Creating a Good Employee Experience
Building a positive employee experience will create a workplace environment that’s productive, efficient, and goal-oriented.
In the ever-competitive and constantly evolving market, employee tenure is declining at a faster rate. More and more companies are keeping an eye on how to improve their employee experience and keep their valued employees satisfied, as they should be.
Employee experience is gaining traction as many organizations feel the need to enhance the way they handle employees with a personal touch.
With this, we’ll talk about the specifics of what you, a business owner, can do to deliver a positive employee experience.
What is Employee Experience?
Employee experience is your workers' perception of what their job is about and what they feel throughout their tenure. It includes all your employees' interaction with their colleagues, environment, and personal development.
Developing a plan for improvement on your employee experience will touch your worker’s pain points and concerns and ensure that they aren’t swept under a rug.
Customers make you money, but who are the key people responsible for this? Yes, that’s your employees. Thus, a great employee experience is crucial to the success of your business. They will always be your greatest asset.
Providing customer satisfaction first begins with delivering employee experience. This not only include salaries but also the overall treatment and morale of the people working for you.
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Is Good Employee Experience Really Important?
Companies pay more in hiring new people than making their existing employees satisfied.
Sourcing out new talents is way costly and a lot more time is invested in making sure that new employees learn the ropes of the business. Today, most highly skilled workers are already employed making recruiters feel frustrated by the lack of candidates for open positions.
This is a lengthy process. Even if you found a perfect candidate, there is no assurance that they will stay for long, especially if you don’t implement better employee experience practices.
If you want to lessen or remove this process, it’s best to focus on your existing employees first.
4 Strategies to Improve your Employee Experience
When your employees feel empowered and supported in the organization, they will be willing to go take ownership of their jobs and produce better results for your company.
Those who are happy with the workplace outperform their peers and produce a valuable impact than the rest. It’s what an employer value most to boost business performances.
Here are the major strategies you can develop to foster the growth and retention of your valued employees:
1. Employee Journey Mapping
Drawing new employees and retaining them is a challenge. While there are thousands in the job market, a lot of companies are finding it hard for them to find the ones who fit the position and company culture. Employee journey mapping is key to improve this process.
An employee journey map is a visual timeline that shows how an employee first becomes aware of the company ends to where an employee resigns. Creating employee personas and developing ways to ensure they are valued as well as producing value will help companies understand what makes an employee happy, demotivated, or quit.
The results of the employee journey maps will be very beneficial to the overall employee experience strategy that a business will plot.
2. Cultural Environment
According to Gallup, the top 20% of candidates use culture as a major criterion for choosing where they want to work. These people are usually highly skilled and produce way more value than their colleagues.
Candidates are more invested in companies that have a mission and vision that resonate with them well. They usually look for learning and growth progression, what the company stands for, and who will be their direct supervisor.
To summarize, providing a balanced culture where both employees and employers benefit will help generate growth for the business.
3. Physical Environment
The physical environment in the workplace affects a worker’s performance. The cubicles, pantries, meeting areas, office design, and open spaces can be a factor.
Not all companies can provide what Google does. But, the matter of fact is, we cannot know for sure that an employee’s primary motivator for accepting a job is because of the ping-pong tables, napping areas, or cappuccino bars. It’s not something all businesses can provide, and some workers may not even use these areas with the worry of being seen as slacking off.
Certainly, there are ways to keep your office that energizes and inspires your team. After all, they stay for 8 or more hours inside the workspace.
As much as you want to create uniform workspaces among all your employees, some of them may prefer an open area where they can communicate better, while some like it best if they are in a closed office.
Providing flexibility in this matter enables your employees to be more productive in a space that they prefer.
4. Technological Environment
There’s no denying that technology has helped workers and businesses become more productive. The rapid growth of technological advancements allowed employees to interact, strategize, and work full time without the need to go to a physical office.
Adapting this dramatic tech evolution helped companies reduce costs and keep their employee experience top-notch. But there are risks to consider too. A heightened level of security should be implemented as hackers are becoming savvier in accessing sensitive business information. So ensure that as you integrate more technology in the workplace, look for the right people to protect you against a possible breach.
4 Key Factors in Ensuring a Quality Employee Experience
Companies that are invested in employee experience produced over four times the average profit compared to others.
Whether you own a retail store, factory, or large corporation, various factors will shape employee experience.
The tasks, colleagues, surroundings, culture, customers, and products. These things encapsulate how your employees feel throughout their stay with the organization.
Companies that recognize that employees are their greatest asset are much more willing to invest in making sure that their employees are happy. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for employees as each of them is different in their own ways.
Here are the major areas to help you produce the best experience for your employees.
Provide Meaningful Work
If your employees do meaningful work that feels significant to them, they are more likely to go the extra mile at work.
Not all the time that an employee’s values relate to what the company’s products and offers are. But, one way to ensure that your employees know that they are valued is to share the company’s goals that will keep them motivated.
For example, when hitting a target goal, let them know that their work made an impact by giving out a reward, a salary incentive, bonus, free training, or things that you know your employee will appreciate.
Create an Opportunity for Career Growth
Upskilling employees will provide a better competitive edge to the business. The demand for technology skills is rising, thus, making sure that your employees educated on the current required skills in the workforce will help your business tremendously.
Training and honing young talents, keeping your older workers up to speed with trends and technology, and providing general training that will help your employees be better at their jobs will reward you in many ways.
Employees who are good at what they’re doing work more efficiently, giving you higher performances.
Provide Flexibility
A report from Deloitte revealed that by 2025, 75% of the global workforce will be millennials. Flexibility is a major motivator for this generation. Providing a wide array of chances to grow, a better schedule, and an opportunity to work remotely provides a better employee experience.
Boost Employee Morale
Many companies who are trying to better their employee experience may be missing the mark which creates a frustrated group of employees dreading to go to any company that provides another offer.
A supportive organization provides security and trust. Let your employees be heard and be ready to speak to them when needed. Support your employee’s initiatives, do small gestures, train your managers, provide feedback, and be open to new ideas. These actions create a balanced sense of trust both ways.
When employee morale is high, productivity is higher and people are happier.
Employees also consider factors as key motivators such as:
- Health care
- Investment in technology
- Social activities among employees
- Access to parking spaces
- Tools
- Training
- Work-life balance
According to a study, organizations with high employee engagement are 21% more profitable.
As always, a good plan will help smoothen out this process. Creating a strategic employee experience plan will impact the bottom line of the results of your employee experience initiatives.
Building relationships is not just for your consumers, employees should be your first priority. Good employee experience ultimately impacts your customer experience. Your employees are reflective of what your value is as a company.
