Employee experience has gained a lot of importance over time. It starts right when the hiring process commences. You can offer a great employee experience by working on your onboarding strategies to introducing them to professional development opportunities and offering them a suitable environment to work in. These little things can have a considerable impact on employee engagement, retention and morale. It is strategies like these that give an organization a competitive advantage if they play it out correctly.
How can a company achieve this competitive advantage? How can they make sure they are the best when it comes to giving their employees a good experience? The first step is to explore human psychology. Even Maslow places the concept of safety on the second level of his hierarchy model. The human brain is designed in a way that it wants to feel safe in an environment first. If the human brain perceives a threatening or uncomfortable environment of any kind, it loses the aptitude to comprehend and perform fully.
Improving Employee Experience
How can you improve your employees’ experience? Take a look at these four tactics:
First Impression is the Last Impression?
To date, following this tactic of setting the right impression the very first time is of utmost importance. The way an employee perceives the organization and its culture will depend highly on how their first experience is. Sometimes, it is during the interview phase that candidates can judge if they could have a good employee experience and decide accordingly if they want to come back and work.
Imagine it was your first day at an organization you had been longing to become a part of. Now that you’re here, there is no one to greet, the receptionist doesn’t know you were hired as she was on vacation last week. You have to wait long enough until someone finally comes out of an office and takes you where you had to go. By now you are feeling unwelcome because the organization was so unprepared to have you on board. This could be the ultimate bummer why an employee would decide to quit the very next day.
Employers need to make sure they don’t let any newly hired employees go through a bad first experience. Having a properly laid out plan for an onboarding experience can work wonders towards a great overall employee experience and reducing employee turnover. And while most employers consider it as an expense, it’s an investment that would offer various benefits in the long-run, including improved retention rate.
You can choose to learn from the experience of your current employees. Take their feedback on how they would’ve liked their onboarding experience to be and design a strategy accordingly.
The Perfect Recipe
Every perfect recipe has one thing common – the right measurement of the ingredients. This means that you cannot figure out the real picture of your employee experience until you get the metrics right, and reduce employee turnover. The key is to measure components such as morale, retention, and engagement. Once you get this right, you’re definitely on the right path of offering first-class employee experience.
Positive Learning from Competitors’ Experience
Positive employee experience is not limited to certain organizations or industries. Word-of-mouth spreads and it is easy to find organizations that have succeeded in giving their employees a positive experience. All you have to do is look around and see those who are doing well and learn from their experiences too. Find out about the best strategies of your competitors and implement the ones that are more relevant to your organization.
Communication Is Key-Always!
If you feel that your communication with your workforce isn’t coming across to them as it should, then maybe it not a comprehension fault. It could be that the message isn’t being communicated to them the way it should be. A lot of times it is seen that sub-ordinates receive lots of e-mails which just adds to their confusion rather than clarity.
So, before you communicate with you sub-ordinates, ask yourself, what is the message you want them to get and how?
Conclusion: Employee Experience is Important
There must be numerous more ways out there that can enhance the employee experience and reduce disengaged employees, and the list of ways is not just limited to the tactics shared above. These tidbits are just a few tactics that can help you provide your employees with a positive experience and hopefully engage and retain them. No matter what you choose it is imperative that you give your employee an enhanced experience.