Employee Experience, fondly shortened to just ‘EX,’ envelopes what employees feel, observe, or encounter during the course of their journey at an organization. A lot of businesses out there strive hard to implement programs and campaigns to improve customer experience, totally forgetting about employee experience management. Pay isn’t the only criterion that draws employees’ attention anymore. They want to be a part of an organization that enables them to prosper, fit their lifestyle, connect, and grow with their peers.
As employees continue to lay foundations to an organization’s success, how they feel at every touchpoint during their tenure remains a question unearthed only by a very few. As companies around the world are gradually shedding some spotlight on EX, they have finally come to terms that happy employees equal happy customers.
Before we talk in detail about Employee Experience Management, it is essential to gain an understanding of what Employee Experience is all about.
Employee Experience Management focuses on pretty much everything about your organization - how they feel about your company, the benefits offered, the vibe that they get, office culture, etiquette, or leadership qualities. If we narrow it down, employee experience is the combination of three things - technological, physical, and cultural environment.
Adam Krahling
VP, American ExpressFor us, the focus around employee experience is on creating a seamless experience around the things somebody needs to do as an employee while allowing them to focus on the business we hired them for—development, sales, leading new products [and so on]. We’ve actually created a VP level role to strictly focus on the employee experience.
More often than not, organizations get confused between employee engagement and employee experience. Employee engagement is an approach at the workplace that enables employees to give their best adhering to the organization’s values with an emphasis on boosting their well-being. It lays importance on trust, communication, and transparency between employees and their organization by helping them understand what their role is within the company and work effectively for the betterment of the same. Simply put, employee engagement is just a small part of employee experience management. Employee experience is the sum of everything that an employee sees, feels, and hears at every single touchpoint within the organization.
Employee experience has been enjoying undivided attention lately. Job seekers are more inclined to the lifestyle and work culture of a company, which is why a simple google search of ‘employee experience’ results in more than 4 million hits. While adopting EX management strategies, there can be quite a bit of confusion as to what you’d be measuring since it isn’t something that you do every other day. But you never know how your employees feel at your workplace without measuring the same, and this is why you need an employee experience management framework in place. Here are a few recommendations on how best to measure the experience.
Employee NPS®
Net Promoter Score usually measures how likely the customers are to recommend your product or service to others. This is a useful metric to measure employee experience as well. A simple question like “How likely are you to recommend our company as a great place to work?” would give a direct result of how effective the EX management programs are. If you already have an NPS® platform in place, you can use the same to measure eNPS.
Employee Satisfaction
Employee satisfaction is a crucial EX metrics that organizations utilize to get a quick peek of how satisfied their employees are at their workplace. They usually roll out employee satisfaction surveys to collect feedback on topics including managerial performance, work environment, office culture, and much more. Let us make your work a tad easier. Here is the best employee satisfaction survey question you should be asking your workforce.
Employee Pulse Surveys
Employee pulse surveys enable an organization to paint a clear cut picture of employee well-being and engagement. The feedback and insights obtained can be applied to various employee experience programs to shape the organization’s culture and to improve employee engagement. Many employee engagement platforms come with a Recurring feature to automate the pulse surveys. Take a huge load off your plate, thus.
Employees Effort Score
Just like Customer Effort Score(CES), the concept of Employee Effort score can be adopted to gain an insight into the efforts taken by employees to get their work done. It gives an accurate picture to determine whether the processes, software, surrounding, etc. available to the employees intercept their efficiency, performance, and productivity.
Now that we know the impact employee experience has on the organizations let’s take a quick look at the key milestones that constitute employee experience. Employees go through different phases inside the organization, and rolling out regular surveys should give an idea of how effective your management program is at each stage.
Recruitment
This is one of the most important stages as it is the first stage at which you’ll be presenting your company to the candidate. Regardless of whether you hire someone or not, this stage is very crucial since you know, first impressions matter. How well you present about your company’s work culture, lifestyle, perks, etc., goes a long way in creating a solid impression and trust with a potential hire.
Onboarding
Chances are very high that a new employee would find it hard to fit in during the initial days, and this is where your employee experience initiatives come handy. Ensuring a smooth onboarding process, combined with providing the new hire with all the necessary resources, should be part of your employee experience management programs.
Management
Cater to the employee needs, clear roadblocks and give them the best environment to perform and conduct performance management reviews, appraisals, awards & recognition, perks.
Exit
It is quite reasonable to assume that even your top-performing employees would leave your company at some point. While the reasons may vary from one employee to the other, it is better to understand what could have been made better at your end. Ensuring a smooth exit-process combined with how you keep in touch with the employees post their exit can go a long way in shaping your organization’s culture, charm and general perception about your company.
While there is no universal approach to put together a perfect employee experience management system, you can build one up for yours only if you understand the benefits of the same. A balanced and near-perfect employee experience management is sure to have a long-term impact on businesses. Some of the compelling benefits of employee experience management include:
Easy-to-use
On any given day, you tend to accept anything that’s easy to use and go-to. There you go, that’s the first thing that should strike your mind while selecting an experience platform for engaging your workforce. A complex and time-consuming software is sure to kill your engagement programs from scratch.
Fits your pocket
By fitting your pocket, we’re suggesting you choose a platform that wouldn’t burn a hole in your wallet, not even in the long run. Identify the requirements and features you’d need to build your EX-management and choose a platform that fits your budget.
Get personal
By fitting your pocket, we’re suggesting you choose a platform that wouldn’t burn a hole in your wallet, not even in the long run. Identify the requirements and features you’d need to build your EX-management and choose a platform that fits your budget.
While there is no universal approach to put together a perfect employee experience management system, you can build one up for yours only if you understand the benefits of the same. A balanced and near-perfect employee experience management is sure to have a long-term impact on businesses. Some of the compelling benefits of employee experience management include:
Employee surveys are one of the easiest and reliable ways to help you understand employee insights. A simple question like “Hey, how are you feeling today” can give you results is ways unimaginable. It enables you to identify pain points and understand employee’s pulse and engagement. With SurveySparrow, build highly engaging surveys and customize it using your brand image, style and colors.
Once you roll out an employee engagement survey, you need to analyze it thoroughly to identify your employees’ pain points. SurveySparrow’s rich dashboards, smooth reporting module, simple plugins and widgets, and easy access to directories, contacts, and forms make it easy to view the extracted data. SurveySparrow also offers integration with business communication tools like Microsoft teams and Slack to help your peers stay connected.
Some organizations tend to forget the very intention of understanding employee pulse. They roll out surveys and don’t dive deep into the feedback gathered. An ideal employee experience management platform should enable you to close the feedback loop and solve their employees’ concerns with ease. Set up and automate the feedback process using SurveySparrow. Make collecting feedback and closing the loop a part of your work culture using SurveySparrow.
The EX management platform you choose must provide you functionalities to carry out 360° assessments at ease. SurveySparrow’s 360° employee review management and feedback & evaluation software enable you to invite every stakeholder - be it manager or the reportees, to participate in the assessments. With SurveySparrow, gain a more in-depth insight into the employees’ performance, assess and reward them accordingly.
With a capable employee assessment tracker in place, you can track the progress of the employees seamlessly. With SurveySparrow’s employee evaluation software, you can assess your employees, evaluate them, roll out reminder emails and surveys, track the progress of projects and tasks, and gain detailed insights into employee performance and development.
Begin your employee journey with SurveySparrow, an intuitive platform that’ll enable you to analyze the extracted data, identify pain points, to gain in-depth insights into your employees, and close the feedback loop. With features like advanced reporting filters, rich dashboards, and conversational surveys, you are just one step closer to creating better experiences and a refined work culture for your employees.
What is the difference between employee experience and employee engagement?
Employee engagement refers to how the organization enables its employees to give their best at their workplace by providing them all the resources required. Employee experience is the sum total of how the employees feel about an organization right from the recruitment stage until their exit.
How do you improve employee experience?
You can improve employee experience by investing time and effort in employee wellness, closing feedback, resolving concerns, adopting career development programs, and improving internal communication.
How do you improve the employee experience?
Designing a smooth onboarding and exit process, sound knowledge transfer system, providing employees with necessary tools and resources, appreciations, celebrating employees’ milestones and achievements, regular employee engagement surveys and programs, and closing employee feedback loops are some of the ways in which you can improve the employee experience.
