are, they’ll look for it someplace else.  And when this happens, you pay twice:  once for the loss in productivity, and again with the cost of replacing that employee.

In Summary

Today’s most valuable employees are no longer willing to tolerate a mediocre experience.  Business must explicitly and purposefully take steps to improve the experience.  In fact, it’s become so important, that doing nothing can do damage.