Get to grips with employee experience and help your people – and your business – to thrive. Here’s our primer on employee experience and how it relates to employee engagement
Employee experience and employee engagement aren’t interchangeable terms. While both are mutually reinforcing, there are important differences.
Employee engagement is the emotional commitment and motivation people bring to work.
Employee experience (EX), on the other hand, encompasses everything people experience in their employment journey with you. It begins when they see your job advert, ends when they leave and it’s everything in between.
Essentially, engagement is how employees feel, while experience is what influences those feelings.
Put another way, engagement is one aspect of the wider employee experience.
Why you need to focus on employee experience
Every organisation delivers an EX whether it intends to or not. But savvy organisations work with deliberate intent to curate and better theirs.
The upside of a positive EX huge.
The more attractive a workplace, the easier it is to recruit and retain the best talent. In the same way that a great customer experience leads to customer loyalty, having a great EX leads to colleague loyalty.
And of course colleagues who enjoy positive EX are far more likely to give discretionary effort. In that way, positive EX drives exceptional business results – boosting productivity, enhancing service, increasing sales and maximising profit.
Think of it as business success built from the inside out. Excellent employee experience leads to excellent customer experience – and that’s the basis of excellent performance against your organisational goals.
The case for investing in EX is becoming irresistible. A Harvard Business Review study found companies prioritising employee experience earn up to four times higher profits. Additionally, Jacob Morgan’s analysis of 250 firms revealed those investing in employee experience outperform competitors in stock returns by nearly 2x.
No surprise, then, that EX is becoming such a hot topic in boardrooms.
How employee expectations are changing
We’re seeing a generational shift. As Baby Boomers and even Gen X head into retirement, organisations are having to meet the changing demands of their successors by updating the EX.
Millennials, born 1981 to 1996, expect flexibility and purpose-driven work. Meanwhile Gen Z, born 1996 and 2009, are digital natives who seek collaboration and inclusivity and want support for their mental wellbeing.
These newer generations also put a premium on equity, diversity and inclusivity (DEI). They expect opportunities for continuous development and regular recognition and career progression.
If their EX expectations aren’t met, these cohorts are not afraid to push back – or vote with their feet and move to an employer who is more in tune.
And by the end of this decade, we’ll be hiring Generation Alpha – those born between 2010 and 2025. They’ll bring with them a new and unique set of demands for EX.
How to enhance EX
Improving the EX starts with uncovering and understanding colleagues’ perceptions and identifying the gaps in sentiment. It’s then about acting upon that information to design and deliver a positive EX.
That’s where Axiom comes in. We have a proven process for helping you achieve EX excellence.
Repurposing techniques from the long-established field of customer experience, we take a deep dive into EX in your business to identify strengths and areas for improvement. Through expertly facilitated conversations that create an environment of psychological safety, we can uncover the reality of your EX – both positive and challenging – and harness ideas for change. From there, we work with you to co-create and implement solutions. Finally, we help you measure the impact of changes.
The benefits are far-reaching. Just look at what we achieved for a financial services client.
Four steps to employee experience excellence
Discover what’s important to your colleagues, what’s working well and the shortfalls in their experience.
Co-create solutions to bridge the gaps. Those who experience a problem are often the best people to know how to fix it.
Implement the best solutions and celebrate the involvement of colleagues in bringing them about.
Measure improvements to the EX from the changes you’ve made. Evidencing benefits builds buy-in and proves the case for a continued colleague-centric approach.
For an informal chat about how Axiom could help you achieve EX excellence, contact us.
