An effective employee experience strategy is tailored to meet your organization’s unique needs. However, there are a few core principles that you should keep in mind when developing your strategy:
Start by reviewing your employee feedback to understand what employees are concerned about and the aspects of your workplace culture they value. Make improvements in these areas, and measure engagement metrics before and after to see if your efforts have been successful.
Understand Your Employees
A successful employee experience strategy is about understanding your employees and their needs. Doing this allows you to design an experience to help them meet their goals and succeed. This can include a wide range of things, from the physical work environment to the culture and policies of your organization.
For example, a study found that living wages and affordable healthcare are employees’ top concerns. Addressing these needs can encourage employees to stay with your company and contribute to its success.
Additionally, creating a culture of fluid communication can reduce the risk that employees will leave for another opportunity because they feel their voice is not heard.
To understand your employees, start by looking at their journey with your company. This includes the initial attraction stage (receiving an offer letter), onboarding, performance reviews, and more.
During each of these stages, consider how your employee experience can be improved and make sure there is congruence between the values your company stands for and the experiences that employees have.
To learn more about your employees’ concerns, use a tool to conduct anonymous employee surveys. You can also incorporate our out-of-the-box Q&A Board feature to allow employees to ask questions and receive answers from leadership directly. This will enable you to understand what’s on your employees’ minds and create a strategy addressing those concerns.
Identify Your Goals
Employee experience is the sum of everything that employees confront, observe, hear about, read, and feel daily in their relationship with their company. It encompasses the relationships with supervisors, colleagues, and managers, the culture and way of working, programs and events, leadership, and technology. It also includes the perks, benefits, and policies that support the employee experience.
To develop a compelling employee experience strategy, identify key moments that matter to your people. These can be uncovered through an employee experience survey and should align with your company’s fundamental values. You can then prioritize and amplify those moments to ensure that your people are experiencing the best possible version of your brand.
In addition, a compelling employee experience strategy must prioritize empathy and the overall well-being of your people. This includes ensuring that your people have access to living wages, affordable healthcare, and retirement readiness and providing them with opportunities for professional growth and development. Moreover, it should prioritize creating a positive physical work environment.
Lastly, employee experience strategy must include clear communication and feedback from top management, including setting expectations for the organization’s performance.
In doing so, leaders can show that they care about their employees and are devoted to the business’s success. This will help foster a healthy work culture and high employee engagement, leading to higher productivity, lower absenteeism and turnover, and increased revenue.
Create a Plan
From the initial attraction phase through the final day of employment, an employee experience strategy shapes everything workers learn, do, see, and feel about your company. By focusing on the make-it-or-break-it moments that impact your employees, you can develop a plan to improve and amplify those experiences.
One of the most effective employee experience strategies involves creating a journey map with your team members. This involves identifying employee personas and mapping out the touchpoints they encounter throughout their work life at your organization, gathering feedback on those experiences, noting areas for improvement, and soliciting ideas from your employees to implement those improvements.
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This approach calls for strong empathy and requires your employees to regularly meet with you and other departmental leaders to discuss their concerns and questions.
Another popular method is design thinking, an iterative process that brings together employees from various backgrounds and departments to solve a problem that affects them all. This approach to employee experience calls for everyone who affects the employee experience to be at the table, including HR, facilities management, IT, and corporate leadership.
Lastly, an essential component of an employee experience strategy is to ensure that your employees understand and buy into your company’s values and vision for the future. A great way to do this is by offering opportunities for professional development, connecting their current work with future success at your company, and providing health and wellness benefits that address their physical and mental well-being.
Measure Your Success
While implementing an employee experience strategy, tracking the impact of these changes is essential. This can be done through various methods, including surveys, meetings, and data analysis. However, the best way to ensure your employees receive the full benefits of your EX program is to make it a regular practice to monitor employee feedback and assess performance.
An effective EX strategy includes a variety of metrics that allow you to track employee satisfaction, retention, and engagement at a granular level. This helps HR and people ops professionals understand what drives engagement, satisfaction, and retention to help them create more effective programs for their teams.
The most commonly used metric is the employee net promoter score (NPS), which measures how likely employees are to recommend your company to others. By analyzing your NPS results, you can identify the drivers of your employees’ positive sentiments and work on improving those areas that aren’t as strong.
Creating staff personas and profiles based on similar employees’ shared characteristics, attitudes, behaviors, and needs. For example, the driven achiever may prefer more challenging projects, opportunities for growth and development, regular feedback, and a healthy workplace culture.
By developing an employee experience strategy that incorporates the needs of each team, you can see a direct return on investment in the form of happier and more productive employees.
