Employee experience is a term used everywhere in HR technology circles. But what does that mean?
Employee experience – commonly known as EX – is all about an employee’s feelings, interactions, and insights about his employment in a particular company. The physical workspace, work-life balance, and technology impact whether this experience is positive or negative. Because it’s complicated and hazy, a solid strategy regarding employee experience is crucial.
Borrowing mainly from customer experience, organizations and their HR teams often use tools from this arena to create employee service strategies as well as more traditional HR tools. Just as marketers worked to understand and improve customer service quality, so do companies with their employees, trying to meet their needs and problems. This is not easy.
Before attempting to create a strategy for employee experience, you must understand ten killer ideas that you need to consider.
Effective employee retention processes
Employee retention aims to retain talented employees and reduce turnover. To accomplish this, employers must encourage a positive work environment that promotes competitive pay, commitment, and a healthy balance between an employee’s work and private life, partly through the use of HR technology.
Frequent turnover leads to a loss of institutional knowledge. It harms continuity, which is why it is in the company’s best interest to offer employees rewards, benefits, and good work culture. The retention of employees begins during the recruitment and onboarding process. It continues throughout the entire career of the employee in the company.
Comprehensive analysis
People study, also known as human resource study, is a form of extensive data study that applies mathematics, statistics, and modeling to employee-related data to perceive and predict patterns. The HR department can then use this information to make informed decisions to improve business results.
The technology aims to provide HR insight into employee issues, improving employment, company culture, and employee retention. For example, people study can improve HR by revealing training problems or turnover.
A modern approach to talent acquisition
Acquiring talent is a process used by employers to recruit, track, and interview candidates, as well as to recruit and train new employees. The HR department may use job boards, recruitment software, or social media to find the perfect candidates, although some might offer more support than others.
Job boards such as Monster, Dice, and CareerBuilder have now started using algorithms that job seekers can look for a job better suited to their skills. Social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook match job offers via connections and networks and then check skills and whether the candidate is suitable for a job.
A Well understood onboarding process
Onboarding is a process that integrates a new employee into the organization. With high costs of recruitment, employment, and training, it is difficult for a company to lose employees, and we believe that onboarding is one of the essential aspects of employee experience and retention.
The new automation options are designed to facilitate employers’ quick implementation and easier management, ensuring better results. Properly carried out, a new employee starts working with positive feelings in his mind about the company. It is crucial that they get an accurate representation of what work entails, acclimatize to company culture, and achieve productivity in a specific period. A new employee may opt-out if the deployment is terrible.
Favorable treatment of job seekers
The candidate’s experience is how a job seeker perceives the recruitment and employment process in the organization. In today’s competitive labor market, creating a positive candidate experience is one of the main priorities of HR and should be part of the overall strategy regarding employee experience. This is quite simply true because bad experiences at the beginning can have an exponential effect on an employee, thanks to Glassdoor and other social media.
The experience a candidate has can have a direct impact on talent development and retention. A lousy experience will make it impossible to re-apply a potentially ideal candidate. The current employee who was once poorly treated is more likely to take up another job if the opportunity arises. Some companies install HR chatbots to ensure positive early communication and use automatic interview planning to limit candidates’ bad experiences.
Improving internal communication
Internal communication teams do much more than disseminate information about the company. They promote a sense of community, encourage employees to work together on a common goal, and create a coherent company culture. When employees have a greater understanding of purpose, they become more productive and become brand advocates and ambassadors for your company. To maintain a connection with employees and gain their trust, you must use internal communication.
Besides, as the workforce becomes more dispersed and mobile, internal communication is more critical than ever. Maintaining the involvement of remote employees is crucial, and providing everyone in the company with the right communication tools, such as Slack or Zoom, can help develop employee relationships and facilitate transparent communication.
Invest in the well-being of employees
Active employees incur lower healthcare costs, saving the company time and money, but employee well-being is more than just physical fitness. Programs that encourage mental, emotional, and spiritual health create rested, more attentive, and productive employees at work.
Companies should strive to implement health and fitness programs, sick days, paid holidays, paid parental leave, gyms, and health clinics on-site and provide healthy snacks, to name a few.
Affiliate Groups
Employee resource groups (ERG) are workplace clubs based on shared interests or identities. These groups give employees the chance to contact other people in similar situations and often form the basis of a variety of employers and integration activities. Employees usually start ERG because they seek to support the community in the workplace.
A lot of tools help automate employee programs and enable HR to track and manage groups. Employers who encourage ERG to contribute to positive employee experience and higher retention rates because employees can find a more natural way to create bonds and a community sense.
Employee benefit surveys and employee feedback
Many employees would prefer additional benefits over an increment, proving that providing adequate employee benefits is key to retaining and acquiring talent. Employee benefit surveys help you understand what benefits are essential to your employees. They ask questions about the quality of specific benefits, compare with other companies, and any additional benefits that employees would like to see in the future. This may apply to PTO, health insurance, parental leave, retirement, share options, free meals, etc.
Many organizations also conduct employee engagement and opinion surveys to understand where their employees stand, but not everyone responds to the questionnaire. This can affect employees and cause them to lose confidence. Employees are more likely to share their views and get involved if they feel that someone is listening and may stop giving feedback if they know they will not be heard. Successful companies provide employees with an action plan and appoint a person responsible for implementing the changes.
Creative approach
Creative thinking is approaching problem-solving through diverse knowledge and skills. People with different experiences and perspectives meeting and developing new ideas for a real problem. Organizations and their HR teams use design thinking to help create employee experience strategies.
There are so many ways to improve an employee’s journey with an organization that will increase the value of their professional life and the organization’s brand. Many organizations have adopted strategies to apply this trend as it will become increasingly apparent. Your employees are an investment for the future of your organization. You need to make timely and well thought out investments that benefit everyone in the long run.
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