An employee's experience is your worker's perception about their time through the multiple touchpoints of your company. With this impression, it can begin as early as the recruitment stages and last until their last day as your company's employee.
In most cases, your employees' overall experience is affected by multiple common factors such as the provided work environment, the company culture and values, equipment, and the nature of the work itself. Depending on the employee, everyone's experiences can be either negative or positive based on how they generally absorb these factors over time.
Often abbreviated as "EX," employee experience can be closely compared to your customer satisfaction ratings. Through this data, the figures can show you how your employees feel throughout each touchpoint of their time with your business.
The Importance of a Positive Employee Experience
Employee-employer should always be handled mutually and respectfully. Providing a strong and positive employee experience is one of many factors that employers should prioritize by continuously improving their processes and culture.
For employees looking to enter a new company, they can check employee ratings and reviews as a guide to see if an organization maintains a good working environment for its employees.
Through a strong and healthy employee experience, many of the most successful businesses are able to retain their top talent, which can act as an edge against other competitors. Apart from that, there are also numerous other benefits that you can gain by taking the necessary steps to improve your EX.
10 Ways to Improve Your Employee's Experience
Employee experience can influence other aspects of the company, such as its productivity and quality of output. Because of this, it is crucial to maintain effective strategies to improve these factors continuously. Here are some methods that you can use to enhance the overall experience of your workers.
- Improve internal communication in the company
Communication within your company should always foster a sense of community within the work environment to encourage everyone to cooperate and achieve set goals in mind. At the same time, practicing active communication skills in the workplace allows your operations to run more smoothly and avoid problems such as miscommunication and negative impressions.
- Create a memorable onboarding experience
The onboarding process plays a vital role in seamlessly transitioning new employees into their position within the company. In many instances, this experience is essential to the success of the employee as they gain major information about the company and their position.
One way of ensuring a smooth onboarding experience is by creating orientations that allow them to transition smoothly into their first few tasks.
- Provide manager training
The relationships between your employees and other team members can be one of the most vital factors that affect their employee experience, especially their relationship with their managers.
Consider providing regular manager training to allow team leaders to empathize and understand how to interact with other employees properly.
- Make career development options available
Workers are more likely to stay with your company if they know that you can provide career development opportunities for them as they grow with your company.
With this in mind, you can establish training programs that will train these workers so that they can be ready to take up more responsibilities before they get promoted. These programs may also be implemented annually to maintain an effective workforce rotation.
- Use an employee journey map
A journey map acts as a key guide that can help you visualize your employee's processes as they go through your company to accomplish set goals that were previously established. Using this map can help you pinpoint critical moments during these different stages and identify weak points in your operations that you can further improve.
Additionally, an employee journey map can help you understand the employee's point of view better as you go through their experiences with them.
- Implement stay interviews
Stay interviews are often conducted by management to grasp a better understanding of why employees stay with your company or the reasons why they might consider leaving for other opportunities. For this interview to be considered successful, conductors should keep in mind to speak in a casual and conversational manner during the interview.
- Perform a survey
Conducting a survey or gaining employee feedback is one of the best ways for companies to learn how their employees feel about working in the organization and understand their perspectives better.
Using the data gathered from these documents can guide you when optimizing your business operations and multiple other factors that affect employee experience. Surveys can be done quarterly or annually, depending on your preferences.
- Invest in employee wellness
When you offer good programs for employee wellness, your teams are more likely to become active within the company as it can be used as a form of encouragement. Apart from physical programs, these benefits can also come in paid leaves, an in-house clinic, healthy food provisions, etc.
- Act on your feedback
When you get multiple negative feedback on your employee surveys, this can be a quick indicator that something is going wrong. To maintain a positive employee experience, make sure that you look through each concern and find ways to improve in aspects that you are lacking. However, keep in mind that these should be for the betterment of all employees, not just a singular one.
- Share customer feedback with your employees
Everyone wants to be praised for the hard work that they do. If an employee receives positive feedback from a customer they served, take the initiative and congratulate them for the work that they have done. This not only boosts employee morale but can also work as a motivator for other employees to perform well with their tasks.
Progress Through Positivity
Creating a good employee experience for your teams can significantly benefit your company in many ways. Apart from experiencing lower turnover rates, business owners can also improve their overall reputation in the industry, which allows you to compete better against major competitors in the market. Moreover, happy employees are shown to work more efficiently and seek better career development plans in their futures.
