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If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that employment now means much more than an exchange of labour for money. Human experiences make the difference between sustainable, productive businesses and those fraught with stress, burnout and high turnover.
Measuring and optimising employee experience (EX) delivers benefits right across an organisation, especially when you can combine past and present EX data to predict and adapt your business strategy.
Our latest EX Trends show how to use this information to your advantage.
Engagement
High employee engagement links to performance, customer satisfaction, employee retention and innovation. By consistently measuring the level of engagement in your organisation, you’ll be able to pinpoint when and why it changes, and take steps to build it further.
Values are increasingly in the spotlight when it comes to driving engagement. Employees who feel that their organisation embodies their values are 27% more likely to have higher engagement scores than their colleagues, and 23% more likely to stay with the business for over three years.
Wellbeing
By measuring wellbeing, you’re assessing how sustainable an employee’s experience is, and whether they’re at risk of presenteeism, burnout, stress and illness. It’s now more critical than ever to keep tabs on wellbeing because of remote work, high living costs and other economic pressures.
The benefits are clear too - among those who feel they have a good work-life balance, almost two-thirds (63%) are willing to go above and beyond for their organisation.
Career development
People who feel that they have an opportunity to progress and gain new skills are much more likely to be engaged at work and to see a future with the company. You can use listening data to refine and personalise your career development offering, and to help with succession planning.
Financial security is especially important to employees in current economic conditions. Just 57% of employees are satisfied with their current pay and benefits, and that figure has dropped 10 points over the last year. The right kind of career development can help them map out a path for progression and increase their marketable skills.
Experience vs. expectation
Understanding what employees expect from working at your company, and how well their experience measures up to that, can tell you a lot about how an individual’s journey is progressing. Answers will vary a lot, but you can use them to segment your employees into those whose expectations have been met or exceeded, and those who are dissatisfied and in need of intervention.
Most people expect their professional tools and systems to be efficient and effective. However, more than a third (38%) of employees are experiencing burnout symptoms at the moment, and ineffective processes and systems are the top driver behind the trend.
From identification to prediction
Looking at outcomes after the fact is only one way to use experience data, and not necessarily the most impactful. You can also use it to identify the signs employees give you before they disengage, ‘quietly quit’ or reach burnout.
By shifting your programme from reactive to predictive, you can anticipate what the employee trends and behaviours are going to be in your organisation. That way, you can also provide information to the wider business to help improve outcomes.
Reducing attrition levels is a great example of how you can use experience data to drive better business outcomes. Employee listening can help you link the fact people are leaving with the reasons why, and identify the patterns in their data that predict resignation. Catching employees earlier in the cycle gives you the chance to solve their problems before they reach a point of no return.
Doing more with less: targeting your resources through listening
We often think of outcomes as a result of what we’re adding or developing. But it’s equally important to link business results with what you’re not doing, particularly when you’re using insights to pinpoint things that aren’t required, and then switching them off.
The benefit of tying insights to action in this way is that organisations don’t need to apply a catch-all approach which is often expensive and slow-paced. Instead, they can be highly targeted and agile in making improvements, while at the same time being very specific about the cause and effect of what they’re doing, and the tangible benefits they are delivering.
For further details, sign up to Europe’s largest gathering of experience leaders at Qualtrics X4 London.
Case study: targeted support to keep progress on track
A major pharmaceutical company wanted to understand how a global technology change programme was landing with employees. Their priority was understanding employee confidence levels during the change process, since confidence was closely related to adoption of the new tools, proficiency and productivity.
The company used triggered notifications to highlight when confidence levels dipped too low in any part of the organisation, whether it was in a certain country, group of employees or office location. This meant targeted support, in the form of training and guidance, was efficiently given to the employees who needed it.
This targeted approach delivered huge cost savings, in part because support was only rolled out where it was required, and more significantly, because the programme did not need to be paused or slowed down in response to the issues. It was successfully completed on schedule.
To learn more, sign up to Europe’s largest gathering of experience leaders at Qualtrics X4 London on 6th June.
