If you neglect your employeesâ experience, you do so at your own peril. I didn’t write that to be dramatic; employee experience impacts everything in your businessâproductivity, retention, your workplace culture, and more.-
If youâre not already, itâs time to sit up and take a good, honest look at it.
This article will give you a comprehensive breakdown of everything to do with employee experience; what it is (what it isnât), whether itâs actually important, whoâs responsible for it, and how to improve it. Letâs jump right in.
What exactly is employee experience?
First off, letâs be clear about what âemployee experienceâ means. Itâs a nebulous term that’s hard to pin down.
Essentially, employee experience refers to everything an employee experiences at workâtheir interactions with their boss, their software, their teams, and hundreds of other things. Itâs a holistic term that considers the full spectrum of an employeeâs experiences throughout their entire time at a company. Read more about low-code no-code.
One easy way to understand employee experience is to think of its popular counterpart, customer experience. Think about everything that falls under the wide umbrella of customer experience, then simply replace the concept of customer with employee.
âAs employees, weâre all on a journey with our employer. Our experiences on this journey will strongly influence our attitudes; our attitudes in turn form our behaviours which ultimately drive outcomes. A poor Employee Experience (EX) naturally results in a poor outcome.â Oracle
What employee experience is not
The meaning of employee experience is commonly misunderstood. To clarify further, Iâve included a few things that employee experience is not:
Perks & Committees: Casual Fridays and free beer are fun perks, but theyâre not the sum of employee experience. They are, by definition, perks; the cherry on top of the ice-cream sundae. However, if the ice-cream sundae is awful, the cherry will not make up for it. Your employee experience is like the sundae, it runs so much deeper than perks and social committees.
Employee Life Cycle (ELC): ELC is the chronological journey of an employee at your company; onboarding, development, offboarding, etc. The ELC is part of employee experience, however itâs just a small piece. Itâs also commonly the responsibility of the HR department, whereas employee experience is the responsibility of every leader in your company (and, in part, every employee).
Employee Value Proposition (EVP): Your EVP is centered around what your organization provides (beyond remuneration) in order to attract, engage, retain, and delight people.
âIt [EVP] has become closely related to the concept of employer branding, in terms of the term EVP being used to define the underlying ‘offer’ on which an organization’s employer brand marketing and management activities are based. In this context, the EVP is often referred to as the Employer Brand Proposition.â Wikipedia
Thus, EVP is part of your employee experience but itâs not the whole thing. It doesnât encapsulate all of those small moments and deeds that impact the employee experience.
When we talk about employee experience, âwe are also talking about days where there are difficult performance reviews, or how well did a manager support an employee the day she learned her son had cancer? Or consider whether the company really did anything to address its employeesâ concerns following its last employee engagement survey.â – DecisionWise
How important is employee experience?
In a recent study by Deloitte University Press, Josh Bersin et al found that almost 80% of executives worldwide rated employee experience as important or very important.
This is hardly surprising when you consider its impact. When the employee experience is good, employees are happy, engaged, and able to get their work done efficiently. That delivers better bottom line results. In an academic study, Alex Edmans determined:
âCompanies listed in the â100 Best Companies to Work For in Americaâ generated 2.3% to 3.8% higher stock returns per year than their peers…â
Who is responsible for employee experience?
This is a fascinating question, and the answer appears to be: employee experience is the work of most (if not, all) of the people in your organization.
In a nutshell, those at the management level have a huge influence on the organizationâs environment. Theyâre in a position of power that can start a positive (or negative) spiral.
However, other employees are not without power. When faced with challenging situations, itâs the employeeâs decision as to how they react. Do they fly off the handle, gossip about the issue, bottle everything up, or take measures to seek out the source of the problem and fix it? In this way, every employee affects the experience for other employees.
Thus, improving the employee experience will most likely start with the leadership and management level; they lay the groundwork of putting employees first. However, itâs up to employees to work within a genuine framework and positively contribute to the overall experience. (Hereâs a detailed article from Hppy on this topic.)
How to improve employee experience
Although people recognize the importance of improving employee experience, 59% of the respondents to the Deloitte survey (mentioned above) didnât know how they were going to tackle the problem. Delivering a great employee experience can be elusive and challenging.
On this point, Ryan Scott (CEO of Causecast) has some great words of advice:
âThe employee experience may be broad in scope, but it starts by optimizing every touchpoint that an employee comes in contact with, to create an integrated experience that feels holistic throughout every stage.â
The key word here is holistic. A great employee experience is holistic. It seamlessly takes you from end to end, starting from the first day you encounter your new employee.
Herein lies one of the big challenges for improving employee experience. Its components are dispersed across many different people, tools, files, and forms. The first step to changing this, is to glue these pieces together and make your employee experience consistent and enjoyable.
How do you do this? Get the right people and the right technology. The next section explains what to look for.