The Business Case for Employee Experience

Over the past decade, workplaces have been transformed. This change has been fueled by several factors including, the expectations of a Gen Z workforce, new levels of reliance on technology and, most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Employee experience (EX) is a holistic approach to every interaction an employee encounters during their tenure, from onboarding to an exit interview. While employee engagement is aligned with productivity and output, employee experience looks more generally at each aspect of employee participation in a professional environment. 

How to address what employee experience means for your business

The most successful companies understand that employees of today strive to be engaged, enabled and empowered. In the same way that businesses invest in the customer experience, it’s time to consider the impact a positive employee experience can have on an organization and its output. 

Employees sit at the heart of a business, often understanding its purpose and mission better than anyone else. These individuals and teams have the potential to be a company’s biggest advocates if the experience they have is positive. 

Deciding what employee experience means for your company means starting with the company goals. If you want to improve EX, it’s worth breaking it down into different areas and considering each of the environmental factors including technology, culture and the physical or hybrid workplace.

Equipping your teams with the tools they need to excel at work means keeping them connected and offering technological solutions that embrace efficient ways of working. Platforms that allow employees to communicate in real-time, share updates and track goals keeps them engaged by building authentic personal and professional relationships. 

What experience means in a hybrid world

When you have employees based remotely or who split their time between an office and home-working, the impact of the physical environment shouldn’t be underestimated. If employees only visit the office once or twice a week, it’s even more important that this space be welcoming, accessible and comfortable. 

Flexibility is the new basic standard, and having office spaces that can be agile, from hot-desking to spaces for collaborative working, will contribute heavily to the employee experience.

In a hybrid world, the digital workplace is also an environmental factor that should be considered. Setting boundaries for how and where people connect when working remotely, is key when building a positive workplace culture, inevitably resulting in a better EX. 

Establishing safe online forums for open discussion allows employees to bring their personalities into their work and build relationships with colleagues which become invaluable in a busy work environment. This comes back to equipping employees with the right tools to do their job, in a hybrid world, being able to effectively communicate is a key tool for the workplace.

The challenge of measuring EX 

Improving the employee experience requires understanding the current experience. In-person or online focus groups, feedback surveys that promote an open, honest discussion will give an insight into how employees feel about the business and their experience at work. 

Collecting quantitative and qualitative data will allow you to evaluate trends and begin to highlight areas for improvement, this can be done using regular online surveys, shorter ‘pulse’ surveys, in-person interviews or remote surveying sites. Create a list of useful questions to ask in a feedback survey.

Once you have these insights, you can prioritize and establish an action plan to improve EX. For example, if you learn from a survey that staff are finding internal communication is slow and ineffective, you could introduce a new communications platform that could be integrated into everyday work for regular quick and easy use. You can then resurvey and measure the impact this change has had.

Setting realistic improvement timelines and planning follow up measurements will allow you to see the impact of the changes you’ve made. 

Measuring employee experience should be a process that takes place regularly as it will revolve around your employees themselves. As new hires join the team and dynamics change, it’s important to revisit EX and ensure initiatives are delivered across the whole team.

The shift from engagement to experience

In recent years we’ve spent time discussing employee engagement, especially in light of the move from the physical workplace to remote and hybrid. Businesses wanted to ensure employees are staying involved, contributing to and feeling driven to achieve company goals, which becomes particularly important in a time of huge change as we’ve seen in the past two years. This is still a consideration, but we have evolved to understand engagement is just a part of the experience, so to change the result we have to transform the approach.

Employee experience impacts business success

Job satisfaction and ‘company environment’ are described by Harvard Business Review as the two key factors that make employees stay at their companies. A degree of compatibility between an employee and a company’s values will affect this, as will outside factors including opportunities for development and being recognised and appreciated. All of these aspects contribute to EX.

In a recent SHRM study, 70% of employees felt that praise and recognition at work made them happier at home. In turn, happy workers are more productive, according to the latest research from the University of Warwick. High levels of EX are a good indicator of employee happiness and satisfaction, which, if it impacts productivity, will very likely also affect the bottom line.

Good levels of EX directly impact the customer experience so if you want good reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations, looking inwards is a good place to start. 

Experience will lead the way in the workplace of the future

As new generations enter the workforce with a range of new expectations, employee experience is set to remain front and center in the workplace. 

Giving employees the tools to be able to do their job to the best of their ability is one of the cornerstones of employee experience, ensuring that staff can stay connected with company-wide targets and goals. Embracing EX shows that you care about your people, and if happy employees are key to ensuring happy customers, that should make for a clear business priority.