Enhance employee experience and you’ll transform not just employee engagement, but also customer experience and wider business results.
Talk to us about developing your employee experience >How we help with customer and employee experience
- Employee experience – the secret sauce of outstanding business performance
- Discover how to achieve employee experience excellence in your organisation
- Drive employee satisfaction, engagement, retention and performance
- Set the stage for exceptional customer experience – and better business results all round
Why focus on employee experience?
Enhancing the employee experience will yield big gains for your organisation. When employees feel valued and supported, they respond with greater commitment, motivation and performance. And that translates directly into exceptional business results – be that productivity, service, sales or profit.
That’s why more and more companies are making the employee experience a strategic priority.
At Axiom, we help you make sizeable, lasting improvements to your organisation’s employee experience so you can start reaping the rewards.
Employee experience explained
So what do we mean when we say employee experience?
Often shortened to EX, employee experience is a catch-all term for all the interactions your people have with your organisation – from initial job application right through to eventual exit.
Six key factors shape EX:
- Culture: The values, norms and practices that influence how people work together and contribute to business goals.
- Leadership and communication: The support, guidance and communication employees get from leaders and managers.
- Work environment: Physical and virtual workspaces.
- Career development: Opportunities for learning and career advancement.
- Recognition and reward: Acknowledging people’s contributions with compensation, benefits and incentives.
- Wellbeing support: Practices, processes and systems that promote employees’ physical and mental health, including support with major life events.
Towards employee experience excellence
Axiom has a proven process for helping you achieve EX excellence.
1. Discover
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.
The basis for this discovery phase is candid conversations with employees via interviews and expertly facilitated focus groups. Targeting what we call the Moments of Truth, we find out what matters most to your people and what they’re really thinking and feeling – warts and all. We go deeper than an employee survey ever could to understand the ‘why’ as well as the ‘what’.
You end up with a complete 360-degree picture of EX in your organisation. It tells you what people value and what mars their experience. And it shows you the real drivers of EX in your organisation.
2. Co-create
During our dialogue with employees, we encourage them to generate and develop ideas for improving EX. No-one knows better how to make things better than those on the frontline. Co-creating solutions with your people is a sure-fire way to close the gaps in employee sentiment.
Combining their input with our extensive knowledge of EX best practice across sectors and cultures, we’re able to provide you with a potent set of solutions for EX excellence. Action might be called for in anything from training provision to leadership practices to pay and rewards.
3. Implement
We help you draw up and implement an action plan for achieving EX excellence – and in turn improved performance against organisational goals.
Our consultants are all real-world practitioners who help you focus on putting in place solutions that deliver most bang for your buck.
Successful implementation demands clear communication. We call on our employee engagement knowhow to secure buy-in from across the organisation.
4. Measure
We help you gauge the impact on EX of the changes you’ve made using a range of performance indicators. These can include standard HR metrics like employee retention, absence and net promoter score. We also take into account employee sentiment in opinion surveys as well as indicators specific to your organisation.
Comparing how things stood before embarking on the EX excellence programme with how things stand today shows you how you’ve moved the needle. This gives you not just solid evidence of the benefits of your investment, but also insights to inform continuous improvement of EX.
Download our PDF >”If employees have concerns that never come to light, before long you’ll lose them. They’ll leave altogether or they’ll give less than their best. Listening closely to employees in an environment of psychological safety surfaces problems that would otherwise stay hidden. It allows us to laser target the big issues, both positive and challenging.
Having an in-depth dialogue also means we can harness people’s ideas and solutions for addressing the issues that are harming the EX.
Christina Dolding, Axiom employee and customer experience consultant
From employee experience to customer experience
Outstanding EX translates directly into outstanding customer experience – whether for internal or external customers. This is one of the most compelling benefits of achieving EX excellence.
As leading management thinker Simon Sinek says: “Customers will never love a company unless its employees love it first.”
When you put EX at the heart of your strategy by listening to employees and delivering on the moments that matter to them, you not only resolve the thorny EX issues, you also improve the experience of your customers. Ultimately, that’s the path to greater revenue and profit.
Employee experience success stories
We applied our EX excellence model for a financial services client who realised all these benefits in under a year:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) up 30 points and employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) up from 37 to 65.
- Employee attrition down from 25% to 1.7%.
- Participation in employee opinion survey up from 69% to 98%.
- Customer complaint resolution times down 69%.
- Operating costs cut by 10%.
”The levels of innovation from the team astounded me. The ideas raised and delivered – with customers and colleagues at the heart of the thinking – were like nothing I’ve seen before. I was blown away by the speed and scale of change and the benefits achieved. Simply breathtaking.
Chief operating officer, financial services client
Read more about how we’ve helped our clients create employee experience excellence – and the benefits this brings:
See how Axiom’s ‘Moments of Truth’ process provided invaluable insights for a newly appointed leader
Employee experience expertise
Axiom’s EX excellence service is led by Christina Dolding. Leveraging her award-winning background in customer experience research, Christina facilitates dialogue with employees to uncover their needs and concerns and tap into their knowledge and ideas. She is an expert in analysing this input and helping organisations put in place successful solutions.
Find out more about Christina >Upskilling leaders and managers for EX and CX excellence
We can provide in-house training workshops to equip your people to drive employee and customer experience.
How to measure and improve employee experience
Two-day intensive masterclass for team leaders and managers involved with employee experience
How to measure and improve customer experience
Two-day intensive masterclass for team leaders and managers involved with customer experience
Enhancing employee and customer experience: Our thinking
Employee experience vs employee engagement: What’s the difference and how do they connect?
See how employee experience relates to employee engagement and how our experts can support you in four steps to achieve EX excellence.
Can you handle the truth?
Read Axiom’s proven process for uncovering what your colleagues are really thinking and feeling, so you can celebrate what’s going well and tackle what isn’t
The Great Detachment: the causes, signs and solutions to employee disengagement
Discover the symptoms of employee disengagement, its impact on your business and proven strategies to engage your workforce and boost productivity.
FAQs
What’s the difference between employee engagement and employee experience?
Employee engagement refers to an employees’ emotional commitment, motivation and involvement in their work and organisation.
Employee experience, 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.
Why is employee experience important?
A positive employee experience fosters a strong company culture, it drives innovation in process, product, and customer service, which leads to improved brand loyalty, performance and results.
By focusing on employee experience, organisations can create an environment and culture where employees can thrive. When a business fails to focus on improving their employee experience, their top talent inevitably moves to an organisation that does.
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.
Why is customer experience important?
Happy customers become loyal customers and they become advocates. Word of mouth is the best marketing money can buy. Research also shows it costs up to seven times more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. Simply put, poor customer experiences are costly. And great ones are gold dust.
How do you know that positive EX leads to a better customer experience?
There is a growing body of evidence that positive EX leads to better customer experience.
Harvard Business Review reports that EX is now the key driver of the customer experience. A study in the Journal of Service Research has found that positive EX leads to improved customer experience as engaged employees are more likely to deliver exceptional service. Meanwhile, Forbes magazine highlights how happy employees are key to creating happy customers. And a study in BMC Health Services Research shows that measuring and improving employee satisfaction can boost service provision in healthcare settings.
Collectively, findings like these demonstrate that investing in EX can lead to better CX, benefiting both employees and customers.
What is the goal of employee experience?
The goal is simple: To make your workplace the most attractive place for people to work. The more attractive a workplace, the easier it is for that organisation to recruit and retain the best talent.
In the same way that a great customer experience leads to customer loyalty, having a great employee experience leads to colleague loyalty.
It can cost up to 18 month’s salary to replace a departing employee, so getting their experience right matters – and to more than your recruitment bill.
Colleagues who receive a good experience from their employer are far more likely to give discretionary effort, provide a good customer experience, and exceed the expectations of their customers whether within or outside the organisation.
How do you measure employee experience?
Just as you can measure customer experience, you can measure employee experience too.
Employee surveys provide key data – like employee engagement, work-life balance, manager effectiveness and net promoter score. Standard HR metrics like attrition, absence, complaints and accidents also provide insight.
But the best foundation for getting under the skin of EX is to conduct frank dialogue with employees through interviews and focus groups that establish an environment of psychological safety. This is an Axiom speciality.
We work with you to co-create the right framework to measure EX and then achieve EX excellence – with all the benefits that accrue from that.
