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EXPLAINING

Employee Experience

Below, we untangle the concept of employee experience and how you can work to improve and maintain it as positive.

Below, we untangle the concept of employee experience and how you can work to improve and maintain it as positive.

What is employee experience?

Employee experience (EX) is the perception an employee has of their work and employer throughout the employee life cycle. It includes all areas of the employee’s connection to the employer. Everything from compensation and benefits to organizational culture, work environment, values, employer brand, leadership, job role, and development opportunities impact the employee experience.

Employee experience is increasingly important for organizations. The speed of change in society and work life pushes organizations to learn from, listen to, and drive continuous improvements through leaders and employees. According to Josh Bersin’s recent research, ”the postpandemic era is quickly becoming defined by employee experience: how your organization shapes the way people work and live, from productivity to flexibility, wellbeing, health, and everything in between.”

The CatalystOne Engage employee survey and analytics software is designed to enable organizations to work with different people and culture experience needs. Using it, you can increase engagement, well-being, and performance; measure and improve how culture empowers effective implementation; and ensure your transformation projects succeed from a people perspective.

Below, we untangle the concept of employee experience and how you can work to improve and maintain it as positive.

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What is the difference between employee engagement and employee experience?

Employee engagement refers to employees’ enthusiasm, motivation, and commitment toward their work and employer. It is essential for fostering positive cultures, increasing productivity, and driving high-performing organizations.

Employee experience goes beyond employee engagement and encompasses the entire employee journey. It is a way for organizations to work together with their employees and co-create the path forward and the experiences that empower well-being and performance. Employee engagement, on the other hand, is traditionally more of a one-way communication from the employer to the employee. We do not want to strip the importance of employee engagement as it still plays a key role in employee, team, and organizational success. However, the development of employee experience and its value must be harnessed to continue to build a modern competitive organization.

The growing importance of employee experience is due to increased employee authority and demand for their voices to be heard. When you understand the employee experience, you can work to improve it. This is where modern employee surveys play a key role.

Short, continuous employee surveys provide the current employee experience status, but this is not enough. To work with the employee experience as the human-centered approach it is, you must give employees access to the survey results and transparently include them in a continuous improvement process.

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Why employee experience is important

Prioritizing a positive employee experience creates opportunities for employees to do the best work of their lives and impacts the bottom line. According to McKinsey, “organizations in which HR facilitates a positive employee experience are 1.3 times more likely to report organizational outperformance.”

All of the moments an employee experiences contribute to their feelings about their employer and work, which in turn impact their performance and view of the employer. All experiences are subjectively perceived by each person; there are no objective experiences. Since people interpret reality based on their experiences, they act on what they believe is true. Therefore, it is important for organizations to understand and influence what employees experience.

A positive employee experience helps organizations drive attraction and retention, develop and maintain an innovation culture, and achieve long-term growth. It fosters passion and purpose and strengthens well-being and performance among individuals, teams, and the organization.

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What makes a great employee experience?

A great employee experience is a combination of several factors promoting an inclusive, fulfilling, and supportive work environment. Employees must feel valued for their contributions and who they are and empowered to thrive and grow in their roles. An effective approach is co-creating the moments that matter in employees’ work lives.
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An organization can develop and maintain a positive employee experience by:

  • Cultivating a sound organizational culture and employer brand
    Prioritize DE&I and provide wellness programs for physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Center values around inclusion, respect, authenticity, recognition, results, and transparency. Ensure you measure how people live the culture and follow up with those deviating from it.
  • Promoting work-life balance
    Set policies that support employees’ performance and well-being on their terms, such as effectively managing workloads, offering flexible work arrangements and parental leave, and encouraging time off.
  • Applying an inclusive leadership style
    Not only does an inclusive leadership style promote a positive employee experience, but it is also the best style for increasing well-being and performance based on how the brain works. The key is helping managers act in alignment with its principles by providing feedback.
  • Providing employees with meaningful work and development opportunities
    The employee’s role should align with their abilities to perform in it. Centering work around teams provides an environment to foster inclusion, which is key to enhancing the employee experience. Offering strong onboarding, training, mentoring, and growth opportunities helps keep employees stimulated and feeling progress.
  • Enabling empowerment and autonomy
    For employees to live up to job expectations, they most often need empowerment to make decisions within their job scope and to work autonomously. Having clear frames to work within and trust to innovate and execute builds positive experiences.
  • Designing a physical work environment where employees want to spend time
    If you want employees to work in the office, ensure you make it easy for people to want to work from there. This includes promoting a healthy work-life, ergonomic workplace, technology and tools that make work and collaboration effective, access to natural daylight, fruit, and more.
  • Communicating transparently
    Foster an open and inclusive communication climate where you set clear expectations and direction. Leaders should actively communicate the progress of achieving goals, strategies, and necessary changes.
  • Recognizing behavior and performance and celebrating success
    Regularly recognize the behaviors you want to promote and the team’s and individuals’ performance. Remember to celebrate achievements to boost morale.
  • Offering a competitive compensation package
    While compensation is not all that matters, it provides the basis for employees to be able to do great work.
  • Offering wellness and well-being programs
    Providing programs that support employee health signals that employers care about their people’s holistic well-being.
  • Conducting regular employee (pulse) surveys
    Provide employees with a channel to encourage them to share constructive feedback, ideas, and concerns and take responsibility for continuous improvements. Employee and pulse surveys with a strong analytics tool are great for holding open and honest discussions about the organization’s current state, what must change, and shifting accountability for change to employees. For a sustainable pulse survey process, barriers arising in the surveys should be removed, and employee feedback should be evaluated and acted on.

  • Measuring key business areas through regular pulse surveys is a great way to monitor the employee experience, learn what might be keeping it positive, and co-create the path forward.

     

Is employee experience part of HR?

Managing initiatives to improve employee experience—such as enhancing the Employee Value Proposition and influencing talent management approaches—is often considered part of HR’s responsibilities. At the same time, changes in business and society indicate that employee experience is moving towards being everyone’s responsibility to influence and uphold positive.

An agile environment, younger generations’ changing expectations, and the working population’s flattening economic size all point to ensuring a strong and positive employee experience requires everyone’s involvement. Organizations and HR must set a favorable foundation. Managers must live up to and enforce it and individual contributors must provide feedback and improvement suggestions and take ownership of prioritized changes.

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Why employee experience is the new customer experience

Organizations must find ways to empower and engage employees to facilitate fast, convenient, consistent, and friendly customer experiences. Not only are employees those who interact with your customers, but they are also more open to giving feedback. Customers might not always tell you why they stop buying from you, but employees often explain what must change if you ask them.

PwC explains, “Great experiences are tangible: up to a 16% price premium”, and the human touch is the important connector to providing a great experience. Additionally, an MIT study found that “companies with great employee experience … had [double the] customer satisfaction.” The numbers show the importance of building and maintaining a positive employee experience.

One effective approach is using a modern employee survey with strong analytics capabilities. This provides fast and relevant insights about people and where they see improvements needed and lets managers have targeted team dialogues.

When you ask your employees for feedback and act on it, they feel listened to, which increases psychological safety. This increases trust and employee engagement, which are strong influences on how employees interact with customers.

How employee experience impacts customer experience

The way employees interact with customers has grown increasingly dependent on their employee experience. There are several ways the employee experience impacts the customer experience, including:

 
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  • Customer interactions
    Employees with a positive employee experience are more likely to portray a service-minded attitude and show empathy toward helping customers. Aligned, engaged, and motivated employees deliver higher quality, more consistent, and reliable customer interactions.
  • Product or service knowledge
    Positive employee experience impacts employees’ engagement in understanding the product or service offering more often. They have a stronger desire to learn the details, which helps them answer more questions, provide more accurate information, and tailor recommendations based on the situation.
  • Urgency to solve problems
    The sense of urgency to help the customer solve the problem tends to be stronger with a positive employee experience. Employees feel empowered to take ownership of problems, find solutions, and ensure they solve the problem.
  • Customer satisfaction and referrals
    Employees with positive work experiences are more likely to be the employer’s ambassadors. They speak more highly of the organization and the offering. Their enthusiasm and passion are stronger, influencing how the customer experiences the product or service. This can result in word-of-mouth customer recommendations and referrals.
  • Human values
    Customers have become more focused on buying from organizations that prioritize their employees and their well-being.
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  • Cost of negative EX
    When employees experience negative feelings connected to their work and employer, they are more likely to bring that mindset into customer interactions, negatively affecting the customer’s experience.

What is an employee experience survey?

An employee experience survey focuses on the business and people areas that matter most to individual, team, and organizational success. Nine questions are enough to learn about the employee experience and fast for employees and leaders to answer them on a regular basis, maintaining a current understanding of EX. According to neuroscience, the most important areas to measure are the 9 drivers of engagement below.

 
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9 drivers of engagement

  • Clarity
    High clarity means teams feel predictability about their work, understand expectations, and know what will happen in the short- and long term
  • Efficiency
    Efficiency means feeling that you have the practical knowledge, resources, support, and technical aids needed to perform your tasks well. Sometimes, the conditions are already in place in the organization, but the employees may be unaware of them or feel they are not accessible.
  • Inclusion
    It is essential for everyone to feel involved and respected in a team and that there is an inclusive treatment and conversation climate.
  • Enthusiasm
    Enthusiasm means feeling joyful about work and the workplace. Enthusiasm can compensate for more demanding periods when the workload is heavier or tasks that are less stimulating.
  • Recognition
    Recognition is the feeling of being appreciated by others for great work efforts. Appreciation results in so-called positive reinforcement, which means individuals and teams want to do more of and repeat the good efforts.
  • Value
    Measuring value means that we are expected—and have the opportunity—to prioritize the most important activities (“80 / 20 rule”) and have a common understanding of what is most important to spend time on right now.
  • Autonomy
    Having the authority and freedom to take own initiatives and pursue these within the framework of what is considered reasonable or necessary to achieve expectations and goals. Autonomy means that you are in control and can direct your situation – not that you are left on your own.
  • Development
    Tasks are instructive and interesting – and seeing an opportunity for continued development. A feeling of learning in the present and predictability around one’s future development drives increased motivation. Development can take place in different ways, for example: (1) specialization/deepening within the same role/area of knowledge, (2) broadening into new areas of knowledge, (3) extended leadership responsibility over other individuals.
  • Balance
    A way of working and a workload that is sustainable in the long term, i.e., a situation where employees have a stress level that is optimal for performance and good conditions for handling periods when there is a lot to do. The optimum is not a low workload with excess time but a balanced situation. According to the latest research, feeling “a little stressed” is positive for the individual to perform.
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The standard CatalystOne Engage survey covers all these areas. With our powerful analytics tool, the answers to these questions are combined with HR master data and paint an accurate picture that is easy to act on.

Organizations should prioritize employee experience for several reasons. One prime reason is to make sure their CX team feels empowered to deal with increasingly complex customer issues, from shipping delays to unprecedented supply chain issues.

 
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The standard CatalystOne Engage survey covers all these areas. With our powerful analytics tool, the answers to these questions are combined with HR master data and paint an accurate picture that is easy to act on.

Organizations should prioritize employee experience for several reasons. One prime reason is to make sure their CX team feels empowered to deal with increasingly complex customer issues, from shipping delays to unprecedented supply chain issues.

 

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