Attracting and retaining good employees are generally big challenges for companies. Add the effects of the Great Reopening and you have yourself a full–blown competition for talent. What can you do if you want to come on top? The answer is simple - invest in your employee’s experience.
Let’s explore together how investing and improving employee experience influences other key points in your organization, particularly employee engagement and employer branding. 
The ultimate trio: employee experience, employee engagement and employer branding
Anyone in the HR or Operations business has probably been hit with these buzzwords before. It’s no longer enough to send a yearly survey and hope for the best. But at the end of the day, how many of us really make a priority of these concepts? How many of us are prepared to tackle the main issue and reap the rewards?
The main issue is, you guessed it, investing in your employees and their experiences. We’re very aware that companies are working with finite resources and it’s all about setting priorities. However, employee experience is at the core of any company and shouldn’t be overlooked. And it’s not just good for cutting costs. Happier employees have a proven effect on improved customer service and an overall increase in work performance and productivity. For this blog, we’ll focus on how employee experience goes hand in hand with employee engagement and employer branding.
Employee engagement
At its core, employee engagement is the psychological investment an employee is willing to give to a task, team, or company. Even though this subjective commitment cannot be controlled by an external source, managers can instill certain feelings into their employees through an employee experience strategy.
You can set a strategy and key actions that can result in a positive, engaging experience for your employees.
The happier and more engaged your employees are, the less likely they are to leave. Sure, there might be other personal reasons for them to leave, but those differ per person and aren’t always clear. We’ll focus here on how to turn a disengaged workforce, feeling disconnected from the company and their work, into an engaged, productive team.
- Improve your communication and collaboration
- Create a culture of giving and receiving feedback and acting accordingly
- Foster a supportive environment
- Recognize and reward
- Invest in employee wellness
Employer branding
Having a strong employer brand means maintaining an authentic, positive position and image in the view of (potential) employees. But what does the experience of your existing employees have to do with your ability to attract new workers? A lot, and it’s not just about your reputation.
Investing in employee experience translates into living up to your reputation. We all like to list attractive attributes of our company’s culture, but once a candidate becomes an employee, the real dance begins. Their experience from the first day of onboarding to their last day (which should include an exit interview but that’s a story for another time) can be influenced by management and will in turn reflect on you as an employer.
When attracting talent, good employee experiences will make you stand out from the crowd. With the rise of online job boards and fora, job seekers have access to much more information about your company than any official information that you put out. After reading the vision, mission and values, the next stop for any candidate would be the reviews from past or existing employees.
Do they feel empowered in their work? Is there a feedback culture? Are they overworked and underappreciated? This will all be on display in those reviews. In order to shape the perception of your employees and boost your brand as an employer, you need to take into account their personal experiences and develop an action plan.
Creating a positive work experience for your employees might also reflect in their willingness to become ambassadors for the company and offer employee referrals and recommendations to their network to join your company. Combine it with a reward system for referrals and you got yourself a win-win situation for both your employees and you as an employer.
No matter which areas of employee experience you invest in, it all adds up. As investments in employee experience go up, so does the perception of employees of the company. But the biggest bang for your buck comes from the biggest employee experience multiplier: internal tools for communication. Per Forbes: A proper strategy for internal communications should do several things: Apart from keeping your employees abreast of the general status of a company, it should also serve to facilitate connections between employees of all stripes, from all divisions. This will help employees feel more connected to the organization, which will, in turn, make them better external advocates for the company as a whole. If you put emphasis on improving how employees communicate, you’re already ahead of the game.
Design your employee experience strategy with Speakap
The thought of creating one strategy that accommodates all employees is overwhelming, even for the most experienced manager. People are unique and constantly changing, and their experience in the workplace is super personal. Not to mention, the job market is providing fresh challenges every day and employers are struggling to find workers. However, there are some tools out there that can make your life easier.
This is the part where we self-promote, but only because this problem is right in our wheelhouse to solve. For more than 500 companies worldwide, having an employee app that allows for top-down and bottom-up communications gives you clarity on what’s happening at the frontlines and involves the frontline in what’s happening on a corporate level. The result is decreased cost and increased revenue. Sounds like a dream, right? It’s not. And we’ve got the proof.
Don’t just take our word for it. Check out some of the big names that understood the needs of their frontline employees and chose our solution. Your problems are not solved overnight with a tool. But with our employee hub you can take a first step to creating a fully customizable solution that makes creating the best employee experience easier than ever.