The Employee Experience: Treat Staff As If They Were Customers

The Employee Experience: Treat Staff As If They Were Customers

The most important asset in a company's arsenal is its people.

To get the most out of their staff, employers must ensure their workers feel engaged, inspired and rewarded. This motivation contributes not only to a company's operational efficiency but also to its bottom line.

Various studies have found that a happy workforce has a substantial influence on company performance:

  • One report revealed that when content at work, people are as much as 20% more productive.

  • Research consultancy Jackson Organization revealed that stock prices increased an average 14% from 1998 to 2005 at organizations that were in Fortune's "100 Best Companies to Work For," more than twice the average growth (6%) of businesses that didn't make the list.

  • According to Gallup, two-thirds of the global workforce is disengaged: Although these people show up to work and do their jobs, they're not giving their best.

Considering the importance of employee satisfaction to an organization's operations, it makes sense that employers are investing significant budget and resources to finding the most effective way to measure and improve staff engagement and fulfillment.

To me, all these statistics are proof that achieving employee happiness is a complex task.

As I wrote in a post about the importance of digitalization for employee satisfaction, gone are the days when a foosball table, bean bags and espresso machine were enough to attract and retain talent.

Now, HR leaders are focusing on the employee experience, which means treating employees much in the same way companies treat customers.

Employers are realizing that the benefits they receive on the client side (and to the bottom line) by prioritizing the customer experience - e.g. greater loyalty and engagement, improved satisfaction and retention levels, higher revenues, and reduced churn rates - can be replicated internally by similarly targeting the employee experience.

In terms of the customer experience, companies must understand the wants, needs and preferences of their target consumers in order to provide them with the best products and services. In parallel, HR must know what drives their employees so they can design experiences and environments that aptly suit their workplace needs.

Admittedly, I've written about tools and strategies that HR can and should incorporate in the interest of improving employee work environments - from investing in HR chatbots to setting up employee resource groups to embracing coworking spaces.

While these technologies and tactics offer advantages for HR and people management, I want to look at a more holistic approach to enhancing the employee experience: Employee journey mapping.

Mapping the employee experience

HR officers are realizing the usefulness of knowing the many touchpoints along the employee journey, and the concept of employee journey mapping is gaining traction.

Indeed, this strategy is nothing new - for some time, journey mapping has been essential for sales, service and marketing teams. What's new, though, is applying the tactics to people management.

The theory behind employee journey mapping closely follows that of the customer. In the same way marketers plot the full customer journey to discover opportunities to convert consumers to customers, HR teams can map employee journeys in the interest of improving the employee experience.

With nearly one of every two new hires failing and leaving a company within 18 months of starting a job, understanding, for instance, the pain and friction points in an organization's onboarding process could help ensure that newly hired employees are a good fit.

Graham Frost, a customer service and employee engagement expert, explains why a lifecycle approach to the employee experience is so beneficial:

“Employee journey mapping is a discipline that can help you ensure that your employees have positive experiences with your organisation from their first impression onwards. Employee journey mapping will encourage you to ask yourself – and investigate - important questions: What are the people who work for you saying about your company to their friends? What are they saying (or not saying) on social media?  What is your employer brand? What are you doing to attract the right people? Who are the right people? What sort of recognition do you have as a workplace? How often do your employees introduce their friends to come and work for you?”

Ultimately, having answers to these questions gives HR access to extremely valuable data.

Businesses must collect detailed data throughout the employee lifecycle, and this data must take into account that each staff member is unique and has different knowledge, needs and experiences.

Armed with the right kind of detailed data, business leaders can identify which organizational changes are required to improve the workplace.

Automation can help

The most efficient strategy for HR to gather this key employee data? Ask for feedback.

Through automation technology that collect, process and evaluate this information, HR teams can save time. These tools can be automatically programmed to send feedback forms to every employee at various times in their lifecycle at the company, allowing HR to focus on interpretation of the results to determine how to drive positive change in employees' experiences in the office.

Related Tags:
About the Author
Ethan at VitalBriefing is a UK-based content specialist writing, editing and creating content in multiple formats in news (print, digital and television), media, corporate communications, marketing and HR. With experience in internal and external communications and content production for various media and business intelligence companies, he covers a range of business strategy topics within the HR and marketing sectors, such as IT careers and learning, and virtual reality and augmented reality in a business context.
Be the first to comment
Sign In to Post a Comment