What is Employee Experience & How To Improve It at Your Company

Keeping your employees satisfied with their jobs is key to business success. Employees who are happy in their workplace are more likely to be committed to their company, more productive, and better performers overall. Your employees' perspectives, feelings, and struggles in their jobs are known as the employee experience, and understanding this is key to keeping your employee engagement up.

With almost half of all workers feeling their workplace experience is different from what was promised, understanding your employees' experience is key. We're going to define employee experience and provide you with tips to improve employee experience, as well as strategies to evaluate and measure employee experience strategies.

What is Employee Experience?

From recruitment to exit interviews, the employee experience refers to how an employee experiences every part of the employee lifecycle. Some aspects of an employee's experience are experienced rarely (such as onboarding), while others are experienced daily (overall company culture), but the overall picture of an employee's experience will greatly affect their job satisfaction. It is well known that job satisfaction affects productivity and retention; therefore, providing an overall positive employee experience is key to improving business performance and gaining a competitive advantage.

Priortising your employee experience is key to maintaining a productive workplace. As employee experience involves every aspect of an employee's interaction with their company and job, it can be difficult to narrow down what plays a role. Employee experience is influenced by a number of factors; and starts even before hiring an employee. Some factors which greatly influence an employee's experience are:

• Onboarding: Job postings, interview rounds, the hiring process, and onboarding training are candidates' first impressions of a business. People like hiring managers and training managers play a significant role in creating a positive initial impression of the company's employees' experience. Improving the experience of new employees will allow you to improve retention rates and ensure they are engaged through every stage of the employee life cycle.
• Company culture: Workplace culture is something that an employee experiences daily throughout their tenure with a company. A positive, supportive workplace environment is key to a positive culture and arguably plays a significant role in the overall employee experience. The attitude of other employees, managers, and business leaders will greatly influence culture. Culture is experienced in every stage of the employee journey, so making sure you have a solid and positive culture is foundational to the employee experience.
• Goals and Metrics: A positive employee experience trickles down to all aspects of the business, including productivity metrics and output. In order to ensure a productive workplace, maintain a positive customer experience, and have a team of happy employees, setting reasonable and effective goals and metrics is key. If employees are pressured by unreasonable goals and metrics, the overall employee experience will be poor. Likewise, if your company is too focused on performance and output, and performance management feedback is always about your company's numerical goals, your employees will feel undervalued and not engaged in their role.

Crafting an Effective Employee Experience Strategy

In order to improve the employee experience, you must first reflect on your company's current workplace culture, environment and goals. Improving the employee experience is about making employees feel like they are appreciated, valued and well-supported in their roles. Taking ownership over any pitfalls in your company's current employee experience will allow you to make specific and effective improvements. Having an open mind in this process is essential. Creating an effective employee experience strategy includes the following steps:

1) Understand Employee Needs

Improving the employee experience means making changes that employees need and want. To do this, you must first understand your employees' perspectives and what they need. You can gather this information by connecting with your employees and giving them the opportunity to advocate for their needs. Some methods of gathering employee feedback include employee surveys, focus groups, or one-on-one meetings to listen to employee concerns.

Your employees are a diverse group of people who will all have their own unique needs and preferences. By giving every employee the opportunity to speak their mind, you might see some similarities or themes in the employee feedback your company is given, allowing you to make effective changes.

Some employee needs might be different to what you are expecting. Some needs of employees that might not be apparent to you include diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, employee access schemes, better training and professional development initiatives. By gathering insight, you will be able to implement changes and motivate your employees in the way that they actually need and want.

2) Develop a Strategic Plan

Drafting a strategic plan with well-thought out steps is key to implementing changes to your employee experience effectively. Having detailed instructions and goals at every step of your plan will allow you to easily prioritise tasks, and also allows you to effectively review and reflect on your strategy later. Some steps for developing a strategic plan to improve the employee experience include:

• Goal Setting: Goal setting is an essential part of your plan to improve the employee experience, as every step will be centred around achieving those goals. You can craft your main goals based on the employee feedback you gathered before. Narrow down the common pain points that most employees brought up and combine them to make a list of goals.
• Business Goals: In addition to using feedback, you can consider your company's goals for the business. Aligning the employee experience strategy to your company values and business goals will give you a boundary to work within, making your strategy more specific and actionable. For instance, if you received a lot of negative feedback about employee training, you can set a goal to improve training programs. If a business goal is to improve employee retention, you can combine both of these goals together to see if improving training programs increases employee satisfaction and retention rates.
• Identify Stakeholders: To ensure you have a well-rounded plan, bring in some key leaders from the business to be stakeholders in your plan. Consider including team leaders from various departments in your plan, so they can help implement the day-to-day goals of the strategy in their teams. Likewise, team leaders can assist in employee experience management by checking in with their staff to collect feedback.
• Set a Timeframe: Your employee experience strategy should be confined to a specific timeframe, in order to make sure goals are reasonable and can be measured and evaluated later. For example, you could implement your employee experience strategy quarterly, measuring and evaluating its success at the end of every quarter. Every quarterly strategy could focus on a different aspect of the employee journey, allowing you to focus more on specific goals. Some key areas to focus on in your strategy include onboarding, professional development, work-life balance and employee recognition.
• Communicate: Your strategy can then be drafted into a communication plan, so all employees and key stakeholders are aligned with the strategy. Make the communication plan easy to read and understand, and include the overall goals of the strategy, expected outcomes and measurements for success.

How to Improve the Employee Experience

Improving your employee experience will allow you to foster a workplace of engaged employees who are also striving towards improving business outcomes. Successfully providing a positive employee experience is a win-win situation for both the business and it's employees, so working towards developing an retaining happy employees should be a top priority. We've come up with some areas of your employee's experience which might need some work:

1) Creating a Positive Workplace Culture

A positive company culture is incredibly influential on the employee experience. Company culture does not just refer to the atmosphere of the physical workplace or office space your employees come to daily, but also includes the attitudes of senior leaders, hr leaders, and the way employees feel coming to work every day. A company with poor company culture will likely have poor employee engagement, as employees feel dissatisfied and unmotivated in their role.

Fostering a supportive and inclusive culture is key to improving overall company culture. When employees feel as though they belong, and are well supported, employee engagement will increase. In order to effectively improve the culture of your workplace, leadership needs to become involved to help by setting an example. To understand your employee's perspective and perception of the company culture, you can collect their opinions with employee experience surveys. To get an honest review, make sure your surveys are anonymous and do not collect any employee data.

You can also work on improving employee engagement as you try to improve employee experience. Employee engagement refers to how committed an employee is to the goals of a business and to their work. Engaged employees are likely having a positive employee experience, so you can measure these two together to see if your strategies are effective.

Doing regular employee engagement surveys will allow you to review your employee engagement strategies and see if there is any positive change. Another way you can gather insight is through company review sites, where previous staff will share their opinions on their employee experience, including everything from the work environment, their employee journey for a specific role or department, to their employee satisfaction.

2) Enhance the Physical and Digital Work Environment

As we mentioned, the employee experience is not just related to the company's physical workspace where your employees come to everyday, but also the digital workspace, too. Optimizing the physical work environment can enhance productivity, improving better business outcomes, and make your employees feel welcomed and supported. To improve your physical office environment, consider giving your employees an allowance for office supplies, or a reimbursement scheme so employees can buy the items they need to enhance their workspace.

If your team is working remotely, you can again survey employees and ask for their opinions on how to make the employee experience better. This is especially important for remote work or hybrid offices, and for providing an exceptional employee experience. To ensure that you are maintaining trust and communication with your employees, avoid implementing any surveillance-style digital tools, and instead focus on improving employee satisfaction and business performance.

3) Professional Growth and Development

Aside from providing a comfortable working environment, professional development opportunities are key to improving employee experience and enhancing employee retention rates. Continuous learning and opportunities for career development and progression are key to ensuring you are fostering a workplace of dedicated employees. Providing these professional development opportunities also gives your company a competitive advantage when it comes to hiring, as research shows that opportunities for growth are a primary motivating factor for candidates seeking a new job.

Providing development opportunities can also allow for improvements in employee engagement, as employees will be more involved and invested in their career. Some examples of professional growth and development opportunities include mentor programs, courses to learn new skills, and opportunities for collaboration and promotion within the company. Creating distinct progression plans, providing career development opportunities provides employees with a sense of job security, improving motivation and leading to more engaged employees.

4) Implementing Recognition Programs

Recognising employees who go above and beyond is key to keeping employees happy and satisfied in their role. Employees want to be recognized for their hard work and efforts, so providing recognition and award programs can be one way to improve your employee satisfaction. On an individual level, you can provide feedback and appreciation in annual performance reviews, or increasing an employee's annual salary based on their performance. More widespread recognition can be achieved with annual award ceremonies, where business leaders recognize stand-out employees for their efforts.

5) Measuring and Optimizing Employee Experience

After drafting your goals for your employee experience strategy, you now need to decide ways to measure it's success. Your measurements for success will depend on the type of goals you decide on, but some common ways to evaluate your goals for your employee experience include:

• Key Metrics and KPIs: Metrics and KPIs are great for collecting raw numerical data. With key metrics and KPIs, you can directly compare a change in scores and easily make conclusions on the effectiveness of your employee experience strategies. Some key metrics and KPIs you can use when drafting your employee experience framework are:
• Employee engagement scores: Use a numerical scoring system in your employee experience surveys and compare results pre and post strategy changes. You can set a specific goal for improvement, or aim for overall increased employee engagement scores. Some questions you can include in an employee engagement survey include their commitment to the company, whether they are proud of their work, if employees feel appreciated in their role and whether they wish to develop their career with your company.
• Net Promoter Score: This is a way to measure employee satisfaction, based off of whether your employees would recommend your company as a great place to work. This is a great way to gather employee sentiment and can be used as a way to check-in on the overall employee experience of your company. Some questions which you can include in your Net Promoter Score survey include whether employees feel appreciated, how satisfied they are with pay and benefits, and how likely they are to recommend a job at your company to others.
• Turnover Rates: Turnover rates can indicate poor employee experiences, and provide insight into specific issues within a business. Some features of turnover rates you can focus on include average tenure of new hires, turnover frequency in the different stages of the employee lifecycle, and satisfaction scores across the employee journey. These will give insight into where the issues are for every stage of an employees tenure.
• Productivity Levels: Measurements of productivity will depend on the specific output of your business. Some productivity metrics you can measure include inbound and outbound call frequency, revenue per employee, average time to complete tasks, customer satisfaction rates, and various ratios of input to output.

All of these metrics can be used to gather baseline data prior to implementing an employee experience strategy, and guide your goal setting when drafting the strategy or employee experience framework.

6) Continuous Improvement

Employee experience strategies should be constantly reviewed and improved based on employee feedback and the results of your strategies. Make changes and iterations of your employee experience strategy to optimize the business impact of your strategy whilst keeping employees happy.

Always continue to engage with your employees about their employee experience and find ways to enhance employee engagement where necessary. Some ways you can keep your employees involved in the process is to ask for feedback about employee experience initiatives implemented during performance management meetings, and take note of their answer. You could even do this in the hiring stages too, by sending out a candidate feedback survey to anyone you interviewed or to new hires to get their initial impression of your workplace.

Employee experience is something your workplace will have to constantly work on, and make effort to review and change strategies based on feedback.

Conclusion

The employee experience directly affects your company's output, retention and productivity; therefore, cultivating a positive employee experience is key to improving the overall outcomes of your business. Improving the employee experience starts with evaluating your employee life cycle, and identifying any key issues in retention or performance.

Collecting data with employee experience surveys can allow you to gain insight into areas of that need improvement. After recieving feedback, you can align the goals of the company to the feedback you received from your employees to create a detailed employee experience framework. Make sure you include specific goals and KPIs you want to measure so you can evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts to improve your employee experience.

If you want to get more tips on improving your workplace and employee experience, you can check out Cake for more free resources. Cake provides free insights, articles and information for employers, HR leaders and businesses to improve their workplaces.

— Originally written by Bronte McNamara —