Especially has remote and hybrid work continues in the wake of the pandemic, employee experience is top of minds for HR vendors and leaders alike. Employee experience, or a worker’s perception of their journey through an organization, is vital for companies to understand, as a successful employee experience strategy can lead to more than just happy employees — like innovation, cost savings, and better customer-facing experience.
Employee experience has become a main focus of human resource departments and the driving force behind the HR strategies of many companies. The term employee experience is also a design principle and marketing buzzword for HR technology vendors. given today’s shifting economic climate, plus the new reality of remote and hybrid workforces, HR departments play a critical role in creating and implementing a sound employee experience strategy. Let’s start with a basic definition. employee experience refers to a workers perceptions about their journey through all the touch points of an organization, from their job candidate days to their exit from the organization and even beyond. Much of the terminology of employee experience draws heavily from customer experience, a concept that predates it, the customer experience is determined by a customer’s journey through the touch points in the buying process, such as visiting an ecommerce site or returning a product. Likewise, it’s essential to understand the key touch points in the employee lifecycle, so HR can build an effective employee experience strategy.
Think of employee experience Threelegged stool as a three legged stool.
Culture, workspace and technology are the three major components of the employee experience, describing how employees feel about their jobs, their co workers in their company. culture includes the corporate culture and how much it helps or hurts in creating a positive employee experience. Culture also includes specific people issues, like after work, social activities, and how well workers get along with their boss or feel supported in their jobs. astrophysical workspace is everything in the work environment that meets the needs of employees or works against them. Those knees can range from comfortable ergonomic desks and chairs, to safe workplaces to healthy cafeteria foods to clean temperature controlled air with the new reality of hybrid and remote workforces.
A workspace that maximizes comfort and productivity is critical. Whether it is in the office or in the home technology is the third leg of the stool it also plays a major role. It is a catch all category for the software tools and technologies employees use in the office or in remote environments. Hard to use technology degrades the employee experience and reduces productivity. In contrast, user friendly up to date tools can give employees a feeling of empowerment.
While all three legs of Fourlegged
stool the stool are absolutely critical to a successful employee experience strategy, we could add a fourth leg employee engagement. This refers to how employees feel about their job and their employer and their commitment to their work into the organization. For the most part, employee engagement is a result of the employee experience, not a driver of it. That’s why measuring employee engagement through surveys, data analysis, and performance management software is the best way to put numbers in science behind the very slippery concept of employee experience. It helps to determine how satisfied employees are with the culture, the physical environment and the technology. It’s also a way to solicit ideas for improvements and see if they are meeting employees expectations.
Technology
Information technology including personal computers, corporate networks, business applications and collaboration tools plays a major role because of the triple impact on the day to day experiences of employees. First, technology is usually the mechanism employees use to carry out their own HR transactions and interact with the HR department. Second, technology is the means by which many employees do most of their work. And third, it is often the primary tool that HR department managers and executives use to analyze and manage the employee experience itself. There are many software applications that affect the employee experience, and especially important one is the human resource management system or HRMS, which is sometimes called an HR is or a Human Capital Management Suite.
It handles most of the HR transactions that employees need to make, like adjusting their tax withholdings or asking for a tuition reimbursement. Software that makes it hard to request or execute those transactions or worse does them incorrectly to tracks from the employee experience. an intranet can be a more friendly familiar entry point to employees entire roster of applications. It can also serve as a communication channel for sharing news and other transmitters of corporate culture. There are many other tools and apps that can actually improve the employee experience service management tools such as HR HelpDesk, health and wellness apps and websites and HR chatbots workflows and artificial intelligence All intended to automate employee requests. The experiences employees have while using their organization’s IT infrastructure and business applications are sometimes called the Digital employee experience. It’s increasingly considered a distinct and important part of an employee experience strategy.
Ensuring positive experiences requires putting the needs of employees front and center when planning technology purchases. One way to do this is for HR and IT to work in close partnership, and not just when it comes time to implement new HR technology. The bottom line is that having a strategy for planning and implementing a complete digital workplace can go a long way to improving the overall employee experience. HR consultants,
Employee Engagement
software vendors and system integrators tend to recommend similar steps to address the main components of the employee experience that we discussed earlier. Culture, workspace and technology along with the most important measure of success, employee engagement, the IBM Institute for Business Value published a paper called Designing employee experience, how a unifying approach can enhance engagement and productivity. It neatly explains the five essential steps for implementing an employee experience strategy, and the essential tools and tactics.
The five steps are as follows. Step one, tune into the voice of the employee. Start by asking employees about their experience and how it could be better consider sending out a regular employee engagement survey that repeats some of the same questions so you can see trends over time. A more sophisticated tool is employee sentiment analysis. Another approach borrowed from Customer Experience Management. Sentiment Analysis technology allows a much greater degree of automation and surveys. It uses natural language processing to analyze the employee feedback and unstructured data, such as social media and email, then it characterizes and quantifies how employees feel about the organization. Sentiment Analysis and survey should be part of a broader strategy of using people analytics to better understand employees. Step two, create a map of the employee journey. The best way to document employees lifecycle to the company is to create an employee journey map.
This means identifying personas, perhaps according to job types, like entry level, or C suite, and the touchpoints they typically encounter, then gather feedback from employees about their experience at each touchpoint and note ideas for improving journey mapping is also an exercise in empathy that demands frequent check ins, and a willingness to take a holistic view of the employee, and that includes their life goals. Step three, build a cross functional employee experience coalition. It’s important to bring together workers from diverse backgrounds and experience. A commonly used method is design thinking, a group approach to solving problems by brainstorming, prototyping, and testing solutions, revising them based on user feedback, then repeating the process as long as necessary. That means inviting everyone who has an impact on the employee experience to sit at the table. The size HR include at the very least representatives from facilities management, it corporate management, and marketing. Step four, invest in touch points with the most impact. The journey mapping process will tell you about the moments that matter most to employees.
The employee onboarding process is almost always a major touch point is the most important action after recruitment. When new employees get a better idea of the culture, the physical workspace and the technology of their new employer. A difficult onboarding experience can set an employee on a bad path that leads to an early departure and negative recommendations to other job candidates. Career Development is another big touch point that can tilt the employee experience either way, assigning employees to meaningful projects that test their skills and creativity can help them feel engaged and hopeful about their future. It’s another moment that matters in the employee journey. Step five, use agile design on employee experiences. Techniques borrowed from Agile software development can work well in an employee experience strategy, and align closely with design thinking. rapid development methods can help find solutions that can be implemented quickly and address short and long term problems identified in the early steps.
As with most any strategy, don’t try to fix the whole problem at once. tackles small manageable pieces, then start from the beginning and do it all over again. Improving the employee experience is a never ending process. research study suggests that a good employee experience leads to a number of positive results such as the following greater employee productivity. more satisfied and engaged employees work harder and smarter produce more and waste less, more creativity and innovation. employee satisfaction is known to correlate with openness to new suggestions and ideas, improved employee retention, happier employees are less likely to leave the company, which in turn adds to the skills and experience of the entire organization. lower turnover, lower employee turnover helps avoid the cost of recruiting and training replacement workers reduced absenteeism.
This increases productivity, boosts employee morale, and helps stabilize the workforce, especially when the workforce is hybrid or remote. And last but not least, better customer facing experiences. Happy employees tend to express more positive impressions of their company, its products and services that typically delivers a higher level of customer satisfaction. As you can see, creating a successful employee experience strategy takes a combination of people, technologies, best practices and continuous feedback from those most effected the employees. The right strategy can yield tangible and intangible results that ultimately increase revenue, reduce costs and hopefully result in higher profits.
