Improve Employee Experience With These 10 Steps

Improving employee experience is an ambition of many HR professionals. Follow these steps to provide your employees with an excellent experience and help your company thrive.

March 4, 2020 By Sara Ana Cemazar

Positive employee experience has a great impact on a company’s business success. HR industry has shifted its focus to improve the employee experience and drive their company’s business performance.

In this article, you will learn how to excel in giving your employees the working experience they deserve and create a working environment where your employees want to stay for a long run.

💡 You can download a list of 16 Questions Employees Use to Evaluate their Employees here.

The Definition of Employee Experience

The shift towards employee-centered market has been going on for some time now. Subsequently, HR professionals have started relating customers and employees. In other words, the same way salesmen understand their customers, employers should now become more effective in understanding the employee behaviors and tailor their experience for a desired outcome.

Therefore,

employee experience is comparable to customer experience. It includes everything an employee encounters in a workplace. It represents an employees’ entire experience throughout their career in a company.

In other words, how employees feel about what they observe during their journey with an organization is what their experience consists of.

Employee experience embodies employee engagement and adds to it. While employee engagement is the main driver of employee performance and retention, improving employee experience will result in happier and healthier individuals as a whole.

Employee Experience Index

In response to rising interest for employee experience measurement, Globoforce has developed an Employee Experience Index that consists of 5 dimensions:

Belonging – how employees feel as a part of a team, group or organization
Purpose – how employees view the importance of their work
Achievement – how a sense of accomplishment is perceived by employees
Happiness – how is feeling good around work achieved
Vigor – how employees express their enthusiasm at work.

This study can help you understand not only what drives employee experience, but which outcomes you can expect if you apply our tips.

10 Steps to Develop a Positive Employee Experience

Let’s now dive into a list of specific recommendations to create an overwhelmingly positive employee experience.

Absolute necessity: technological and physical environment

It goes without saying that at the base of employee experience stands the technology for employees to do their job as well as a comfortable working environment.

💡 You should make sure your employees have the right tools to perform their work duties effectively. The physical place employees work in should be safe, clean and bright.

Plan ahead: map employee journey

Mapping your employee journey can help you dot down all the important touch-points in your employee’s work lifetime. It presents an opportunity to lay out all the instances of employee’s career path and develop an action plan accordingly.

Mapping your employee journey can help you understand your employees better and significantly influence employee performance. In comparison to surveys that can serve as a pulse check in a single moment of time, employee journey map allows you to plan the best time for certain actions according to employees’ professional timeline.

Start things right: provide excellent Candidate Experience

First impressions have long-lasting effects, and all employees start their journey with a company while they are still candidates. A negative candidate experience has a serious impact on your business as well, with 58% of candidates saying that a negative experience would make them less likely to buy company’s products (Manpower).

From candidates’ perspective, the way you treat them reflects how you will treat them as employees. Therefore, there are several tactics you can apply to enhance your potential future employees’ experience.

Think of it in terms of simplicity, clarity and communication. You want to simplify your candidates’ application process and make the job description and recruitment process clear. In addition to that, you should communicate your decisions often and in a respectful time frame.

Optimize onboarding experience

Naturally, the next step after your candidates are hired is onboarding. Poor employee onboarding creates stress in the workplace and it negatively impacts your employee’s future success.

It is crucial for your new employees to have a structured outline of their first few days in a company. You want to fortify your employee’s decision to work for your company and lay out a smooth onboarding plan.

According to Glassdoor, when a robust onboarding process is implemented, productivity improves by more than 70%.

More importantly, your onboarding techniques can help you integrate your employees into the company’s culture, which is a great driver of employee engagement and retention.

Give feedback

Giving feedback is essential to your employees’ motivation. Not only does it stir your employee’s actions towards a desired goal, it also leads to higher employee engagement levels: Gallup’s research found that 67% of employees whose managers give positive feedback were fully engaged at their work.

Contrary to popular belief, feedback does not always have to be negative. In fact, positive employee feedback has a myriad of benefits for the workplace in general.

Moreover, younger generations are especially eager to receive feedback on a more regular basis. For example, 74% of Millennials feel that they don’t know how their managers and colleagues think they’re performing at work.

💡 Continuous feedback allows employees a constant and immediate check of their performance. Read more about why continuous feedback is important.

Check in with your employees with Surveys

Employee surveys are an excellent way to measure the underlying issues concerning employees at your company. It can give you useful insight into your employees’ motivation, grievances and satisfaction. You can check out our 70 Employee Surveys Questions for some ideas.

Some companies perform annual, biannual or monthly surveys. However, new trends suggest that employee surveys should be done more often. For example, Amazon has rolled out a one-question-per-day program that helps them understand their vast workforce on a daily basis with a minimal time investment.

However, employee surveys have gained bad rep among employees because it feels like a waste of their time. Make sure to explain that you will use the survey to identify areas for improvement and follow it up with action!

Have a look at SurveyRocks, our HR survey and assesment solution.

Create your own employee survey!

Recognize & Reward Your Employees

One study found that 50% of employees believed that being thanked by managers improved their relationship with them, and built more trust with higher management. Not only does recognition work wonders for employee engagement, but it also boosts employee productivity. Moreover, 69% of employees reporting they would work harder if they felt their efforts were better appreciated.

💡 Check out 5 reasons why you should recognize your employees’ work.

Recognition has many forms, so don’t feel like you necessarily have to give out monetary prizes to improve your employee experience. Read how JTI has transformed their company culture by implementing a non-monetary rewards & recognition program.

There is many employee recognition program benefits and ideas you could use in your company. However, you can start with something simple like introducing an Employee of the Month program or recognizing your employees on their work anniversaries.

If you want to implement a similar program in your company, take a look at JobPts, our recognition and reward platform.

Appreciate Your Employees & Create Moments that Matter.

Drive Performance: Develop Internal Communication

We all know this one: communicate, communicate, communicate! According to one study, 33% of employees think that lack of open communication has the most negative impact on their morale.

Developing employee communication can allow you to break down barriers across organizational hierarchy. In addition, it will assure that employees are informed of your company’s vision.

💡 Keep in mind that communication should be a two-way street. Therefore, try giving your employees their own voice. Create a common platform for them to share their thoughts and ideas.

Latest trends in internal communication focus on decluttering. Approximately 40% of employees ignore HR emails, which indicates that communication channels should be more diverse.

Promote employee well-being

According to AIS, job is the main stressor for 1 out of 4 employees. In turn, APA has found that 89% employees at organizations that support well-being initiatives were more likely to perceive their company as a good place to work.

Implementing a wellness program can help you reduce healthcare costs and absenteeism while building a culture that supports employee well-being. Also, promoting a work-life balance culture can help prevent burnout in the workplace, as well as create a better performing workforce.

Give Opportunities to Develop

Vast majority of employees want opportunities for career growth. This wish is even more prominent among younger generation of workers.

💡 87% of millennials think professional development is important, with 72% of employees even thinking of financial investment to their own training.

These statistics speak volumes: employee development is crucial for a positive employee experience. It drives your employee retention and makes your company a more attractive employer.

You can start developing your growth opportunity program by organizing workshops for trans-departmental skills, such as communication or soft skills. You can even encourage some of your employees to lead the workshops in some area they’re particularly good at.

Eventually, you can work on your internal company’s advancement strategy. Try to communicate a clear set of promotion requirements, and work with employees on their individual employee development plans.

Depart on a Positive Note

Employees quitting their jobs or being let go does not have to create an unpleasant situation for everyone involved. It is important to learn why an employee is leaving, because it can indicate a greater problem at your company.

Performing an exit interview can help you collect valuable information and ensure that ex-employee is departing from your company on a positive note. It is in your best interest to make your ex-employees your alumni and keep in touch with them. They may want to return, and they can serve as your company’s ambassadors even if they do not longer work there.

The Benefits of Positive Employee Experience

There are numerous benefits of positive employee experience. In this section, we will outline the most important ones.

Improved employee engagement

If your aim to improve employee experience, you will positively influence your employee engagement as well. Employee disengagement costs amount to $500 billion annually in US only, and engaging your workforce will result in a positive change on a company-wide level.

💡 Check out more benefits of highly engaged workplaces.

Higher employee productivity

When employees feel appreciated, recognized and taken care of, they will be more productive. In other words, happy employee is a productive employee! Productivity killers such as poor communication, lack of recognition and feedback will all be positively affected once you start improving your employee experience.

Lower employee turnover

This SHRM study predicts that replacing an employee costs 6 to 9 months’ salary. Providing your employees with a great experience will make them more likely to stay with your company in the long run, thus decreasing employee turnover. This can save your company not only financial resources but also time it takes to onboard a new employee.

Better company culture

By implementing positive employee experience strategies, you will end up with a healthier company culture. If you’re trying to create a culture of engagement, appreciation and well-being, this is a way to go.

Higher business performance

Here’s an interesting statistic you can show your upper management when discussing a budget for improving employee experience. According to IBM, the companies with best employee experience scores had three times the return of assets and have doubled the return on sales compared to companies with worst employee experience score.

Better customer satisfaction

The ultimate goal of companies working in B2B or B2C sector is customer retention. The business success starts with employees. If your employees are happy, they are more likely to make your customers happy as well.

How SemosCloud Can Help You Boost Employee Experience

SemosCloud is all-in-one Employee Success suite designed to help employers deliver the experience that employees are expecting.

SemosCloud is the most complete HR tech solution covering the most important stages of employee lifecycle. Our focus on user interface and ease of use has resulted in remarkable user adoptions by employees at enterprise companies across the world.

Check out our 6 products and schedule a demo to see how we can help you improve employee experience:

JobPts– employee rewards & recognition
FeedBck– employee feedback
SurveyRocks– employee surveys
Healthain– employee health & well-being
BoardFlo– employee collaboration & productivity
WorkVibe– complete HXM solution