Why Employee Experience Needs More C-Suite Attention

Business leaders recognize the importance of customer experience and how it affects the success of their company, but what about employee experience?

Over 80 percent of executives agree that employee experience is important, but only 22 percent of them believe their organizations offer excellent employee experience. In fact, 59 percent of business leaders report that their organization is not even ready to handle the employee experience challenge.

Organizations that readily invest in their employee experience are able to retain and hire better talent, improve productivity, and increase their bottom line. As a result, it is crucial for business leaders and C-suite executives to give more attention to employee experience.

​Why is employee experience so important?

Employee experience is defined as an employee’s perceptions and observations about their employment in a company.  In other words, employee experience is how employees feel about working in a company throughout their entire tenure or employee journey.

There are several factors that influence employee experience including the tools and technologies used within the company, employment benefits, skill development opportunities available to the employees, and company culture.

Employee experience affects an organization in numerous ways, including:

Recruitment: A good employee experience is shared, often through online platforms like LinkedIn and Glassdoor, and sometimes through word of mouth. When your employees have a good experience working in the company, they share it with their friends and other people in their network. As a result, you will have more people interested in joining your company which will allow you to find the best talent and fill vacant job positions in less time.

Employee engagement: When you offer a good employee experience and give your employees all the tools and support they need to perform their best work, it leads to higher employee engagement and improved efficiency.

Revenue: According to a report by IBM, employee experience of an organization has a direct financial impact on it. A positive experience leads to a positive effect on both profits and revenue. Whereas a negative employee experience can eventually decrease the company’s overall profits, revenue, and bottom line.

Benefits of a great employee experience

More engaged and productive employees

Disengaged employees can cost companies over $450-500 billion every year. While organizations spend as much as $720 million globally on employee engagement initiatives, only 13 percent of total employees are actually engaged.

Positive employee experience will make your workforce more engaged and committed at work. This will directly improve employee engagement which won’t just save your organization a lot of money but it will also lead to higher efficiency and productivity.

Higher quality of work

When employees feel happy and satisfied at work, they want to perform their very best which leads to a higher quality of work, every time. A positive and strong employee experience also supports the upskilling of employees. It fosters an environment where employees want to get better at their jobs and achieve greater results.

Improved customer experience

Your employees are the ones who directly deal with customers every day. If your employees are not happy with the way the company treats them, it will eventually reflect in the way they deal with customers which will invariably lead to lowered customer satisfaction.

On the contrary, a positive employee experience makes employees feel valued within the company. They feel more driven and passionate about the products and services that the company offers which allows them to deal with customers in a better way and improves customer satisfaction.

What should CEOs do to improve employee experience?

CEOs need to recognize the importance of employee experience and make it a priority in their organization.

Creating an optimum employee experience starts with the employees. You need take a bottom-up approach to understand their requirements, problems, and challenges in order to offer an employee experience which helps and supports them in performing their best.

Start with a company-wide survey to get a clear idea about what the employees expect from the organization. Take the entire workforce into consideration including full-time employees, part-time contract workers, and even freelancers. Also, make sure that the entire survey is anonymous so that everyone can share their honest opinion about what it’s really like working in the company.

Develop employee personas and journey maps based on the employee survey to get a clearer, more targeted understanding on the unique employee needs. Employees in different teams and departments might be facing different problems. Your goal is to study, listen, and learn about the day to day challenges faced by the employees in order to discover new ways to simplify their entire work and improve productivity.

Find the right technologies and tools to support your employees and help them perform their work in a better way. Introducing more and more applications will only overwhelm and confuse them Instead, integrate a unified digital workplace platform in your organization which can give your employees access to all the digital tools and data they need to manage their everyday work.

Create a designated team in-charge of improving employee experience. This team should be responsible for everything right from the survey to the end implementation. More importantly, the team should have members from different departments of the company so that they can give everyone a clear overview of what the optimum employee experience looks like in their particular department.

Improving employee experience is an ongoing process

Just implementing a few new practices and guidelines for employee experience and hoping for it to work for years to come is not the way to go. CEOs need to continuously measure how the new initiatives are being received by the employees through engagement surveys, ongoing performance reviews, and exit interviews. As you measure and track the employee feedback, you should make changes to your employee experience strategy accordingly.