Employee experience is the wellspring of success in modern business. It’s where employee productivity, retention, and your workplace culture are born from.

But what exactly does it mean?

Employee experience (or EX) is a holistic term that recognises the full spectrum of an employee’s involvement, progression and sense of feeling valued throughout their life cycle at a company.

​Gartner​ defines EX as “employees’ perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with their employer’s customers, leaders, teams, processes, policies, tools and work environment.”

In 2020, 80% of executives rate employee experience as important or very important to them and their companies [source: 2017 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends].

So we know what employee experience means and have a general sense of what it is. But can you put a business value on employee experience? Here are a few things to remember when thinking about EX:

• Employees are also a customer – We often focus on the importance of customer experience, investing time budget and resources into enhancing the customer’s experience. What’s being forgotten however, is that employees are our top customer. To provide a positive experience for top clients and providers, the work starts at the very core of the company. For the uppermost 25% of employees in terms of EX, 96% also report high levels of work performance.
• Recognition is fundamental to success – In What Makes Us Feel Good about Our Work, Dan Ariely highlights the value of employee recognition. Using performance management software, employers and employees can track their professional progress and set goals and objectives.
• There’s a direct line from EX to profit margins – According to the 2019 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends report, enterprises with a top-quartile employee experience achieve twice the innovation, double the customer satisfaction, and 25% higher profits than organisations with a bottom-quartile employee experience.
• Positively influence what your employees say about you on the internet – With online resources such as Glassdoor being utilised more and more during the recruitment process, the importance of EX comes hand in hand. Recruits will often research a company, from onboarding to off boarding and everything in between. Creating a positive EX will help to demonstrate a company’s values and culture to new recruits.
• Standout in a competitive market – workplace culture is becoming increasingly important for new recruits. Culture arguably plays a deciding role in retaining and binding people to an organisation and for the younger generation, it is seen as a priority for work-life balance. No matter how talented and smart you are, you can work to the best of your capabilities and creative skills when you are surrounded by an encouraging environment that values human resource.
  [Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/270338]
• Traditional EX shifts to ‘human experience’ – Jeff Schwartz, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP determined that “As a result, organisations need to shift from the traditional employee experience to a new category we call ‘human experience,’ where relationships are enduring, learning is continuous, and work has meaning centred around human identity.”

Redefine your employee experience

The employee experience may be broad in scope, but it starts by optimising every touchpoint that an employee encounters, to create an integrated experience that feels holistic throughout every stage. This means taking a closer look at the day-to-day interactions of your workforce and treating them as you would your customers.

Steps towards a better EX:

1. HR software allows employers to capture real-time data at every touchpoint of the employee experience, from recruitment and onboarding, to checking in on your employee’s wellbeing. Find out how your employees are feeling, what’s on their mind and help answer any questions they may have.
2. Conduct an internal survey and determine what influences how employees feel about work – from room temperature to treat bars, company culture to internal communications – identify room for improvement and provide employees with a voice. Employees can give and receive feedback continuously, whether informally from their peers or in a formal meeting using HR software tools.
3. Deviate from the traditional employee engagement strategy and flip the focus on its head. Look at it from the employee perspective rather than a management one.
4. Bespoke HR Software allows you to sow the seeds as well as the flowers and get substantial benefits. Of course, there is no two-step plan to create a flawless EX, but working towards doing so could mean improved customer experience, enhanced productivity, easier recruitment and retention of talent – and that’s just the beginning!