It’s 2021, the year that companies around the world learn to shift their focus over to their employee experience. An excellent employee experience brings along plenty of perks, including a happier and more productive workforce. If you work in digital product development, this is vital.
Today, we’re going to dive into what employee experience means, how it can impact your organization, and what you can do to improve the experience of your employees.
#What is Employee Experience?
Employee engagement and employee experience are two terms that are often confused. Employee engagement is the outcome of employee experience. So what is employee experience?
Employee experience represents the entire journey that an employee has at an organization. It encompasses every experience from interview to exit, including every moment and every interaction that the employee has during their time at the company.
A positive employee experience translates to measurable metrics that will help the business, whereas a negative employee experience typically results in decreased productivity or simply leaving the company behind.
#What Are the Goals of Employee Experience?
The focus of employee experience should always be on making employees feel motivated, valued, and engaged. You can do this by listening to employee feedback, but you should also understand how employees are feeling at a specific time in their career. Next, you take action on the things that are most important to each employee.
One of the main goals of employee experience is to create peak moments. A peak moment is any experience that is particularly meaningful to the employee. A peak moment could range from getting a promotion to being allowed to work from home. It’s those moments that stand out when an employee reflects on their time with your company.
Another important goal is to create a sense of fulfillment and even happiness within their current role. In digital product development, we’ve found that this typically happens when employees are free to operate autonomously using whichever tools they prefer.
#What Value Would a Better Experience Have on Your Organization?
Excellent employee experience brings multiple positive outcomes for your organization. Some of these outcomes are directly measurable, which helps to justify the focus on providing a positive employee experience. Below are some of the valuable outcomes that your organization may experience:
#Reduced Employee Turnover
Most employees don’t leave their jobs for better pay; instead, they leave from a sense of dissatisfaction in their current role. Having high turnover can absolutely destroy a company. You need to consider the cost of hiring, onboarding, and training a new employee. You’ll invest a significant amount of money into a new employee before they start adding value back into the company.
On top of the monetary loss, high turnover can devastate the culture of a company. Prioritizing a great employee experience will encourage employees to stick around.
#Increased Productivity
There have been countless studies that show that happier employees are more productive. Warwick University conducted one such study that showed that happy employees are 12% more productive -- this is a substantial increase! Essentially, providing an employee with a great work environment makes them perform their jobs with increased efficiency.
#Better Talent Attracted
Finding the right people to join your company can be expensive and time-consuming. Having a great employee experience will mean that your employees are more likely to recommend you on sites like Glassdoor or simply refer their similarly skilled friends to your company. Especially in the realm of digital product development, word spreads quickly when it comes to a positive work experience.
Investing in employee experience is an excellent way to ensure that your company attracts and retains the best people possible.
#How Do You Improve Employee Experience?
There are multiple effective ways to improve the employee experience. Let’s briefly go over some of the best things that you can do to provide a better experience to your employees:
#Understand their Experience
Lean on user research to understand employee sentiment. This can include running surveys, user interviews and user testing to understand how employees experience an internal tool or a process.
#Provide the Best Tools
Every department in your company should have the best tools available. You should also provide flexibility to allow employees to choose the tools that they want to use.
#Go Remote
Give your employees the option to work from home or come into the office. Don’t make either option mandatory. One of the perks of digital product development is the ability to complete the entire project without being in the same physical space. Make use of this by allowing employees to work how they want.
#Provide the Right Solutions
A lot of the times there are off-the-shelf solutions out there that will get the job done. In those cases, ensure that your employees are getting the best solution in the space.
For example, if you have a content website, consider using Drupal for your content management needs. This will give Content Editors the most creative control and the ability to work on any device.
Taking this a step further, ensure that you're working with the latest versions of such software. This will ensure the solution is always performant, secure and easy to use.
Other times, you might find that off-the-shelf solutions are only creating problems for employees. Particularly they're time consuming to use or create a lot of rework. In such cases, consider custom software solutions as this will reduce the time it takes employees to get things done and make them happier.
#Want to Use Code to Improve Your Employee Experience?
With Pulp is a UX design and development studio. We help clients increase productivity by providing their employees with the best user experience possible to get their jobs done. Contact us for a free consultation.