Pro Tips to Enhance Your Employee Experience Strategy
Want to build an employee experience strategy primed for success? Check out this blog for pro tips.
Forward-thinking businesses worldwide are experimenting with varied employee experience strategies to empower their workforce. Gallup's State of the American Workplace highlights several benefits of this, including enhanced employee engagement, top-performing employee retention, and creating a positive organizational culture with a boost in worker productivity.
Do you want to enhance your employee experience strategy for success?
This blog shares actionable tips for elevating your employee experience strategy and unlocking your team's full potential in the current business landscape.
Employee Experience: What you need to know
Employee experience refers to an employee's overall journey and interactions with their employer across every touchpoint throughout the employment lifecycle. Jacob Morgan’s book, "The Employee Experience Advantage," explains its three essential components: physical environment, technology, and culture. Focusing on each of these holistically is crucial to ensuring optimized employee experiences.
Lately, there’s been a shift in the business realm. Post-pandemic, hybrid work has become popular. This has sharply altered the working environment, relevant technology, and culture. The resulting transition demands revisiting employee experience strategies to introduce appropriate interventions for staying relevant.
What you need to include in an employee experience strategy
A successful employee experience strategy requires focusing on several correlated aspects concerning enhancing the environment, technology, and organizational culture of individuals in an organization. These include:
- Communication plan: Poor or insecure communication creates new hurdles, work-related difficulties, and misunderstandings, negatively impacting employee experience. Therefore, prioritize secure, transparent, two-way communication channels to clearly inform employees about company updates, changes, and plans.
- Feedback and recognition: Recognition - formal or informal, makes employees feel valued, fosters a positive environment, and motivates them to perform their best. So, ensure you recognize and reward good performance. Provide polite yet constructive feedback to those needed.
- Professional development opportunities: Learning new skills strongly drives employee satisfaction and engagement, boosting productivity and improving skillset. Therefore, enhance employee experience by supporting employees with learning opportunities and providing mentorship and training.
- Well-being initiatives: Mental health issues are widespread, impacting 15% of working-age adults. This results in poor well-being and a distorted employee experience. So, implement well-being initiatives such as intervention programs and awareness campaigns. Provide access to professional help to those who need it to improve their working experience.
- Technology support: Legacy workflows affect productivity and an employee’s satisfaction with the working environment. Ensure you choose easy-to-use technological solutions to streamline processes and remove redundancies. The technology should be accessible for both your in-office and frontline workforce, overcome language barriers, and simplify work for your team.
Using comprehensive tech platforms, such as an employee experience platform, is an efficient way to implement and address these varied aspects from a unified interface.
How to integrate tech platforms into your strategy
Integrating a new tech platform, such as an employee experience software, into your workflow can feel challenging, especially when employees aren’t used to modern tools. Here's how you can go about this successfully:
- Define your objectives and requirements: Start by identifying existing processes and gaps and filling these gaps with tools that further improve employee experience. For example, note if your frontline workers aren’t tech-savvy enough to use complex tools.
- Choose the right tech platforms: Only 27% of companies choose software tools that meet their expectations or needs. This highlights your need to go deeper in selecting context-dependent software platforms. Using the same example as above, if your frontline isn’t comfortable using a desktop, you need to use a platform that works on mobile.
- Make training and support accessible for employees: When introducing new tools, ensure you give your employees enough time and learning resources. This is often needed for them to become comfortable and proficient with using the latest technologies. Rushing at this stage will negatively impact the experience and the outcome.
- Measure success and impact: Set up metrics and regularly monitor the right KPIs to see how you’re doing with your technology implementation. This will help you iterate and succeed.
While suitable technology combines varied aspects to enhance an employee experience, leadership plays a distinct role, too.
The role of leadership in shaping employee experience
Leaders are the guiding force of any organization and set its cultural tone. When leaders inspire, listen to employees’ voices and concerns, and lead by example, they positively shape the employee experience. Therefore, leaders with such a mindset significantly boost employee well-being, satisfaction, and understanding.
If you’re an HR professional or manager working on employee experience initiatives, getting your leaders’ buy-in is the way to go when working on improving your EX outcomes. If you get that, leaders will endorse your initiatives verbally, allocate resources, actively participate in them, and promote them through their actions. Furthermore, they will also serve as role models to your employees in fostering a positive company culture. This is known as behavior modeling and can bring excellent results out of your employee experience strategy.
While employees look up to decision-makers as role models, they also have their individualities. Catering to that requires personalizing the employee experience.
Personalizing the Employee Journey
When you aim to create an excellent employee experience, it helps to remember that every individual is unique. Just like all other individuals, employees have an innate desire to feel unique and valued. If you cultivate this feeling, you can boost the employee experience significantly. This requires customizing and personalizing employee experiences throughout the lifecycle, from onboarding and development to offboarding. To implement, you’ll need to know your employees, their desires and concerns, and tailor experiences to align with them. This necessitates a mechanism for regularly collecting employee data and feedback. You’ll also need to find a way to integrate your findings into implementing the employee experience strategy.
Basic-Fit understood the importance of making every individual, regardless of their identity, feel included, represented, and heard. In response, they made small interventions that proved super effective in boosting employee experiences. For instance, one of their steps included adding a pronouns feature to their internal employee communications platform, Orange Connect. This allowed their employees without a company email address, such as frontline workers, to easily indicate their preferred pronouns in their profile and be addressed respectfully. People felt recognized, seen, and respected for who they were. This helped make their employee experience more customized and inclusive.
Overcoming Challenges in Implementing an Employee Experience Strategy
As with any strategy, enhancing employee experience can come with its challenges. There may be skill gaps in employees when implementing modern methods. Employees can be reluctant to evolve from legacy processes, even if it means things get better for them. Investing in tools results in additional business expenditures, which budgets may not allow or leadership may not agree to. Departments may be working in silos, hampering the implementation of a holistic employee experience strategy.
To overcome these challenges and teething troubles,
- Involve employees in developing and refining your employee experience strategy to get their buy-in.
- Actively promote diversity and inclusion initiatives within the workplace. When formulating employee experience strategies, consider the needs of different groups to create an amicable environment.
- Upskill all employees in the primary use of the latest technologies and methods and create a level playing field.
- When formulating strategies, personalize them to your organization's unique needs before approaching leadership. This will help you make a stronger case and get budgets approved.
- Implement regular performance feedback mechanisms, moving beyond annual reviews to identify gaps and prioritize continuous improvement.
- Choose an EXP solution to streamline varied aspects of a successful employee experience strategy in budget across the organization efficiently.
Bottom Line: Step up your Employee Experience Strategy to Thrive
We live in a fast-paced era of remote work, digital transformations, and dynamic market demands. This environment requires pivoting from traditional approaches to employee engagement towards optimizing holistic employee experiences. This is essential to building high-performing teams and thriving. Implementing a comprehensive employee experience strategy is simple if you use a powerful EXP tailored to your organizational needs.
Want Insights and Best Practices from the Employee Experience Platform ‘Super Users’?
Speakap offers a robust employee experience platform to improve communication and facilitate better onboarding and learning experiences. It enables easy task management and feedback collection to improve productivity, coordination, and engagement while supporting personalization.