What is employee experience?

Employee experience, or employee experience, summarizes what people experience during their employment with an organization. Every company invests in the customer experience. And as organizations increasingly see their employees as their greatest asset, they are also investing in employee experiences. Employee experience refers to an employee’s perception of their journey along all touch points of an organization; from the day they apply for a position to leaving the organization and even beyond

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Advantages of a positive employee experience

A positive employee experience has several benefits, all of which are related to employee satisfaction. A positive employee experience results in a stronger market position for the organization and better financial results. Consider the following, among others:

• • Better customer relations
    Many experts believe that customer satisfaction is a direct result of the employee experience. Happy employees often have a better mood and convey positive emotions while interacting with customers. They are also more interested in the product and service they provide, which makes them more supportive of customers.

• • Involved and more productive employees
    Involved employees are more productive, work safer and stay longer.

• • Lower absenteeism
    Unhappy employees are more likely to be absent from work, negatively impacting morale, productivity and financial results. Happy employees have lower absenteeism.

• • Higher quality of work
    Research shows that happiness has more influence on job success than IQ and other skills. For example, a “happy” brain sees more opportunities and is more creative.

• • More effective recruitment
    Employees with positive experiences are more likely to promote the company as a great place to work. This results in more referrals for open positions and higher occupancy rates, as most job seekers are easily influenced by perceptions of employees’ work experience and company culture.

How do you create a good employee experience?

An employee experience is not a one-time thing. Companies known for a good employee branding experience have a mission, a business strategy and clear values. So do good working conditions and an environment with trust and respect between employees and their managers in which even negative feedback is encouraged. This encourages honest feedback from employees that managers then use to make improvements

A number of steps you can take

Make staff retention a priority; make sure you retain talented employees and reduce turnover. High turnover leads to loss of crucial knowledge and damage to continuity. As a management team, work to create a positive work environment. Provide competitive benefits and encourage a healthy work/life balance

• • Value differences and seek alternatives
    Make use of diverse knowledge and skills to create creative problem solutions. People with different experiences and perspectives come together and brainstorm new ideas for a realistic problem.

• • Map the employee journey
    An employee journey map is an important tool for understanding the employee experience throughout an employee’s life cycle. The journey map can be a high-level overall view of the employee experience; from recruitment to training to final offboarding. You can track an employee’s onboarding experience, career development opportunities and other key moments and then use the map to identify key areas for improvement and develop new strategies based on data from employee feedback and surveys.

• • Recognize the importance of the candidate experience
    Candidate experience is a job seeker’s perception of an organization’s recruiting and hiring process. Creating a positive candidate experience should be part of the overall employee experience strategy

    Candidate experience can have a direct effect on the pipeline and talent retention. A bad experience will deter a potentially ideal candidate from applying again, and a current employee who was treated poorly is more likely to take another job if the opportunity arises. Read about the importance of a well-thought-out candidate journey in our article on the 6 steps of the candidate journey in the knowledge base.

• • Improve onboarding tools and processes
    Onboarding is the process of integrating a new employee into the company. Few companies can afford to lose employees due to a poor onboarding experience, and yet it happens all the time. Onboarding is one of the most important aspects of the employee experience because it lays the foundation for job satisfaction and employee retention

    When onboarding is done well, new employees begin their jobs feeling positive about the company. They should get an accurate picture of what the job entails, adjust to the company culture and become productive within an efficient schedule. A new employee is more likely to drop out if the onboarding experience is poor. ENBOQ brings your company story to life and makes onboarding a fun experience.

• • Request feedback
    Surveys are very useful when managers take action based on the information they provide. Make them simple so the employee can give feedback quickly. Some sample questions are:
    How challenging is your job
    What are some challenges you are currently facing
    How much do you recommend the product we make?

• • Track Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)
    Like NPS, Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) consists of a survey with two questions. The first question asks employees to indicate on a scale of zero to 10 how likely they would be to recommend the organization as a place to work. The second question is an open-ended question that asks why they chose the rating they did. eNPS is an important method for portraying the employee experience because it is easy to use and interpret and can show trends.

• • Implement team bonding tools
    Collaboration tools can help improve communication between employees, regardless of the department they work in or the area they are in. Typically, employees in different locations around the world struggle to set up convenient times for meetings and conversations. But with today’s communication tools, employees can easily connect, chat and collaborate.

The future of the employee experience

While HR professionals struggle with how to develop an effective employee experience strategy, the COVID-19 pandemic that has redefined the nature of work almost overnight. Remote work has become the new normal. For millions of workers, the employee experience now takes place at home

Employee experience versus employee involvement

The difference between employee experience and employee engagement lies in the difference between experience and engagement. Simply put, employee experience is holistic and includes everything an employee thinks, feels and sees. In contrast, employee engagement refers to how positively engaged or committed an employee is to work

Employee experience is the input a company gives to get better engagement. Employee engagement is the result of the overall experience and is more specifically associated with productivity

Employee engagement — versus employee experience — is often associated with a focus on technology tools or perks such as free food. These types of factors may be part of an employee experience strategy, but they do not replace a holistic and long-term approach with the goal of creating happy, loyal and productive employees. Discover ENBOQ’s solutions such as onboarding program, assessments and gamification combined with E-learning