What do your employees say about their experience with your business?
Have you ever asked your employees about their experience with your company?
Most businesses focus on their customer experience or CX, and they disregard or they don’t even look at their employee experience (also known as EX).
Now, what is this EX or employee experience that I’m talking about?
Employee experience has to do with everything your employees experience or the engagement that they have with your company, starting from the first time that they walk into your company doors for an interview, right through their period of employment, until the day they decide to move on and leave your company, and beyond. That whole process from start to finish is what’s called employee experience.
Now, most large organisations and companies are realising that employee experience is critical to their company’s success moving forward into the future. A lot of large organisations are now investing a lot of money into employee experience because they understand that this is critical to their success. They’re investing in things like market research as well as quantitative and qualitative research into the experience and engagement that their employees have with their organisations.
One example is Volkswagen. VW Australia are using things called employee pulses to be able to test and also understand how their employees are engaging and the experiences that their employees are having with their company. Through this assessment and through these processes, they made some changes. One change that they made was they redid the floors in the workshops of their service departments, and they also added name tags on the lockers and some of the areas where the staff carry out their work. They found that this improved engagement. It improved productivity as well, and that made the staff happier.
Now, when you have happy staff, that obviously, in turn, leads to:
- Better productivity
- More engaged staff
- Better results
- Better customer experiences
A couple of things that you can do to improve your employee experience when a new employee joins your organisation is determine:
- Do you have a great onboarding process?
- Do you walk them through what your company values, focus and mission are?
- Do you have someone that brings them on and works with them during their initial first few days, creating a great experience and getting them to understand how your company and organisation works?
So, that can be the very first thing that you do to create a better experience.
From there onwards, when you’re creating journeys and maps for customer experience, consider the following:
- Are you incorporating your employees in that?
- What do your staff need to do to achieve this for the customer?
- How do you make the experience for the staff better?
Include your your employees in that customer journey and create a journey for your employees along the way as well so you have both an employee journey and a customer journey. And, these should work and integrate seamlessly together because that way, you know that a great employee experience is going to lead to a great customer experience.
One of the things that Richard Branson said was, your customers don’t come first, your employees come first. And, the reason for that is because your employees will treat your business as if it’s their own. When you create those kinds of experiences and engagement with your staff, then they are certainly going to look after your company and business better.
A few other things that you can do to create better experiences with your employees, especially as a business leader, is be seen, be on the floor, get out there and mix among your team. That way, you’re engaging with them, you can understand what their challenges and problems are, and then, you can solve those things together. And, when you solve them together, you make the experience better and your employees become your number one advocates because they’re then going to sell your business. If they enjoy showing up at work and they enjoy the work that they do because it’s engaging and the experience is great, then they’re definitely going to be telling potential customers and family members about your business, products and services. They’re going to be wanting to talk about what it is that they do and how great it is to work for your organisation, and they become your number one advocates in that sense. So, get out there, mix and be part of the team. Don’t just sit behind your desk and bark orders. Get out there and engage with your staff.
Let me share with you some key stats about employee engagement and how it has a dramatic effect on the performance of your business:
On average, 53% of employees globally report feeling engaged at work.
So, that means just over half of employees in the workforce actually feel engaged. There’s another 47% that are unengaged. That leads to poor productivity and customer experience. They won’t be meeting their sales targets or performance targets.
Employees whose managers consistently acknowledge them for good work are five times more likely to stay at the company.
As a leader or manager, if you are constantly acknowledging the good work that your staff or team is doing, then those staff members are going to stay on long-term at the company. They’re going to feel engaged. They’re going to have a better experience. The flipside is, if you are constantly reprimanding your staff, then they’re not going to produce the results that you need them to, and chances are, they’re not going to stay with your company for long.
Engaged employees generate 2.5 times more revenue compared to unengaged employees.
As I mentioned, engaged employees definitely produce better results and outcomes.
Unengaged employees or employees that have bad experiences at work, take 15 more sick days than engaged employees or other average workers.
As you can see, productivity is certainly affected when people are unengaged and have poor experiences in their workplaces. These key stats clearly highlight the importance of creating great employee experiences and engaging more with your employees. At the end of the day, employee engagement produces better performance and productivity from your staff, and that, in turn, results in a better-performing and successful business.
