Good employees are the fuel on which a successful business runs. To attract and retain quality employees, every leadership team needs to pay close attention to employee experience. Cultivating a good environment for employees has proven to be an effective way for organizations to increase productivity, efficiency, and creativity. Many factors contribute to a good employee experience, which gives you many options to enrich your employees and, as a result, improve your business.
What is Employee Experience?
Employee experience can be defined as the sum total of an employee’s experiences with their employer from the pre-employment phase to post-employment.
Every interaction that an employee has with any part of the organization will shape this experience, and employees with a more positive outlook regarding their employers will perform better. As an employer, it is in your best interest to establish a culture in which employees are excited to perform because they know that they are appreciated and will be compensated in a number of possible ways. In other words, you need to establish a good employee experience.
What are the Components of Employee Experience?
Though the employee's experience is cumulative, it is useful to break the concept into three distinct components:
Physical
The physical element mostly pertains to the employees' workspace. Desks, chairs, break rooms, paint colors, and room configurations all contribute to the physical part of employee experience.
Cultural
The cultural aspect is about how employees feel about the organization. This can be impacted by leadership quality and style, the structure of the organization, benefits, etc. Sometimes, a company's culture can feel like a weight to employees, as if it is preventing them from growing within the organization. Other times, employees may feel like their company's culture lifts them up and helps them to achieve.
Technology
How employees feel about the tools that they have to perform their jobs is the technological aspect of employee experience. This includes software, hardware, mobile devices, etc. Not having the right tools for the job can lead to frustration and a very negative employee experience.
Why is Employee Experience Important?
Every successful business understands that to thrive in any industry, they must keep their customers happy. If you don't keep them happy, customers will go to someone else who will make them happy.
This same concept applies to employees. Employees have a choice of where they want to work. Whether they know it or not, they are making their choice of where to work based on employee experience. They consider aspects such as compensation (monetary and otherwise), work environment, technology, and a host of other things to determine which position will be best for them. If you want to recruit and retain the best talent, you will need to put an emphasis on maintaining a positive experience for all of your employees.
Word travels fast around an industry, and if you have cultivated a good employee experience, then you will attract the most highly qualified job candidates. Similarly, you will improve your retention of established employees. This will give you an advantage over others while increasing productivity, innovation, and profit.
But how do you improve employee experience?
The key is having a great employee experience strategy.
What is an Employee Experience Strategy?
An employee experience strategy is an outline of what you can do to establish and maintain a good employee experience. A good strategy will range from making it easy to apply for the position to helping the employee leave the organization on good terms.
An employee engagement strategy is a distinct but important part of any employee experience strategy. The engagement strategy is how your employees will make a good emotional connection with your organization. This strategy will aid in building an overall positive employee experience.
What Does an Employee Experience Strategy Look Like?
All strategies should be tailored to the specific organization's needs. However, there are some universal recommendations to remember when making your strategy.
- Candidacy- Make the job easy to find and easy to apply to.
- Get off to a Good Start- Ensure that the employee knows what will be expected of them and that they have the ability to fulfill those duties. Then, give them everything they need to get started comfortably and competently.
- Set Goals- Make sure that your employees are constantly striving toward realistic goals for the length of their employment.
- Growth- Give employees a clear path and the support they need to grow within the company. Help them learn new skills and improve their value to your business.
- Departure- Try to keep good employees until their retirement but also provide a smooth exit strategy that works in everyone's best interest.
When properly implemented, an employee experience strategy both attracts and retains top talent.
Retention
Employees increase in value to your organization each year. It is good business to provide them with a positive employee experience so that they are excited about working and will continue to choose to work for you. Employee retention is crucial to any businesses' long-term success.
If you want to know if your employee experience is leading to high retention, download our Employee Retention Scorecard to see how you measure up.
