Improving the employee experience

Employee experience (which is often shortened to just “EX”) is an emerging business function focused on tracing how employees think and feel during every single touch point of their journey through the company. EX emerged as a direct response to a similar function you might have heard of: customer experience (or CX).

What Employee Experience Is

• EX involves, for example, facilities (the physical workspace), corporate communications (how employees perceive what’s going on, transparency), and IT (the tools to facilitate the job).
• The input to achieving employee engagement.
• For example, if an employee has a great experience of leaders showing integrity, good line manager support, consideration for their wellbeing and a facilitative environment, they are more likely to be engaged.
• The sum of an employees’ perceptions throughout the employee lifecycle
• The employees’ day-to-day, real-life experiences.
• A long-term, strategic approach that aligns culture, behaviour and processes.

What Employee Experience Isn’t

• Just HR — HR might lead recruiting, on-boarding, performance reviews and other such activities, but this only covers part of EX.
• Interchangeable with employee engagement. Employee engagement is what you get as a result of achieving a great experience for your employees.
• How engaged employees are at a fixed point in time.
• Employer grand — the external image of the organisation
• Just Perks — short-term, “feel good” initiatives

Deliver a Great Employee Experience

• With every single internal decision you make at your organisation, take the time to question how this change will impact your employees. How will they perceive it? Have efforts been made to keep employees in-the-loop and engaged with the change?
• Remember, employee experience begins before the employee’s first day. The first step is recruitment. Employees have more choice than ever and a good recruitment experience could sway a candidate away from a competitor and towards your company.
• Leadership is key to a great employee experience. Make sure they receive the training and support they need, so they know how to motivate and engage their employees.
• Encourage transparency throughout the employee experience and encourage open lines of communication. Operate an open-door policy and encourage employees to give feedback. Equally, leaders need to be open to answering difficult questions.
• Keep up-to-date with employee experience trends. As time goes by and technology advances, employees will expect different things from their employee experience, including the opportunity to work remotely and decide their hours. Consider how you can adjust your company culture to accommodate these trends.

For a streamlined and positive employee journey.

• The moments that matter is the ones you want to streamline. If onboarding is important, consider investing in an onboarding app that checks whether all the important criteria for successful onboarding have been met. Did the employee have the first one-on-one with the manager? Are expectations for the job well-defined and communicated to the employee? Has the employee met the entire team within the first day of working at the company? And so on. The app helps to remind and track how many of these ‘moments that matter’ have taken place. I expect there to be a direct correlation between this goal-completion and the employee experience.
• A technique to measure the employee experience at the right time could be a pulse survey, or a simple email asking about the employee experience. These pulses or emails should then be sent during those ‘moments that matter’ (e.g. just after a performance review has taken place).
• With this measurement structure in place, you can measure the impact of better employee practices. To stick to onboarding: if you implement such an app, you expect the employee experience to increase for the next cohort of new hires that are using this app. If the experience remains the same, it’s an indication that the app is not used or ineffective. If the experience goes down, you need to review your process.
• If you have the data, measure how the employee experience at these ‘moments that matter’ correlates with absence, productivity, engagement, and the intention to leave the company. As this is a fairly new approach, I haven’t been able to find quantitative validation of this method yet.