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The employee experience encapsulates everything your workers see, do, learn and feel during their journey with your organisation.
While sometimes used synonymously with the familiar buzzword employee engagement, the two are actually very different things. In fact, employee experience has a direct impact on employee engagement - so it’s important that we distinguish clearly between the two.
Understanding the effects of your employee experience can be challenging. After all, it encompasses so many areas, some of which aren’t directly under your control. However, it’s not impossible. There are a number of touchpoints within the employee journey that are identifiable regardless of the size, shape, or industry of your business, including: preboarding, onboarding, learning and development, promotion and offboarding.
To help you better understand how effective your employee experience is, we’ve identified 5 core pillars that you can use to diagnose frictions and sticking points throughout the employee lifecycle.
5 Core Pillars Of The Employee Experience
Onboarding
Employee experience starts way before an employee’s first day. In fact, it starts the moment an individual sees one of your job adverts and extends months into their first year at your company. The key to a successful employee experience during the pre boarding and onboarding stages is consistency and clarity. New recruits must know the answer to who, what, where, why and how in order to feel a sense of purpose, belonging and understanding as part of a people-first onboarding process.
Culture
A great workplace culture is key to employee engagement, retention, innovation, collaboration and communication. As the world of work has changed recently, creating effective workplace cultures that bridge the gap between the physical workplace and remote working can be difficult. But only if we try and carry over the ‘old’ ways of working into the new. Now is the time to shake up your approach to employee benefits, flexibility, team building and internal communication.
Communication
Effective communication from the top down is key to creating frictionless experiences for employees. Once again, a sudden rise in hybrid working has made communication between teams and leaders more challenging as we contend with asynchronous communication and flexible working arrangements. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It means your internal communication strategy has to be improved, taking into account relevance, timeliness, and the type of channels you use to deliver them.
Technology
We’re firm advocates of technology as a great enabler. Different software and apps can be used to great effect in order to make tasks and workflows easier, communication quicker and collaboration possible from anywhere. That being said, there’s an art to ensuring you find the right balance of technology in your business that doesn’t overwhelm employees or leave them spending more time searching for what they need instead of actually getting the job done.
Growth
The majority of your employees want to grow with your company. If they don’t, it’s a symptom of a wider issue that may signal problems within the employee experience. It’s important to offer employees opportunities to develop both professionally and personally, in line with their individual goals and those of the business.
Diagnosing Your Employee Experience
The above pillars will work as a guiding light when it comes to diagnosing your employee experience. In exploring each of these key touchpoints, leaders, HR and people teams will be able to pinpoint areas for improvement in the employee experience that will supercharge productivity, efficiency, collaboration, communication and innovation across the board.
To support this, we’ve created the Employee Experience Health Check, a simple quiz that looks at each of these core pillars in depth and gives you a personalised action plan for improvement:
