Employee Experience Management: The What, Why, and How

Employee experience management helps align talent acquisition and employee retention with your overall business goals.

Companies are increasingly recognizing the critical importance of their employees and have started to invest in employee experience.

In fact, it’s become so prevalent that entire roles and departments are dedicated to building a positive employee experience.

While company leaders know the value and importance of their employees’ well-being and happiness, only 9% of business leaders believe they are ready to address the issue, according to research from Deloitte.

When you align the values of your employees with those of your company, you help them find meaning and purpose in the work they do.

Employee experience (EX) management has been created to deliver an employee experience that’s positive and human-centered.

When done right, it leads to an overall improvement in performance, revenue, and customer happiness.

Here’s what we’ll cover in this article:

What is employee experience management?

Why is employee happiness and experience so important?

The main goals of employee experience management

The key milestones in the employee experience

How to design a strong employee experience

What is Employee Experience Management?

Employee experience management involves managing and optimizing each touchpoint an employee has with your company over the course of their tenure, from recruiting to onboarding and exiting your company.

It involves facilitating positive encounters, preventing negative viewpoints, and ensuring employee satisfaction and engagement.

It’s about creating a positive employee experience that helps employees perform and think at their best. The ultimate goal is to get them more involved, invested, and engaged with your company. This helps you build effective teams and retain top talent.

Employee experience management requires an array of skills. But most importantly, it requires empathy and emotional intelligence.

In addition to investing in customer experience, companies have now started to invest in employee experience. Most companies have realized how important their employees are for the growth of their company.

Research shows that organizations that have nailed their employee experience achieve twice the customer satisfaction and innovation, and generate 25% higher profits than the ones that haven’t.

Read on to learn more about the benefits of investing in employee experience.

Why is Employee Happiness and Experience So Important?

Here are some benefits of improving your employee experience:

1. Improved engagement: A good employee experience leads to more employee engagement. Most companies measure and improve employee engagement since it’s highly correlated with turnover and the amount of effort employees put into their work.
2. Reduced attrition: Your company will experience reduced attrition since engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave your organization.
3. Improved revenue: Organizations with highly engaged employees made 2.5 times more revenue than the ones with minimally engaged staff.
4. Most engaged employees (70%) believe they can effectively fulfill customer needs compared to 17% of minimally engaged employees.
5. Company review sites give a peek into the kind of experience a candidate would have if he or she were to join your company, which will affect the number of good candidates you can hire.

The Goals of Employee Experience Management

Here are the main goals of employee experience management:

Scaling the Employee Experience

As a company grows, it gets harder to ensure that every employee has a voice and feels heard.

You need effective feedback channels and tools to help your employees feel connected to each other and your mission.

Translating Data into Insights

With the help of workforce analytics software, you can now get the key metrics needed for optimizing the entire employee experience.

This data helps you create targeted experiences that couple employee interests with company goals.

Maintaining Workplace Culture

Establishing workplace culture is about finding your company’s core purpose. 88 percent of employees believe that a distinct culture is important to organizational success, according to research by Deloitte.

Defining your company culture begins with identifying your company’s mission, vision, and values.

Improving Internal Communication

EX transformation has led to a major change in the structural position of internal communication.

Internal communicators use specific channels of communication and marketing strategies to target specific audiences throughout the entire employee lifecycle.

Catering to the Needs of Younger Workers

One main goal is to manage the expectations and needs of a younger workforce.

Millennials are predicted to account for 75% of the global workforce by 2025.

And millennials are also the most likely generation to switch jobs, with six out of ten open to new opportunities.

Strengthening the Employer Brand

One of the main responsibilities of EX management is to promote your brand internally and influence the way your employees think about your company.

You can create genuine advocates by inspiring your employees with positive experiences.

The Key Milestones in the Employee Experience

Now that you know the main goals and responsibilities of employee experience management, let’s take a look at the three main stages of the employee lifecycle and how you can use surveys at each stage.

1. Attraction / Recruitment

This is the stage where you establish trust with a potential hire and get them further interested in working for you.

How Surveys Can Help You Improve this Process:

Get real feedback from your potential candidates on the experience of applying for a job at your company and the initial interactions.

What does the whole experience really look like from the eyes of your job candidates? A survey can help you answer that question. You can get their feedback on:

• the application process,
• the interview content,
• the behavior of individuals they interacted with, etc.

2. Onboarding

This stage begins when a potential hire accepts your job offer. In this stage, you get the newly hired employees up and running smoothly.

How Surveys Can Help You Improve this Process:

A survey can help you quickly identify any inconsistencies in training or knowledge. You can ask them questions about:

• the quality of information they received
• why they decided to join your company

3. Exit

This is the point where your employees leave your company.

It’s never been more important to stay engaged with your employees now that the average tenure is on the decline.

How Surveys Can Help You Improve this Process:

An exit survey helps you understand the reason behind an employee’s decision to leave your company. It could have been because there was a conflict of values, they were unhappy, or for some personal reason.

How to Design a Strong Employee Experience

Here are some steps you need to take to build a strong employee experience:

Determine Your Highest Priority

The first step is to identify the problems and bottlenecks in your employee lifecycle funnel. You’re not getting enough applications? Then you may want to focus on the attraction/recruitment stage.

Are you experiencing a high turnover rate? Then you should focus on improving an employee’s exit experience.

Start Collecting Data

Once you’ve identified your focus area, the first thing you need to do is to start capturing data.

Get enough feedback to draw connections and make meaningful decisions.

Take Action on Feedback

Now that you have a lot of valuable information, it’s time to put it to good use.

All the data you collected is for nothing if you don’t put it into action!

Take a close look at both your aggregate and individual results.

Final thoughts

Successful EX management covers all the touchpoints throughout the entire employee lifecycle and helps you ensure every employee feels empowered and supported.

Looking for the right tools to manage your employee experience? Here’s an article from us on the best employee experience management software.

Here’s another article that helps you craft an effective employee experience strategy.

And here’s one more article that gives you instructions on how you can measure returns on employee experience.

Got any questions on employee experience management? Any interesting tips or techniques you use as an EX professional? Let us know about them in the comment section below. Looking to create surveys your employees will love answering? Feel free to check out SurveySparrow.