Does "Employee Experience" matter in sales?

In marketing for tech it is easy to get caught up in features and function and marketers are regularly reminded to pay attention to the business value. As a member of the DataXstream marketing team tasked with making sure our audience knows about OMS+ I am always asking our sales team, delivery team and customers when I can speak to them, about realized business value.

Employee experience always comes up. OMS+ offers a modern, streamlined user experience.

I always wonder about "employee experience" as a business value for a product. Sure, the employee cares, but they are not usually the ones holding the purse strings. Does the executive team care? Employee experience sounds kind of squishy right? It sounds good, and everyone nods and says they want to create a good work environment and they ad snacks to the break room, but does it really matter to the business?

I’ve been doing some reading on the topic and apparently it should.

A Gallup report shows that companies with a highly engaged workforce have 21% higher profitability. They also have 17% higher productivity than companies with a disengaged workforce.

“organizations that are the best in engaging their employees achieve earnings-per-share growth that is more than four times that of their competitors. Compared with business units in the bottom quartile, those in the top quartile of engagement realize substantially better customer engagement, higher productivity, better retention, fewer accidents, and 21% higher profitability https://news.gallup.com/poll/241649/employee-engagement-rise.aspx

Researchers Kate Gautier, Tiffani Bova, Kexin Chen and Lalith Munasinghe published an article in the Harvard Business Review in March 2022 on the topic. "Research: How Employee Experience Impacts Your Bottom Line."

"Not only were we able to establish a clear link between employees and revenue, but the impact was substantial. In fact, if an average store could move from the bottom quartile to the top quartile in each of the employee experience metrics we studied, they would increase their revenue by more than 50%, and profits by nearly as much."

Our own customers report reduced training time, improved employee engagement and improved customer satisfaction. They also report increases in sales revenue and improved margin.

I will continue looking at studies on the topic of employee experience and increased productivity. I think it is going to matter to business in the days ahead both as employees continue to make demands for changes from “the old way of doing things” and as business leaders look to productivity to pull their business through a looming economic down turn.

Image: Jack Taggart Photography, the Quarantine Collection view: https://jacktaggartphotography.mypixieset.com/quarantine-collection/