In 2022, improving the employee experience has become a top business priority. After the pandemic’s irreversible impact on the workplace, 90% of employers strive to improve their organization’s employee experience to create a more stable, happy work environment.
However, the rules have changed. Employees are no longer satisfied with sole perks like a snack room or catered happy hours. They want their employment to enrich their lives, meaning HR professionals and other leaders shaping the employee experience must take a more holistic approach. With that being said, here are six methods to deliver a superior employee experience.
1. Promote a culture of excellent communication
Just as with other relationships, communication is key to strong workplace relationships. Although companies prioritize stellar communication with their clients, board, the media and other stakeholders; many don’t pay attention to how they communicate with their employees.
This needs to change if you want to improve the employee experience. To start, define digital communication protocols and be sure to communicate all important company updates in a timely manner, both for the bad and good. When relaying feedback, go directly to the source. And lastly, use all employee interactions to learn how employees feel about their experience and the workplace.
By maintaining clear channels of communication, you get a better view of the work environment from an employee’s perspective and can optimize processes for:
- Hiring
- Onboarding
- Employee development
- And turnover
And if it so happens that an employee’s request is not possible, don’t sit on it; explain why. Even if they don’t get exactly what they want, your employees will be grateful for the transparency and may seek an alternative solution.
2. Provide meaningful work
Employees are on the hunt for meaningful work and a mission to contribute to. This means that your company’s mission should be crystal clear and promoted widely, especially if it is inspirational and can be used to mobilize your workforce.
To further drive meaningful work, encourage employees to be leaders in their field. Give them the autonomy to test strategies, take on new responsibilities and make mistakes on scenarios that allow it, such as on their internal OKRs.
3. Train management to be supporters
Managers are the foundation of every organization with a hierarchical organizational structure. If managers are not trained consistently according to your company’s values, your employees will surely have different experiences as they work within different teams.
To create managers that embody your organization’s values, you can follow these basic steps:
- Encourage managers to set clear and transparent goals for their employees at the beginning of the employees’ review periods.
- Have managers and their team members practice explaining the purpose behind every assignment to ensure all work is meaningful.
- Give managers training on best practice meeting protocols.
- Coach managers on mentoring employees, providing frequent feedback, building employee confidence and determining where they can help.
Most importantly, by investing in management, you won’t have to uphold your organization’s ideal employee experience yourself. All levels of leadership will be informed on what role they play in improving the employee experience.
4. Offer growth opportunities
Growth opportunities are a significant differentiator in the employee experience. After all, high-performing employees only stay with their organization if their work continues to challenge and reward them. Despite this, only 43% of employees view their employers to offer good opportunities for growth.
Fortunately, there are many types of these opportunities and your organization can strategize which positions need them more depending on their turnover rate. Growth opportunities that improve the employee experience include:
- A promotion
- A new job title
- Raised income
- More responsibilities
- Training or learning opportunities
- Opportunities to travel
This step requires allocating time and money to develop employees’ professional careers so check that resources are going towards opportunities that excite employees. To help, work with employees to establish their ideal career path, and offer them opportunities that will help them get there.
5. Formulate the right tech stack
Clearly, there are many ways to improve the employee experience, but they can be difficult to implement effectively without the right tech stack. For instance, how do you know if your efforts are truly improving the employee experience? Or driving more meaningful, productive work?
Leverage top work and communication tools to maintain visibility of your employees’ work experience. We recommend checking out the following popular tools depending on your workforce’s needs:
- Microsoft
- Workfront
- Wrike
- Zoom
- HubSpot
- Google Workspace
- Slack
- Jira
- Salesforce
- Github
No matter your tech stack, you may need an additional tool to manage employees and their work experiences. People analytics solutions can pull data from your tech stack to show how your organization’s digital work impacts the employee experience. With this data analytics, you can inform methods for improving the employee experience by:
- Prioritize high-priority work and project blockers to empower employees to work on what matters
- View employee sentiment by individual, team and the company at large
- See where employees collaborate and communicate in digital apps
- View which management teams need more direction on employee coaching and meeting protocols
- Assess which employees need guidance or feedback
Overall, with an unbeatable tech stack and the people analytics platform to understand it, you gain the tools to standardize and measure your organization’s employee experience.
For more information on the best people analytics software solutions on the market, check out our recent blog to explore your options.
6. Maintain a remote or hybrid option
Although companies have mixed opinions about remote work, those who push going back to an in-person office may be taken aback by their employees’ lack of enthusiasm. After two years since the emergence of the pandemic and its rapid transition to remote work, employees expect the option to be able to work from home.
Almost 65% of employees state that flexible, remote work options improve both their experience and their loyalty to the company. To offer at least part-time remote work at your company, separate roles that can work from home and define how many days they must be in the office (if at all) to be successful in their role.
Based on this information, create your organization’s optimal hybrid or remote work plan and define how you plan to make the transition. If you have any hesitations, we have some expert tips and tricks to the perfect remote work strategy in our latest blog.
Improving employee experience is an ongoing process
A final note to remember: employees stay where they feel they belong. If your organization isn’t in the current position to award large pay increases or new technology deployment, there is still work to be done when improving the employee experience.
Overall, lead with intention in building a workplace culture that is inclusive, vibrant and filled with skilled employees. And no matter your current workplace initiatives, keep track of their effects, and know that there is rarely a finish line in sight. Instead the process should be iterated upon for continuous improvement to ensure your organization’s employee experience is always advancing and staying in line with market trends and standards. Curious to learn more about improving the employee experience? Click here to read our blog on how people analytics can inform your strategy.