Employee experience

The term employee experience refers to interactions, observations and situations that members of the workforce encounter during their time with an organisation.

It can be seen as a counterpart to customer experience, an area that many see as an essential investment for organisations.

Why is employee experience important?

Creating and fostering positive employee experience will have several positive impacts on your organisation and the people who work there. When the right sort of employee experience is being encouraged, it will normally manifest in:

• Better engagement – Good employee experience will produce a more engaged workforce. Teams and individuals, at all levels, will be more invested in the goals and organisational culture, more aligned to their roles and better able to collaborate with others.

• Improved staff retention – When their experience is positive, employees are much more likely to stay with an organisation. Creating the employee experience through comprehensive onboarding and opportunities for internal mobility and personal development will reduce the potential for staff turnover.

• Stronger recruitment – There are a multitude of opportunities for employees to share their experience of working for an organisation. The growth of websites like Glassdoor and social networks like LinkedIn now means that a poor employee experience is likely to become a significant factor in the decision-making of potential candidates considering the opportunities available at your organisation. Giving employees a great experience to talk about will give you are better quality of candidates in your talent pipeline.

• The bottom line – More engaged employees, better retention of staff and a higher quality talent pipeline all help to create a more productive and efficient organisation. The improvements in performance you can harness with a positive employee experience will see a positive impact on the bottom line.

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How to improve employee experience

If you are concerned about the quality of your employee experience and want to make changes, it's important to take a methodical approach to ensure that you're planning for long-term improvements.

• Decide on your priorities – Make sure you know which areas of experience you are going to improve, and what impact that will have on your organisation. Carefully consider why you are planning changes and ensure they align with business goals.

• Start gathering data – The only way to know if the changes you make are working is to have a benchmark to measure against. Use employee feedback surveys, performance reviews, attendance reporting, recruitment and retention data to build an understanding of the current employee experience and monitor this data as an ongoing process to see what impact the changes you make are having.

• Create connections – Think about how you can link activities together to create a more interlinked employee experience. Ensuring consistency at all employee touchpoints will not only benefit them but will mean the data and feedback you are looking to collect will be much more useful.

• Encourage action – Once you have begun to generate learnings about your employee experience you should ensure that you are empowering the leadership in your organisation to act on them. Where specific teams are identified as needing additional support be ready to provide this, and when great examples are identified be sure these are shared to motivate others with best practice.

As with any large-scale organisational change project, improving your employee experience will require careful planning, meaningful investment and dedication.