The Rise of Employee Experience

For an organization to master employee experience (EX), it must listen to its people at each stage of the employee lifecycle and create personalized experiences. Dive deeper into EX with our strategic ultimate guide.

From the moment prospective employees look at your job opening, to the moment they leave your company, everything that the workers learn, do, see, and feel contributes to their employee experience. For your organization to master employee experience management, you must listen to your people at each stage of the employee lifecycle identify what matters most to them, and create personalized, bespoke experiences.

The employee experience is foundational to business performance. Sustaining customer experience efforts, improving products, and building a strong and reputable brand all require the help of your employees. Ultimately, it is their experiences – positive and negative – that will impact how hard they work, how much they collaborate, or whether they are invested in improving operational performance.

"In a world where money is no longer the primary motivating factor for employees, focusing on the employee experience is the most promising competitive advantage that organizations can create." – Jacob Morgan, author of The Employee Experience Advantage

The shift from old-school employee engagement to a more holistic approach to employee experience has been driven by a number of factors – including social media, changing demographics, the pandemic, and more volatile economic conditions.

Millennials, and increasingly Gen Z, want more opportunities to have their say. Companies need to get a deeper understanding of groups who feel, think, and behave differently to previous generations.

The war for talent is fiercer than ever before – there are now more jobs and fewer candidates, and experiences are one of the last ways to differentiate yourself as an employer in the hiring process

Organizations are changing faster than ever – digitization, disruption, hybrid working, and other economic forces are causing companies to shrink and expand more rapidly. You need to understand the impact this is having on your people more regularly than once a year.

There’s an expectation for personalized employee experiences – employees now expect to be treated as a unique person, just like they are when they interact with leading B2C brands as a consumer.

The explosion of social media and the potential for damaging reviews to go viral has meant workplaces have become more transparent to protect company and brand reputation.

By focusing on employee behaviors and improving the employee experience the world’s leading brands have discovered that there are knock-on effects: not just to traditional HR metrics like turnover and absentee rates, but also on customer experience and overall profitability.

The business impact of employee experience

Good employees are your greatest investment, and they’re hard to find. When you’ve battled to attract and hire quality people, you don’t want to lose them. Investing in positive employee experience is crucial to creating an engaged workforce who wants to stay with you, and it’s an effective way of reducing staff turnover.

"Companies that invest in employee experience are 4x more profitable than those that do not." – Jacob Morgan

The organizations that invest most heavily in EX are found:

11.5x as often in Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work

4.4x as often in LinkedIn’s list of North America’s Most In-Demand Employers

2.1x as often on the Forbes list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies

2x as often in the American Customer Satisfaction Index

Source: Jacob Morgan

How to leverage employee experience to drive customer experience outcomes

As well as the above, it has been known for a long time that great employee experience is critical for delivering great customer experience, which leads to business success. Happy employees deliver great products, providing exceptional service that drives a brand’s reputation, which in turn attracts more happy employees.

There are three consistent patterns in which frontline employee experiences are most strongly connected to customer experience outcomes:

1. Expressing a connection with the organization’s vision, values, and purpose, or pride in the company’s products and services.
2. Feeling safe, respected, cared for, and treated equitably.
3. Being empowered, enabled, and rewarded for delivering great customer service.

Now it’s even easier to see how your employee, customer and brand experiences impact each other, so you can prioritize the actions that will have the biggest impact on your business.

Employee experience challenges

The researches show that there are four areas you need to focus on:

1. Instilling confidence that you’re sailing a successful ship

As the world and global markets become more volatile, it’s unsurprising that job security and financial certainty are employees’ top priorities. All your employees need to know that they’re working for an organization that will continue being successful in the future, and pay them a competitive salary.

2. Employees have been working at surge levels for years. Now, they’re reclaiming boundaries

Going above and beyond used to be an exception, but recently it has become the expectation. Employers have leaned on employees throughout disruption. Now employees are pushing back and reshaping their relationship with work to set healthy boundaries and a better work-life balance.

Of those who feel they have a good work-life balance, almost two-thirds (63%) are willing to go above and beyond for their organization.

3. Bad processes and inefficient systems are fueling the risk of employee burnout

The past few years have completely scrambled how organizations operate: from how they hire and the tools they use, to remote work and the processes in place to get things done.

What leads to employee burnout is ineffective processes and systems – and organizations may be taking too long to resolve them.

4. Being employed isn’t just about having a job: it’s a part of a person’s value system

More and more employees want to work for organizations with integrity and purpose that match their own, and at the same time, they crave growth and development opportunities that fulfill, challenge, and motivate them.

When employees feel that their organization embodies these values, they’re 27% more likely to have higher engagement scores, and 23% more likely to stay working for more than 3 years.

So how do you understand what your people want so that you can meet these current challenges head on? It all starts with listening:

Have a meaningful conversation about pay and benefits and how to meet employee expectations

Avoid ‘job creep’ by ensuring equal and fair distribution of work-life balance and flexibility, and identify pain points or barriers to flexibility across your organization.

Ensure your people have the resources they need and that you take care of their mental and physical well-being. Keep up with innovation and upgrade work processes to streamline activities and combat the risk of burnout.

Make the ‘company values’ conversation more prominent — take it seriously and encourage your most senior people to do so, especially leaders and other departmental role models. Create a culture of end-to-end feedback to help employees develop.

Of course, to address all of these points it’s important to understand every stage of the employee experience — and that’s what we’re going to cover in the next newsletter.

Source: Qualtrics