It’s not hard to believe that happy, empowered employees work harder and stay with their employers longer. Our breakthrough research supports this idea. Companies with the highest employee experience (EX) scores have the best financial outcomes. So, getting EX right can positively impact your bottom line. And that’s something else employers think is easy to believe, considering that more than 9 in 10 organizations intend to make EX a top priority for post-pandemic success.
The sum of all the touchpoints and moments that matter between employees and their employer, the employee experience sits at the heart of delivering superior customer experience and outstanding business performance. EX encompasses every aspect of daily work for employees – from their interactions with their colleagues and customers, to their perceived ability to influence change in the organization.
When looking to improve the experience, our research findings point to specific themes and introspective questions as good places to start:
Achievement in these areas involves a keen focus and a continuous cycle of improvement: taking stock of where your organization stands, listening to employees about how to improve, setting priorities and implementing real change. This may mean rethinking organizational priorities, optimizing total rewards, arming managers with the right tools to support their teams, or increasing efficiency across the organization.
Ideally, the digital employee experience is an extension of the organizational employee experience, a tool to either communicate the work that’s transpired or translate real-life practices into an improved, efficient experience. Figure 1 offers a few examples:
| Theme | In-person EX strategies | Online EX strategies |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose |
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| Work |
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| Reward |
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| People |
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Gone are the days where resources are filed in mass on the intranet, leaving employees to sort through a series of regional and organizational caveats to find the 10-page Summary Plan Description document that offers details about their personal benefit offering. Or, worse yet, going on a person-by-person wild goose chase through the HR department to find answers.
Employees expect a modern online experience, like what they see on the sites they visit off hours. It’s common these days to see “You might also be interested in …” when reading news articles or buying something online. The underlying expectation is that you can anticipate your audience’s needs and help them before they even ask or know they need it.
An Employee Experience Platform can help deliver on those expectations by serving as a communication vehicle that streamlines the digital EX. By infusing communications with employee data, an EX platform can:
Serve up targeted information that is applicable to the employee front and center such as:
Make personalized suggestions on tasks to complete, actions to take, or benefits to engage in
Provide employees with one central resource to access the tools and resources employees need, with one click, from any device
Present a comprehensive total rewards package that builds understanding and appreciation of the programs with real-time updates through automated data feeds
Upping your EX game isn’t achieved overnight, and organizations often struggle with where to start. The best place is by first asking employees how the organization is doing and what’s important to them, and then start prioritizing work to improve. Employee engagement software makes it easy to gain insights from employees through targeted surveys or virtual focus groups.
How do you deliver on an optimal, holistic employee experience? The same way you eat an elephant: one bite at a time. It’s a slow, uphill road but an important one to climb for the health of your organization and its employees.
