Employee Experience
Think Wow Employee Experience Specialists
We’re firm believers that people define a business and that your customer experience will only be as good as the team delivering it.
Getting your employee experience strategy right is key to attracting and retaining the right team to help you grow your business.
Creating a positive employee experience rarely happens by accident. Consider that the employee experience actually begins well before your new employee even starts working with you, at the point they first read the job advert, all the way through their interview and induction process.
Driving employee satisfaction from as early in that process as possible will depend on your company culture, how your business leaders focus on new hires, and just how welcome your new member of staff feels.
Still on the fence?
It’s not just your current employees who feel the sting if your employee experience isn’t up to scratch.
With Company review sites like Glassdoor, and honest feedback on company culture available to anyone who wants to see it, it can become increasingly difficult to attract the right talent if your business and HR leaders aren’t deliberately creating a positive employee experience.
There are a lot of ingredients that make up a great EX – the work environment and physical workspace, the hiring process, management practices, and workplace culture all contribute to to what employees perceive.
It can be useful to look in detail at your employee experience by conducting exit interviews, utilising pulse survey tools and employee interviews to understand how your employees feel.
You can then use the insights gathered and combine employee journey maps and internal customer experience journey maps to highlight the moments that matter most to your teams, identify any potential risks and take action to create an effective employee experience management strategy.
Having the right strategy in place can help elongate the employee lifecycle, improve customer satisfaction and business performance, and ultimately create happier, more fulfilled employees.
Did you know that having an engaged workforce makes companies 21% more profitable and 17% more productive on average?
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Why is a positive employee experience important?
Creating a work environment that creates engaged employees and allows them to feel safe, happy and enables them to be as productive as possible is just good business sense, but it runs deeper than that.
Your employees influence your customer experience, which influences customer loyalty and your ability to maximise revenue. Conversely a poor employee experience will lead to unhappy, de-motivated and unproductive staff. This negatively impacts the employee lifecycle, makes it more likely you’ll have poor attendance, poor staff retention and knowledge gaps, and can also negatively impact your brand reputation, even going so far as to affect your financial performance.
Employee engagement reduces absenteeism. In fact, a Gallup study shows that highly engaged workplaces saw 41% lower absenteeism.
Still need convincing? Okay, here goes!
More so now than ever before, it’s a candidates market when it comes to recruitment. There are more vacancies than there are quality candidates, which means attracting top talent is now much harder than it was before the pandemic.
Your talent acquisition experience needs to the best in order to attract the highest calibre of staff. Your employer brand is crucial to forming those vital first impressions, so leaving your employee experience to chance is no longer a viable option.
Instead, use design thinking and combine it with employee insights to create an integrated experience and really give your business a competitive advantage when it comes to the recruiting process.
Did you know that 85% of the workplace does not feel engaged, and that a whopping 81% of employees are considering leaving their jobs?
Hopefully your team members fall into the 15% of employees who do feel engaged, but is it worth taking that chance?
What happens once you’re ready to get started on your employee experience strategy?
When you feel ready to start working on your employee experience framework, we’ll start by assessing the company culture and talking to your people to gain a deeper understanding of their perception of the current employee experience.
We’ll speak to your senior leaders and staff from every level of the business to build a clear picture of the EX journey of your current teams. You’d be surprised what a huge difference it can make for your employees to even know that you care enough to ask how they feel about their employee experience with you, so this first step is crucial to kickstarting improved employee satisfaction.
We’ll work in collaboration with your HR leaders, and any other key HR professionals and executive team members to make sure that any findings are shared and acted upon. We’ll help you measure employee engagement and uncover the insights needed to either adapt your existing employee experience or create an entirely new employee experience framework.
Still have questions? Check out our FAQs:
Is employee experience linked to customer experience?
It’s long been established that happy staff lead to happier customers and that unhappy, unproductive staff can negatively impact your customer experience.
With customer experience overtaking price and product as a leading brand differentiator, getting your employee experience just right will give you the best possible competitive advantage.
How can we use employee feedback and employee surveys to understand how well we are doing with our employee engagement?
It’s easy to look at the smiling faces of your team members and assume that they are happy and fulfilled in their work, but with only 15% of employees feeling engaged, now is a great time to remove the element of assumption and either prove you have happy staff, or learn where you can improve to drive increased employee satisfaction and a stronger overall employee experience.
Exit surveys, employee feedback, and anonymous pulse surveys can help you to collect honest and unfiltered feedback on how your employees feel, and where your employee experience is most vulnerable. Once you have the insights, you can analyse the data to highlight key trends, prioritise the improvements you want to make and start to move towards a proactive approach to employee experience with an EX strategy.
The theory is that a customer who scores you 6 or less is likely to be a brand detractor, out there negatively talking about your brand and not someone who is likely to recommend you to others.
7-8 they are considered passives. They don’t feel strongly enough about their experience either way to even talk about you.
9 and 10 means that they are promoters. They were so pleased with their experience with you that they will be out there telling everyone they meet just how great you are, and drumming up business for you based on their customer service feedback.
You need to make sure that as many key team members as possible are empowered to help with the project, that they see the value in any culture change, and that they know how important they are to the success of the overall transformation. Bringing your team along and involving them in the process is a tried and tested way to drive engagement and you can’t do that with a team who are disengaged or feeling undervalued. That’s why we recommend the cultural assessment is one of the first stages to the project.
For some, you might need to present a business case for the project, for others having a clear vision of what great cx looks like will be enough to guide them.
How important is a positive employee experience to recruitment and top talent acquisition?
In short a positive employee experience is very important in recruitment. Candidates assess future employers long before the formal job offer is made. They will prescreen businesses based on how a job advert is worded and how the company culture comes across. The job market is tough for employers at the moment. Never before has it been such a candidate’s market. Your potential new hire has options so you can guarantee that it’s not purely going to be about salary for them. They’ll be on the lookout for a business they know creates a work environment that will help them flourish, that will not only ensure their well being, but will also continue their professional development and put them in the best possible position to scoop their next role. This is particularly true for Millenial and Gen Z employee engagement.
Factors such as how many stages there are for interview, how welcome you make your candidate feel when you offer the job and how ready you are for them to start on their first day all add to the overall employee experience (and avoid at all costs leaving them waiting in the reception if the previous interview runs over!). With the risk of a new hire leaving in their first weeks so high, the recruitment and induction experience you offer needs to influence your employee’s decision to stay for the long term.
You ask your customer to rate the ease of their experience on a seven point scale as below with the questions formed as a statement the customer has to rate.
Eg: The company made it easy for me to place an online order…
- = Strongly Disagree
- = Disagree
- = Somewhat Disagree
- = Undecided
- = Somewhat Agree
- = Agree
- = Strongly Agree
You then calculate your effort score using the below formula.
CES = Sum of all Customer Effort Scores ÷ Total number of respondents.
What are the best key performance indicators (KPIs) to use to measure the success of our employee experience?
Focusing on just one metric over another can risk changing one process, but to the detriment of another. Instead, we recommend combining metrics like employee satisfaction scores with employee sickness rates and attrition levels. Try to set a benchmark for your industry when it comes to staff retention and aim to raise the bar, keeping your team longer than those performing similar roles across your industry.
Look at metrics such as customer satisfaction and revenue too. As long as you see an upwards trend in these areas you can usually feel confident that you’re on the right track.
Is a work/life balance important to employee experience management?
As the famous quote goes; “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. If you’ve ever seen the iconic film The Shining, then you’ll know that Jack was anything but dull… but one thing is for certain, he certainly wasn’t happy and fulfilled!
It’s okay to expect your team to work hard for you and to be productive because, well, that’s what you pay them for. But don’t forget – it’s crucial that any team member, (no matter how well paid or how senior they are) gets proper downtime.
When we get to rest and relax we are at our most creative, we can give full energy to work, and we are ultimately much more productive. We’d recommend encouraging staff to leave on time as often as possible (and de-stigmatise the concept of ‘clockwatching’ – employees have lives outside work and they’re probably far more important to them than their job), take regular breaks and reduce out of hours emails as much as possible to help your team find the best balance for them.
Once you know what you’re trying to achieve you can gather feedback in a way that helps you create reports and trend analysis each month to measure the success of your wider customer initiatives.
How much should we help employees with financial wellbeing?
It’s not your responsibility to ensure your employees achieve financial wellbeing but that doesn’t mean there aren’t benefits to supporting them with their finances.
Firstly, paying someone what they are worth, without them having to come cap in hand for a pay rise can prevent a valued employee from becoming disenfranchised and looking elsewhere.
In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it was also established that staff are more likely to be motivated if they have their basic human needs taken care of such as safety and shelter. Financial instability can have a significant negative impact to mental and physical wellbeing. Supporting your employees by making basic financial advice available can be a great step towards them achieving financial wellbeing, not to mention that as most companies don’t do this, it helps you stand out from the crowd as an employer of choice!
Should Employee experience be led by the HR team only or by HR and business leaders together?
Employee experience can be led by anyone knowledgeable about employee engagement, and who cares about people enough to want to raise the bar in the business. A HR leader makes a natural choice as often they own the people culture within the business but it will require the collaboration of all the senior leaders in the business if the new employee experience framework is to actually improve employee engagement.
When your customers feedback it’s because they need help, want to see change, or want to recognise excellent service.
The more the rest of the business share feedback, are involved in the strategy and are empowered to have a deeper understanding of why it’s important that changes happen and stick, the more likely your strategy is to work.
How should we balance ongoing performance conversations with maintaining a positive employee experience?
From time to time in each employee lifecycle, tough conversations will be required when it comes to performance management. It’s important to have honest and constructive conversations with anyone who is underperforming and in this context that could potentially be someone who is a detriment to the overall employee experience.
Constructive feedback, poor outcomes to performance management, or appraisals should never come as a shock to the individual concerned . They need to be fair, balanced and give that team member the best possible chance to improve their performance. There is nothing worse for employee experience than for an otherwise engaged employee to find our their annual appraisal that their manager thinks they’ve had a terrible year…
An employee who is supported through improvements, offered ample opportunities to improve, and feels valued will probably feel positive about their employee experience. Senior leaders and HR services should remember that almost all team members want to do a good job, so ensuring that regular feedback and coaching is baked into the employee journey will have a significant positive impact on employee engagement.
Does a poor employee experience really impact a company's success?
There are a lot of statistics out there on this and they all point to the same conclusion; that yes – a poor employee experience negatively impacts a company’s performance and a positive employee experience can help you grow your business.
How important is employee talent development and career development to the overall employee experience and employee engagement?
The level of support employees experience when it comes to their personal development and career progression will influence how valued they feel, and how much they trust your business to have their best interests at heart. We all know how demotivating it can feel to be passed over for promotion or to be left to get on with a task we feel ill prepared for.
Invest in ongoing training and development to boost your employee experience, help your team get ready to take the next step on the ladder and improve the level of knowledge in your organisation.
