What is Employee Experience?
For years we’ve seen businesses focus on creating a positive customer experience to help drive the success of their business. Until recently, however, there hasn’t been a focus on developing an irresistible employee experience. The idea is simple, yet powerful–take care of your employees, and they will take care of your customers. Ensuring the wellbeing of your employees is an absolutely essential part of the foundation of your organizational culture. When you focus on the wellbeing of your employees, you begin to directly impact the employee experience.
What Is Employee Experience?
The three essential elements for driving a positive employee experience are wellbeing, culture and engagement. By creating consistent positive experiences for your employees, you will create cultures that attract talent and retain high performing engaged employees.
What Does The Employee Experience Encompass?
By foundationally focusing on the wellbeing of your organization, your employees will genuinely know that you care about their health and happiness – in and out of the office. What does this encompass?
The employee experience encompasses so much more than perks and free snacks; a strong employee experience empowers and supports employees to be their best and meet their goals, at work and beyond. This includes diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Employees should be encouraged to bring their whole self to work so that they can feel included in a company culture that supports them. By fully integrating employees into the company culture and giving them the tools to thrive in their roles, you can heavily influence the employee experience across your organization. Take care to listen to the voice of the employee because it shows you care about what your employees desire: having a purpose in the company, the opportunity to grow, and to feel like they are being holistically taken care of by the business.
How To Create An Irresistible Employee Experience
As an organization, two key questions to ask are “Why would someone talented want to work at our organization?” and “How do we retain our talented and engaged employees?”
These questions both tie directly to building an irresistible employee experience. It starts by creating daily positive experiences that will transform company cultures to drive broader employee engagement.
- Look at your organization to see your views on corporate social responsibility. Do you offer employees a way to tie altruism into your wellbeing program?
- Are leaders in your organization actively and transparently working on their own wellbeing? Are leaders involved in the program design, management and implementation of your wellbeing program? When leaders embrace holistic wellbeing, they create a top-down approach that trickles through the organization positively influencing others.
- How have you taken the voice of the employee into consideration when shaping your engagement and wellbeing strategy?
- What additional wellbeing benefits have you added to create a more holistic program? Examples include smoking cessation programs, financial counseling, mindfulness workshops, stress management and sleep promotion programs.
- Have you changed the physical workplace to create a work environment designed with wellness in mind? An essential component influencing the daily employee experience is the physical workspace of your organization. Examples include onsite garden, plants around the office, walking paths, standing desks, onsite gym, natural lighting and meditation spaces.
Technology And Scaling Your Employee Experience
Technology plays an important role in your employee wellbeing program. Delivering a consistent, simplified employee experience that engages employees in all aspects of their wellbeing, while also promoting your organization’s culture, mission and purpose, can be incredibly difficult. This is where technology can help.
Look at how you can extend your wellbeing initiatives and wellbeing technology platform to:
- Segment, target and reward employees based on their specific interests, actions and goals
- Serve as a hub, or one-stop shop, for all of your HR and benefits programs
- Act as a communications platform across all employees
- Allow your organization to amplify your culture and mission through customized experiences and content