Anyone who led a company during 2020 had to shift their strategies to support employees during the pandemic. Therefore, the workplace that we used to know has undergone a significant revolution. Since then, we have found that employee experience (or EX) statistics has tripled throughout December 2019 and July 2022. However, 61% of businesses still only have either a basic or undefined employee experience strategy. What might be the cause of this result? Not knowing where to start may be the reason.
Many companies are facing employees who are exhausted and overwhelmed, questioning what work means, and thinking through their options. Research has shown that people who report having a positive employee experience have 16 times the engagement level of employees with negative experience, and that they are eight times more likely to want to stay at the company. In this blog, we will cover the foundational steps to planning your strategy in order to improve employee experience to help retain excitement (and talent) and maintain a competitive edge.
In this blog you will find:
The Importance of Employee Experience
6 Steps to Creating a Successful Employee Experience (EX) Strategy
No 1. Understanding the Context
No 2. Prioritizing Cross-Functional Relationships
No 4. Define Roles Across the Organization
No 5. Do the Research and Make it a Habit
Start Building your Employee Experience Now!
The Importance of Employee Experience
Employee experience has changed its meaning during the pandemic. Nowadays, organizations have put the holistic experience of employees at the center of their decision-making. An employee experience strategy means evaluating every step of employees’ journey. These crucial moments are evaluated and designed in a way that fits employees’ beliefs, preferences, needs, and motivations. As a result, the HR trend is to make employee experience as the responsibility of the entire organization, rather than a particular business practice. The chart below shows the evolution of employee experience.
It's more than just an Experience.
Employee experience is a series of actions, techniques and strategies which help employees create deeper connections with their work, their colleagues, and the organization itself. As a result, this fosters a sense of belonging. This, in return, helps improve company-wide performance and productivity. When people feel better at work, they do a better job.
Employee experience isn’t the same as employee engagement. Where employee engagement is designed to change behavior, employee experience is designed to change culture. A focus on employee experience is a requirement for organizations that want to compete in today’s talent market. Employees gravitate to organizations that are designing work not just for them, but also with them.
6 Steps to Creating a Successful Employee Experience (EX) Strategy
Every organization is unique in structure, culture, and problem solving. So, there isn’t one plan that fits all when it comes to an employee experience strategy. Organizations must fully understand their unique issues before thinking about the solutions an employee experience strategy can solve. That’s why we’re here to help. Here are 6 steps to get started:
No 1. Understanding the Context 💭
In order to set up an employee experience strategy, there is a significant change that must be made in how most organizations run. By this we mean that the various functions, such as HR, Communications, IT, Finance, etc. are siloed from each other by design. As a result, many organizations are not set up towards success.
There are two main obstacles that these organizations face:
- Not doing the deep internal research about your employee’s pain points - from onboarding and throughout their tenure at the organization until they leave.
- Understanding that employee experience doesn’t have a single owner. Instead, it must be a joint effort across all functions in the C-suite.
No 2. Prioritizing Cross-Functional Relationship 🤝🏽
After understanding the context, it’s clear that solving employee experience is a joint effort for all teams! This is not just an HR responsibility. It is important to start developing cross-functional relationships and build empathy with employees before coming together to discuss employee experience.
No 3. Create a mindset Shift 🧠
For employee experience to function properly, an organizational shift must occur. When it comes to solving employees’ problems, organizations mostly think about tactical processes and software. Instead, they need to shift to thinking about managing experiences that span into multiple departments, systems, and locations.
For example, how does your organization interact with employees during their tenure? In most cases, it looks like the following:
- HR is responsible for recruitment & legal paperwork
- Payroll handles compensation logistics
- IT takes care of setting up phones and laptops
- Facilities provides badges and access
- Line manager welcomes them to the role.
The result for new hires is that they will provide their same information numerous times over different systems, creating a disjointed and complicated experience.
An employee experience strategy solves this by centering around the employee, looking at the process as a whole and then offering a solution that spans multiple departments.
No 4. Define roles across the organization 🌐
In every organization, roles need to be clearly defined in order for a dedicated employee experience team to be put in place. It’s also important that incentives are in place to reward cross-functional work on employee experience. Everyone needs to believe in it. Let us break down each role for you.
The Role of HR
HR leaders are responsible for bringing the right teams to the table, prioritizing focus areas, and designing the overall program and policies for the duration of the employee lifecycle.
The Role of Communications
One of the biggest risks while establishing community within an organization is miscommunication. Communications’ critical role is to create and manage the channels that enable the right information to flow freely to everyone and allow the community to flourish. This takes more than email. It will require investment and innovation so that employees can hold conversations, discover ideas, share their interests and more.
The Role of IT
IT plays a key role in employee experience by enabling experiences through removing barriers and providing technology which enables an organization's goals. IT leaders support business goals through building connections, listening, and enabling the workforce.
The Role of Leadership
Leadership can make or break employee experience by loudly and publicly endorsing it as a business priority. CEOs need to embody new ways of working, building empathy and working cross-functionally that exemplifies the values they want to instill across the organization.
No 5. Do the research and make it a habit 👩🔬
Once roles have been defined, then the research starts. We approach employee experience by focusing on Design Thinking. What is design thinking? It is a cycle of continuous improvement that starts with empathy and ends with testing and implementation — followed by more design thinking, it’s a process of continuous iteration.
Applying this approach to employee experience looks like:
Empathize
First you need to learn all about your employees. There’s a whole toolkit to do this. From surveys to focus groups, but also key is direct observational research. This is literally sitting down with your employees and watching them do their jobs.
Define
Once the problems facing employees are clear, you should also be able to determine what exactly is needed to fix this.
Ideation
You’ll need to bring stakeholders together for a working session to come up with the solutions.
Prototype
Start building the solutions. The idea at this phase is to start small, and trial the solution that’s fastest to implement.
Test
Did it work? No, keep at it.
Once implemented, then the testing starts by measuring, getting feedback and iterating.
No 6. Measure the Success 📈
The evidence shows that having an employee experience strategy is key to improving employee productivity, retention, and engagement. However, because employee experience has multiple touchpoints, you’ll have to measure each specific effort unique to your organization, before refining it and then starting the process again. Feedback must become a habit, creating a constant cycle of improvement and iteration.
Start building your employee experience now!
It’s never too late to get started on prioritizing employee experience in your organization. Your employee experience strategy must be based on paying attention to your employees - listening, observing, and getting actionable insights that will inform you what you need to do.
With Workplace from Meta, your organization can help you build your internal communication to help jumpstart your employee experience strategy. Learn more about how Workplace can help you do this by contacting us today!
Let us know how your organization builds a successful employee experience (EX) strategy in the comments below!
Not using Workplace yet?
Want to see how Workplace could take your internal communications strategy to the next digital level and help you to reach everyone across your organization in a more efficient and effective manner? Give us a shout! Through a live demo of the Workplace platform, we’ll help you to brainstorm ideas on how to utilize Workplace to achieve your organization’s goals and objectives around internal communications.
Already Using Workplace?
If you’d like to explore more opportunities to learn how to use Workplace to improve your internal communications strategy and be part of the corporate Metaverse, we’d love to chat! Give us a call if you want to learn how to use Workplace to enhance employee interaction and engagement.
Comments