5 Crucial Steps to Building an Employee Experience Program
April 27, 2021
Employee Experience
Effective employee experience programs can set your entire company up for success. Here are five crucial strategies for building one that works for your organization.
Nearly 80% of leaders recognize the importance of employee experience. The problem is only 22% self-rate their own employee experience programs as excellent, according to a survey conducted by Deloitte. On top of that, a majority of these survey respondents report feeling unprepared or only somewhat prepared to address their company’s employee experience challenges.
Employee experience programs can fall short of their true potential when employers only check in on their employees on an infrequent basis (say, via annual surveys), don’t take direct action based on employee insights, don’t remove top barriers to staff performance, and aren’t transparent about the next steps leadership members plan to take.
Effective employee experience programs, however, can help HR professionals prepare for the next big shift in employee expectations and needs, in the moments that matter the most. And at the company level as a whole, when employers prioritize improving the employee experience and fully support and invest in employee experience initiatives, the company and workforce both stand to benefit — in the form of lower turnover, greater productivity, stronger employee engagement, higher profits, and happier customers. In fact, MIT researchers found that companies that excel at employee experience achieve two times the innovation, two times the customer satisfaction, and 25% greater profits than organizations with poor employee experiences.
How to maximize ROI on employee experience programs
On average, companies are investing $2,420 per worker on improving employee experience. But, with only 13% of employees feeling “fully satisfied” with their experience, there’s a great opportunity for improvement to maximize the return on investment.
Being responsive to your employees’ needs requires continuously meeting your team where they are, in the flow of work. You can activate the untapped power of your people to improve every area of your business by taking these five steps.
#1 Capture employee signals: Solicit direct feedback from your employees through always-on, triggered, pulse surveys, and crowdsourcing. Additionally, capture indirect feedback and observed behavior, from anonymized experience data points like chatbot transcripts, helpdesk tickets, PTO patterns, and performance reviews. Combine insights from the two to form a clear picture of the employee experience at your organization.
#2 Use AI to hone your efforts: With the help of AI tools, you can review millions (or even billions) of these structured and unstructured data points to surface patterns and trends. Then, you can pinpoint issues and recurring themes as they’re happening in real time.
#3 Set up alerts: Put workflows in place to ensure actionable information reaches the right stakeholders. Alerts can also empower teams to resolve issues and close the loop with impacted employees more quickly.
#4 Take action based on employee feedback: A majority of employees (64%) say their company rarely acts on their feedback. The lack of company action can lead to poor employee engagement, with only 21% of employees considering themselves “very engaged” at work. You can build data-driven strategies to respond to employee feedback in strategic ways that will increase employee satisfaction, improve retention, and bolster your company culture.
#5 Communicate the actions you take: Employees need to know what action you’ve taken based on their feedback. Communicate those actions back to your employees via all-hands meetings, company newsletters, and employee portals. When employees are fully clued into how you listen to them — and how you act on their feedback — engagement enjoys a boost.
A recipe for success — now and in the future
When it’s up to you and your team to stay ahead of the trend, ready for whatever’s coming, you need a comprehensive employee experience strategy that enables you to continuously listen, understand, and respond to your people. After all, they are your best source of creative solutions and innovative ideas that can vastly improve how your company operates. You are also creating a workforce that feels empowered, entrusted, and connected to a higher purpose.
Companies set up with the tools, resources, and initiatives in place to take these steps stand to gain a competitive advantage and be best positioned to meet the greatest demands and most pressing challenges of this moment, and the next. And, that’s a winning recipe for maximizing ROI, now and in the future.
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