Employee experience

- May 18, 2021

Employee experience

Employee experience definition

Employee experience equals everything a worker learns, does, sees and feels at each stage of the employee lifecycle.

How to improve employee experience

As a new hire travels along their employee journey to their eventual exit from your organization, there are a few things that will shape their employee experience. Jacob Morgan, author of The Employee Experience Advantage, highlights three basic environments, no matter how large or small your organization, that make up employee experience.

Culture – Difficult to define as each one is different, a company’s culture may be what the C-suite tells you it is, what you understand of its mission, values, practices and attitudes, or even the shop-floor camaraderie when senior management isn’t in. It’s a mixture of leadership style and organizational structure, sense of purpose and the mixture of personalities who work with you. Corporate culture is the vibe that you feel when you come in to work – it can motivate or stifle, energize or drain, empower or discourage its employees.

Technology environment – Imagine firing up a desktop computer on your first day and discovering you’ll be working on Windows XP. Forward-thinking organizations invest in suitable tools for employees to get their work done efficiently, with future developments in mind. The technology landscape is so vast, that it’s easier than ever to give employees the tools they need to maximize their efficiency and make them feel more confident in their role.

Physical workspace – Employees who work 9 to 5 in a windowless, air-conditioned basement will have a very different experience from those who work flex-time in an airy new glass building with an on-site gym, subsidized canteen and chill-out lounges. Employees who are happy in their work environment will concentrate better, have improved well-being and will be more productive. And the physical workspace is not necessarily always in the office: autonomy to work from home or in multiple workspaces can also contribute to a positive employee experience.

How to design your Employee Experience strategy

When you consider that employee experience is ultimately about creating personalized experiences, developing an employee experience framework is a challenge – especially in the face of constant change. Yet if you embrace a growth, rather than fixed mindset and break down your EX strategy into three basic elements, you’ll be able to design and shape a compelling employee experience for your workforce:

Discover the moments that matter to your employees by collecting regular feedback from across the employee lifecycle.
Make company culture, technology and the physical workplace the best they can be
Broaden your traditional HR functions to recognize the importance of customer experience and how employee experience impacts it

Types of employee experience surveys

Engagement surveys

Employee engagement is a measure of someone’s connection to their work and how they think, feel and act towards helping their organization meet its goals. These reviews are particularly useful at the retention stage of the employee lifecycle: they indicate how involved and engaged established employees feel in their work.

When employees are engaged, it has an impact across the business:

Increased performance – Research shows that business unit-level engagement is predictive of future customer experience metrics, productivity, and financial performance¹
Lower attrition – Engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave² their organization, which means reduced costs in having to recruit new staff, train them and wait for them to ramp up to full productivity
Increased revenue – According to Bain & Company, companies with highly engaged workers grew revenues 2.5x as much as those with low levels of engagement³
A better customer experience – 70% of engaged employees indicate they have a good understanding of how to meet customer needs; only 17% of non-engaged employees say the same⁴

Additional employee engagement resources:

Candidate reaction surveys

These evaluate your company’s ad-to-hire process for new employees. A good survey will capture the experiences of both successful and unsuccessful candidates, making everyone feel that they matter, and their voices are heard, whatever the outcome. It will reveal the effectiveness of your reach with advertising and marketing, brand and recruitment processes. And treating unsuccessful candidates well enhances company reputation, by creating advocates who had a positive experience with you.

Onboarding surveys

Onboarding introduces a new hire to their colleagues, their role, expectations, and available resources, and embeds them into your company culture. It’s important to find out what your new hires think of their ‘ramp time’ by using onboarding surveys. Gather first impressions from day one, then regular surveys once new hires have had a chance to settle in and form their opinions. The onboarding experience sets the tone for the whole employee journey and it is strongly linked with important employee experience and engagement KPIs.

Training feedback surveys

Training sessions are crucial to a successful onboarding process, but they are also important milestones during the development and retention stages. Gathering data after every training event during the lifecycle will map an individual’s growth and highlight where the organization could enhance learning and development more efficiently.

Reference

Qualtrics AU. (n.d.). Your ultimate guide to employee experience (EX) | Qualtrics. [online] Available at: https://www.qualtrics.com/au/experience-management/employee/employee-experience/?rid=ip&prevsite=en&newsite=au&geo=LK&geomatch=au [Accessed 25 May 2021].

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