We firmly believe that employees are the most important stakeholder in a business.
Providing your employees with a quality experience is vital to your company’s success.
By providing a great experience, you’ll have happier and more productive employees. As an added bonus, you’ll reduce employee turnover.
Today, we’re going to dive into the ways that you can enhance your employee experience. While our tips are specifically catered to digital product development, they can apply to other industries, as well. Let’s get started!
#Give Employees the Best Tools for the Job
Every role in your company should include the best tools available. For example, content creators and editors should have access to a CMS that is fast and works well across multiple devices. In fact, that’s one of the reasons we love using Drupal.
In addition to providing the best tools available, make sure that you give your employees the upgrades to the tools they use.
Sometimes that means paying for the premium package of whichever tool they ask for. Your employees deserve the best; don't make them use any tool that is just "getting by."
This also means that you should let your team choose their own tools.
When it comes to programmers, letting them use the programming language, framework, and tools will go far in increasing their productivity and work enjoyment.
Designers may also have a preference of tools, so fulfill their requests, as well.
By providing your teams with the tools they want -- and the best versions of those tools -- you’ll quickly discover that your entire workforce is more productive and happier about their jobs.
#Let Your Team Go Remote-By-Default
There’s not really a good reason to have everyone commute to the office every day. Make your entire company remote-by-default. You should still have a headquarters and office space, but you don’t need employees to work eight hours per day in the office.
Instead, give your employees the option to work remotely or at the office.
You’ll discover that some people will always work remotely, while others will prefer getting out of the house and working in a shared space.
This change might require some updates to your infrastructure and security policies, but it will greatly improve the employee experience.
Not only will this increase the job satisfaction of existing employees, but it will also open up an entirely new pool of talent when it comes time to expand your product development team.
You can hire talent from all over the world instead of being limited to your local pool of talent.
#Give Your Teams the Ability to Self-Govern
Give every team the freedom to decide how they get the job done. They will appreciate the autonomy that allows them to choose their own work processes.
Self-governing means that each team can decide when and how they conduct meetings (synchronous or asynchronous, for example), the types of workflows that they’ll use on projects, and even when they work.
You’ll quickly see that product development is best completed with teams that are empowered to do as they see fit.
Autonomy in this field is vital, as it provides programmers and designers with more time to discover new and more creative solutions.
#Invest in Custom Solutions
You might discover that ready-made software solutions simply don’t exist for the task or process that you need a solution for.
Alternatively, the solution might exist, but it might require heavy customization.
If you find yourself in this situation, it’s well worth investing in a custom solution. Here’s a real-life example:
We once worked with a major enterprise company to modernize antiquated software that their entire company was using.
The executive team was bumping up into inefficiencies when trying to pull key reports and analytics to help them manage the business.
Company staff were becoming more and more frustrated as they had to spend a lot of time using the software to get their jobs done.
As this was a company-wide problem, we conducted a company-wide user research initiative to understand the biggest painpoints and develop a roadmap of priorities.
We heard from employees across the company about gaps, frustrations, and what worked well.
Not only did this help us to design a great new solution for them, but the employees were happy that they were being heard.
When the project was completed, employees loved the new solution, since it addressed their needs and concerns.
This eased tension between the staff and executive team, and helped all employees be far more productive in their roles.
Custom solutions allow the specific needs and desires of your employees to be heard and addressed.
While this can often be done with off-the-shelf software, some processes simply require a solution that’s crafted specifically for your teams.
Don’t shy away from investing in something that will make your employees’ lives easier.
#We’re Here to Help
As a product development agency, we are well versed in the best ways to consult with other companies to boost employee experience.
If you feel like you could be providing your employees with a better experience, but you aren’t sure where to begin, we’re here for you.
With Pulp is a UX design and development studio. We help clients to increase productivity by providing their employees with the best user experience possible to get their jobs done.
Contact us for a free consultation.