Era of Employee Experience > Insight

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Everything an employee sees, learns, and feels from the time reading a job advertisement to the moment the employee leaves the company contributes to employee experience. If an organization wants to increase the level of employee experience, it shall hear employees’ opinions at each stage of their career and provide individualized and customized experience by identifying meaningful items. Since it is hard to expect the spontaneity of employees with financial benefits alone, focusing on employee experience is one of the most promising competitive advantages. 

Why Is Employee Experience Getting More Important?

The shift from the traditionally emphasized employee engagement approach to the total employee experience approach is fueled by a variety of factors, including the changes in demographics, social media, and volatile economic conditions.

Millennium and Z generations

want more opportunities to express their opinions. It is necessary to deepen the understanding of new members who feel, think, and act differently from the previous generations.

The War for Talent

is getting more intense than ever. There are more candidates for fewer jobs, but the market competition for talent has been intensified. Employee experience is one of the last ways to make a company outstanding as an attractive employer.

Companies are being asked to change faster than ever.

We are now facing an economic environment, which has newly emerged products and services that can completely reorganize the market order to the maximum extent, called disruptive innovation, as well as digitization and agile management. Companies are expanding at a faster rate than ever before or shrinking, contrarily. It is needed to regularly observe and understand how each moment of an employee experiencing a change is actually impacted.

Expectations for personalized experiences

are growing. Employees expect to be treated and interact uniquely within the organization just like when they are experiencing the goods and services of a B2C brand as consumers.

Since social media-based information sharing

is increasing explosively, a company has a higher risk to be exposed to a reputation virus. The best way to protect your own employment brand reputation is to maintain the workplace more transparent.

Basis for Forming Employee Experience

There are several important things for a member to form employee experience from the moment starting a career and leaving the job. Jacob Morgan, the author of “Employee Experience Advantage”, highlights several factors that consist of employee experience, regardless of the size of an organization.

Culture

It is hard to define the culture of a company. Culture is not only the words of leaders, including top executives but also the official mission and values. It also includes actual practice in reality and the company's reaction to an employee’s attitude. Sometimes when a manager is no present, it is a way for members to engage with colleagues who they work directly with. It is a mixture of everything encompassing leadership style, organizational structure, and the definition of success. Although it is difficult to define, employees can experience culture only with the atmosphere they feel when working. Culture can motivate, energize, and empower employees but, on the contrary, it can shrink and alienate them, like lagging behind.

Technology Environment

An organization that thinks about the future of employee experience must invest in the right tools and environments that will help employees do their jobs efficiently. The technical environment is not limited to simply supporting a convenient working environment, but it becomes a medium for improving personal competence and social skills. Since the technology environment has evolved extensively, providing a necessary tool for helping employees have confidence in their roles is getting easier.

Physical Work Space

Employees who are satisfied with the work environment have better concentration and higher productivity. Moreover, they feel it as one of the attractive welfare benefits. Physical workspace is not always limited to offices. The autonomy of working in a variety of workspaces other than the office, including one’s home, can contribute to positive employee experience. In proportion to the development of the technological environment, the boundaries of the physical workspace widen.

The basis of the basic environment can be defined by an expanded model that includes shaper (affecting the formation of employee experience), vehicle (expression of tangible/intangible things), and outcome. The employee experience readiness and level of an organization is measured through it. 

The results of many studies showed that the improvement of employee experience affects the overall business. Employee experience and engagement level are the best indicators for predicting the level of customer experience as well as the productivity and financial performance of a business unit. Companies with high employee participation increased their sales by at least 2.5 times more than companies with low employee participation (Bain & Company). Moreover, employees who engage better due to positive experiences are 87% less likely to leave the organization than those who do not (Corporate Leadership Council). This reduces the waiting cost of hiring and growing a new employee to reach his or her full potential. 

70% of employees with high engagement understood how to meet customer needs, while only 17% of those with low engagement understood it (Wright Management).

No Boundaries in the Scope of Employee Experience

Employee experience includes every moment from hiring to resignation. The starting points are hiring hours and costs at the step of hiring a new employee, the ratio of job acceptance, and employment quality. It includes whether it attracts the best candidate with attractive and clear job postings, the experience during the hiring process, and whether the target candidate group accepts the job offer quickly or not.

Afterward, employees go through a process of quickly identify the systems, tools, and processes of the organization and satisfying role expectations. Most employees need an “adjustment period” to reduce work hours and increase productivity. Obviously, t is better for the organization when they can achieve it quicker. An effective onboarding process inspires members' aspiration for new jobs and turns it into a commitment to do a great job while working there by establishing meaningful relationships with the organization.

Employees grow at a slightly different rate within their roles. It is also important to understand what skills and competencies they learn and what they want during this process. Members need a kind of “portfolio career” composed of diverse experiences to grow. Moreover, organizations shall capture opportunities to provide differentiated experiences to many employees.

When employees are organized to a certain level, the company's challenge is to maintain the rate of contribution and development of its members for success. Moreover, employees should be inspired by the company's vision and values. It is also economically rational to do the best to keep the already organized existing staff rather than replacing them.

Employees can leave a company for a variety of reasons. What stage employees leave the company and why they leave it provide good opportunities for improving employee experience for current and future members. However, yet it may sound cruel, those who leave may give honest opinions because they feel like they have nothing to lose.

Overseas companies such as IBM and GE can increase the level of employee experience from the hiring stage by utilizing digital tools and have monitoring systems for quickly detecting problems. They focus on helping employees conveniently meet their own needs and providing tailored experiences for them by hiring dedicated organizations and experts as needed. Through this, they try to constructively protect personal growth and organizational values ​​and culture.

Future of Employee Experience Management

Combination of Operation Data and Experience Data

A company has “operation data” including employees' personal history and evaluation and compensation details. The move to identify new insights by combining it with “experience data”, which informs the experience of employees, is getting faster. It will widen the opportunity to know what is happening in the company and why it is happening, what need to be improved, and what values employees feel from it and what they prefer regarding activities taking the same amount of time and cost in-depth.

Listen and Measure Every Day

More attention is given to what employees do and feel every day. It is because everything can be excellent employee experience including learning new things, simplifying repetitive practices and tasks, and trying new ways to improve performance. In addition, it is understandable that there can be different views and opinions in the same experience. Regular surveys including annual surveys (pulse check) and listening to opinions using public feedback platforms have become essential management activities. Furthermore, companies will continue to try to know how employees understand the problems they face every moment through short and brief questionnaires and attempt to secure rich data.

Interest and Investment in Workplace Environment

The workplace environment doesn't just mean fancy office buildings and new interior design. It can be the autonomy of time and space, the authority to make small decisions in services, or anything that employees want to be in the workplace. Additionally, there is an increasing interest not only in the workplace environment but also in how one’s workplace is related to and contributes to society or communities. It is because internal and external pride is one of the ultimate aspects of employee experience. The impacts of these interests and investments can be more effective when the results are publicized in an easy-to-understand and transparent form.

Start with Employee Experience Survey 

Understanding how employees experience the workplace, grow, and feel when they leave it is a starting point for enhancing the employee experience. What is meaningful and what is not? What experience is positive and what a company can do to improve it? Surveys need to be conducted more regularly and systematically to answer these questions.

It is necessary to measure various things at the right time using the right tool, such as the candidate reaction survey and the on-boarding survey, which monitor the recruitment process and adaptation phases after hired, and the training feedback survey, 360 review, and pay and benefits optimization survey for evaluating the experience of employees’ growth and recognition.

As shown above, the trend is to conduct surveys on the experience and feelings of employees more frequently in a simpler format. The real-time snapshots of company-wide morale and employee satisfaction obtained through this enable the company to interview more effectively. Putting small amounts of time and money at the right time is a more effective way, than investing large amounts of time and money just once. Moreover, the attributes of employee experience tend to be individualized and customized. It is expected that the level of employee experience will be higher when small successes are accumulated.

Written by Seung-A Baek, Vice President, Consulting Biz Unit (sabaek@e-hcg.com)