3 Tips for Building a Great Employee Experience

With the right employee experience strategy, you can boost your ability to attract, engage and develop high-performing employees. It is vital to align your employees' experiences with your company's purpose, brand and culture, so every interaction they have with you is authentic and sustainable…inspiring employee commitment and improving your company's performance.

What Is the Employee Experience?

The employee experience is the entire journey an employee takes with your organization. It includes every interaction that happens along the employee life cycle, plus the experiences that involve an employee's role, workspace, managers, peers and wellbeing.

That is why our focus needs to be on human experiences over processes.Unfortunately, most talent management strategies default to process improvement and transactional care of people. When a problem arises, our tendency is to look at how we can fix our policies…instead of searching out what is going on with our people.

Additionally, we as leaders must strive to become the best version of ourselves, in order to bring out the best in our people and truly optimize personal and business performance.

Three Keys to Building A Great Employee Experience:

? Improve Your On boarding Process

Only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job of on boarding. On boarding sets the tone of the employee experience. Start this first impression off right with a well-written offer letter. This is crucial in defining what your employee is responsible for, so there is no confusion about expectations. Knowing the mission is WAY different than connecting with the mission! An employee might be able to recite your company's mission. But when they understand their contribution to your mission, they work with a purpose, and it becomes an experience that supports their engagement over time.

? Create Learning Opportunities

The No. 1 reason people change jobs today is "career growth opportunities."Providing opportunities for your employees to learn is a direct investment in your company. And these opportunities are desired by employees– particularly younger ones.

After all, providing them with more skills only makes them more competitive both within their roles and as individuals. You might decide to offer discounts or freebies on e-learning courses, where your employees can pursue projects of their choosing.Or, you might consider starting a learning and development program at your work in which multiple employees can learn a new skill together. This can be a great way to create camaraderie among your team members, which can, in turn, improve the experience for everyone. Whatever you decide, be sure to consider what your employees are interested in and how these learning opportunities can help them succeed.

Here at Beyond Influence, our team follows a reading plan in which we as a group learn from and discuss books on business and self-improvement, and it has been invaluable to our success and cohesiveness. I highly recommend it!

? Are You a Nice Manager or a Great Coach?

Only 2 in 10 employees strongly agree that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.When an employee has a nice manager, it's a bonus. We all want to be liked, right? But when they have a great manager -- one who cares for them and knows how to coach them -- it's an experience that enhances productivity and passion. By focusing on experiences over processes, you create moments that are intuitive and adaptable around what matters most to people and your business goals. According to Gallup, 70% of the success of your organization is on how well you teach, train and equip your managers and they found the biggest key to success is to teach managers how to coach.As an executive coach and in training corporate teams, I teach that the first step in transitioning from a nice manager to great leader is to ask questions. Find out their why and help them explore who they are meant to be. There are many great tools and resources for this and I'd be happy to help you in this area.

Remember you can't help them get to where they can go if you don't know where they are starting from and what gives them joy and purpose.

Start implementing these three vital steps in YOUR business and watch the morale, enthusiasm and productivity at your workplace skyrocket.

I'd love to hear from you at BeyondInfluence.com when your employees…and YOU…can't wait to get to work every morning!