Why you should focus on employee experience

Employee experience has rapidly become a top priority in the HR world. Where once the focus was on employee engagement – making employees happy but from a top-down perspective nurturing a ‘culture-fit’ environment, now employers are clued up that for their people to be truly happy they need to reverse this thinking.

Positive employee experience is about listening to and adapting for employees and, instead, nurturing a ‘culture growth’ environment. Ultimately, everything and everyone in the workplace impacts the overall employee experience, which is why bumping it to the top of the list could revolutionise your organisation.

Here are 5 compelling reasons to do just that:

1. You’ll make lighter work of addressing talent shortages

Building a positive employee experience strategy across the organisation will help boost your company reputation and brand with new recruits, many of whom will actively research your company and may even look at comments from current employees on sites such as Glassdoor or via social media. In the modern working world, employees have much more choice and can afford to be selective. Most job seekers specifically look for organisations that show they care about things such as their workforces’ health and wellbeing and are willing to invest in their professional development.

2. You’ll boost both engagement and productivity

Engagement has a direct impact on employee productivity, and both are now considered as important outcomes of the wider employee experience equation. When employees are happier and have their individual needs met, which can include clarity and purpose at work, autonomy, work-life balance and a sense of belonging, they are much more likely to put additional effort into their work. This can also be bolstered by driving organisational agility and giving employees the tools they need to succeed in their roles that make life easier, such as self-service HR.

3. You’ll cater better to the changing expectations of Millennials

A major contributor to the rise and relevance of employee experience is the growing representation of Millennials in the workplace. The presence and expectations of this generation group have required organisations to fundamentally redefine their structure and purpose. This will become even more imperative in future since a Deloitte study predicted that Millennials will comprise 75% of the global workforce by 2025. More experience-seeking Millennials in the workplace means that a shift to experience-centric organisations is needed to attract, retain, and engage this prominent age group.

4. You’ll significantly reduce employee turnover

The well-worn phrase of ‘the war for talent’ still applies more than ever as organisations seek to retain their greatest assets. When employers are committed to providing an engaging, transparent, collaborative and high-trust employee experience that is tailored to each individual’s needs, they’re in a much better position to do this over the long-term. Contributing factors to this may also include your onboarding processes and how you prioritise reward and recognition. These things can make a significant difference to an employee’s desire to stay and their perception of the workplace culture.

5. You’ll benefit from increased customer satisfaction and higher profits

Employee experience is no longer viewed as a ‘nice-to-have’ initiative with no measurable returns. According to a Global Human Capital Trends report, organisations with a top-quartile employee experience achieve twice the innovation, double the customer satisfaction, and 25% higher profits than organisations with a bottom-quartile employee experience. This speaks volumes in there being a clear relationship between employee satisfaction and financial success. Happy employees are more likely to provide a stellar customer service, with a knock-on effect on loyalty and brand promotion and finally, leading to higher profits. It really is a win-win situation.

How HR Technology can support you

If HR is to proactively manage employee experience across the organisation, it means looking more closely at all sorts of day-to-day interactions and putting measures in place using insights from your people data that boost positivity and successful outcomes from an employee perspective (as well as a company one). Consider running pulse surveys through an HR system to find out current employee viewpoints on the things that affect their regular activities at work and influence how they feel about the workplace. There are also a multitude of ways to utilise HR technology in every stage of the employee experience to create a heightened sense of value and belonging, from onboarding and training right through to reward and recognition.

There are no quick fixes when it comes to addressing and improving employee experience, but like anything that takes real and sustained effort, getting it right can bring substantial benefits. For your organisation that could mean improved customer experience, enhanced productivity, easier recruitment and retention of talent – and that’s just the start.

For further insights on creating a better employee experience for your workforce based on the new normal, download our new HR guide.