Employee experience management

How do you cultivate and foster employee experience (EX) within your company? Create programs around employee experience management.

The employee experience encompasses everything an employee learns, does, feels, sees, and contributes—from the time they see your job posting until they depart your company. It includes cultural experiences, interactions with coworkers and leadership, as well as their workspace and technology.

Employee experience creates tangible impacts on your company’s culture and business outcomes. Employee performance and productivity, as well as your company’s profitability, are all influenced by EX. The most critical benefits of good EX are:

If an employee has a positive EX, they will perform their job duties with increased ease and effectiveness. This leads to job satisfaction and increased motivation, all of which benefits your business.

Job seekers are looking for meaningful work and positive, diverse work culture. They often check out your company on review sites and discussion apps. Prospective employees are interesting in finding out about your diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) initiatives, benefits, company culture, technology, and other EX components.

The employee experience is directly related to retention of the people working for your company. Check out this guide from Momentive, the maker of SurveyMonkey, for information on how to attract and maintain employees with feedback.

When your employees are engaged, they’re likely to do their best work and that can reflect on your customers. For example, you may have a customer advocacy team that is always championing your customers. Or, a customer support team that has incredible response rates. Highly engaged employees equal greater customer satisfaction. 

According to a 2020 survey of CX and EX leaders conducted by Salesforce, businesses that prioritize EX to deliver a premium CX achieved 1.8-times faster revenue growth. 

Since employee experience includes every touchpoint an employee has with a company from recruiting to exiting, employee experience management is the act of influencing each touchpoint to ensure positive experiences. 

A variety of things make up EX and therefore different tools can be used to measure the experience employees are having. Employee experience is driven by:

Employee experience management examines employee experience through the lens of each of these factors and makes small changes to the components to improve employee experience overall and workplace culture.

The five key touchpoints for monitoring and improving employee experience are:

In order to improve employee experience, you’ll need to monitor feedback throughout the employee journey.

We’ve discussed the importance of employee engagement for a company. It’s best practice to conduct an employee engagement survey on an annual basis. Take note of factors that are related to employee experience and act on them to make improvements. 

Periodic pulse surveys are short, focused surveys to assess the success of your EX efforts. Given at a frequency of your choosing, these surveys allow you to make tweaks to your EX management plan to improve its effectiveness. Use our employee satisfaction survey template as a starting point.

Onboarding is a great time to find out what new employees think about their roles, expectations, and workplace resources. What you find out in an onboarding survey or new hire training quiz can affect the entire employee lifecycle.

An exit interview should link the input from all of the other surveys an employee has taken during their tenure with your organization. You should be able to create a picture of the entire employee experience journey with the data and find insights into retention.

A 360 review includes input from a senior employee, a junior employee, a peer, and a self-assessment. This reveals more information about the employee experience than traditional manager-employee reviews. Raters are anonymous and are encouraged to speak freely. Use these surveys to investigate EX further in terms of development opportunities rather than as an overall performance review.

We know that employee experience is valuable, but if yours isn’t up to par, how do you improve it? Check out these tips:

It’s interesting that some companies will go through the process of conducting surveys and never act on the feedback. Employees are more likely to share their opinions and provide useful ideas if they feel they are being listened to. 

Gather your feedback and create an action plan to share with employees so they know you are committed to listening and taking action.

Your company culture is a combination of leadership style, organizational structure, sense of purpose, and personalities of employees. Company culture should be motivating, energizing, and empowering.

Take a look at how SurveyMonkey helped Dennemeyer build its employee-centric culture.

Provide your employees with the tools they require to do their jobs easily and efficiently. Make sure tech is up-to-date and running smoothly. 

Your physical workspace should be light and inviting with a few perks selected by employees. The flexibility to work from home or another workspace definitely contributes to a positive employee experience. Your company may need to adapt to hybrid work situations and consider employee experience from that point of view. See how the State of Michigan keeps remote workers engaged.

Senior HR directors are the natural choice to take ownership of your employee experience program. They should collect data and present it with proposed actions to your executive leadership. 

While your learning and development director and recruitment director may “own” the program, every leader in the organization will play a role in providing optimal employee experiences. Encourage them to follow through with actions deemed necessary by the team.

Your onboarding process sets the stage for the entire employee experience. During onboarding, the employee is exposed to the work environment, culture, and expectations. If an employee loses enthusiasm during onboarding, you need to examine your process and make adjustments.

Businessolver Inc. conducted the 2020 State of Workplace Empathy study, in which 91% of CEOs said their organizations are empathetic, but only 68% of employees agreed. 83% of employees would consider leaving their current companies for similar jobs at businesses that are more empathetic. 

Demonstrate your empathy with good benefits. Look at your family leave policies for maternity and paternity leave, bereavement, and time to care for sick family members. Do your benefits show that you care?

DE&I efforts are important to employees. In fact, in the CNBC and SurveyMonkey Workforce Happiness Index of April 2021 study, 78% of the workforce says it is important to them to work at an organization that prioritizes DE&I. Make sure you are promoting your DE&I efforts and keeping your employees up-to-date with improvements.

Need more assistance? Look at the Momentive Guided Employee Experience and other employee experience solutions for more information on how their AI-powered solutions can help.

Make sure your employees have positive employee experiences. Start with SurveyMonkey and any of our business solutions to help measure employee experience now.