You must have heard about customer feedback, attention, and experience from your boss, colleagues, or corporate friends. But how many times have terms like employee engagement, employee journey, or employee satisfaction made it to your ears? If the answer is quite a few times, your or your friend’s employer knows the importance of measuring employee experience. But are they doing it the right way?
I raised this question because if the employee experience management is good, engagement will increase, and high employee engagement can increase the overall revenue by 2.5 times! And your IT team plays a huge role in that.
How? You got to dive deep into this blog where I’ve discussed exactly what is IT’s role in providing remarkable employee experience. And how has it become even more vital in the new normal? Plus, there’s a bonus section as well! Let’s get started, then.
Measuring Employee Experience: What Employee Experience Actually Means
Before I get started on the main topic of discussion, this quickly needs to be addressed. Why? Because there’s a lot of confusion among organizations when it comes to employee experience. There are some who think putting up their organization’s values on walls, abiding by them, and celebrating their employee’s birthdays is employee experience. And managing that is employee experience management. Well, that’s not what it really means. Nor does employee experience means creating an environment where no work gets done and everything’s for free!
To give you a succinct explanation, employee experience is a shift in mentality where leaders stop assuming that people need to work in their organizations and start creating an environment where people actually want to work.
Measuring Employee Experience: Why is it Important For Your Organization?
Because of this fast-changing world! Yes, measuring employee experience, providing employee satisfaction, and improving employee journey has become extremely important because of the way people want to work now. Just look around you, people are renting out their place on Airbnb, they’re creating products to sell on Etsy, creating profiles on Upwork or Fiverr based on their skills, and it goes on. So, people are not necessarily dependent on a job to run their homes.
Now, look at the immense opportunities a platform like Linkedin is giving to these skilled people. They and the recruiters are just a message away from each other. Hence people can change jobs easily. And in a world like this, your organization can get loyal employees only when they have a robust employee experience structure in place where the employees’ want to work’ rather than ‘made to work.’ You know what, let me quickly talk about the other significant advantages it brings.
- Increased Productivity: In an organization lacking a proper employee experience management system, an employee is constantly interacting with HR for even the smallest of things. From paid leaves to availing benefits, there’s just a lot of paperwork, and hence, a lot of wasted time. All of which is a sheer loss of productivity.
- Better Culture: A proper employee experience system adds to an organization’s culture. How? Because everyone knows their work, their benefits, and their goals really well. Plus, everyone is connected well with each other because of the transparency they get with this system. So, when the culture is great, the results tend to be the same!
- The Brand Image: This plays an important role in any corporation’s growth, isn’t it? Now, brand image isn’t just formed by your customers, but by your employees as well. Glassdoor is a prime example of how employees can voice their opinions about their employers. And, 60% of the customers say that they wouldn’t use a business if it has negative reviews. Providing a good employee journey and experience can save your organization from all this and help massively with their brand image.
- Impressive Customer Service: This goes without saying because when you’re investing adequately in forming a strong employee experience system, the employees would be happy and content at work. And they’ll pass the same vibe to your customers. If your customers are happy, they will spread the word about you, hence getting you new customers. That’s how it works!
- Increased Profitability: All the pointers mentioned above would lead to this at the end! Glassdoor conducted a survey where they formed a portfolio of companies that were deemed as the best places to work and tracked their stock performance for 11 months. The result? This portfolio gave an average return of 3.4% compared to the 1.2% given by the S&P 500.
The IT teams around the world play a huge role in making all this a reality, and without their efficient working, measuring employee experience and improving employee journey would not be possible. So, how do they do it, and why their role is crucial? Let’s dig deep on that.
How Do You Measure Employee Experience: The Role of IT
The heading says it all, isn’t it? Your IT team and IT leader is responsible for implementing the right employee experience structure in the organization with the help of cutting edge technology and support systems. They are the ones who streamline every process and make it accessible to everyone in the organization, thus preventing confusion and increased workloads among the employees.
Intrigued, are you? Do you want to know how exactly do they do this? Well, here you go.
- Being The Active Listener
- The Solution Provider
- Creating The Ecosystem
- Maintaining Transparency
- Keeping it Up And Running
- The New Normal
#1. Being The Active Listener
When it comes to working on an employee experience system, the first thing is to form a synergy between what the employees expect and what the organization needs from them. And this task comes under the work scope of the IT team. Why? Because they’re the ones who are going to work towards finding solutions for this synergy.
Now, this step is pivotal because every organization has a different employee experience system and a different way of measuring employee experience. So, knowing the people and the experiences they’re having becomes the first step towards working on improving them. Since this step is so important in implementing a successful experience system, it would take the IT teams forever to do if proceeded manually! But the team at companies like Mphasis and other top brands got done with this step quickly and efficiently. How? By using SurveySparrow‘s powerful surveys! We found that the employees really liked the conversational surveys that even the survey completion rate was spiked by nearly 40%. Here’s a survey created using SurveySparrow..
To create similar engaging surveys, you can create a free account.
The collection of data from such surveys and interactions allows the IT team to outline the major problems and organizational values, ultimately pointing them in the direction where they can start finding technological solutions. This step is important because, in the end, the IT team clearly knows what employees want and what they don’t. So, they don’t end up working on the wrong side of the funnel!
#2. The Solution Provider
This is where the IT teams really prove their worth! And if collecting relevant data was tough, providing customized solutions to achieve the right employee experience is a different challenge altogether. The important point to consider here is that providing the right employee satisfaction by improving their employee experience & journey is not a single task. It’s a group of solutions to different underlying problems, that involve different technological innovations and continuous iterations. So, the role played by the IT teams here is highly extensive and detailed. Let me talk about the different types of problems they face here.
- Employees are not satisfied with just the options when it comes to their benefits and perks. They want further context and insights on each of these options to make better decisions.
- A virtual benefits counselor like Alex is what they ideally want. Employees today want to do simple transactions and work by themselves. They don’t want to take multiple rounds of the HRs office for that.
- They want the necessary information to be easily available and accessible to them. Employees don’t want to ask others for a piece of information that should’ve been already given to them.
- The employees, or even candidates, want to interact quickly, easily, and on a timeline that works for them, not just for the HRs or the recruiter.
- The systems on which the employees operate don’t often work together. These different systems don’t share information about the employee with one another, and that’s a loss of productivity and time.
You see, these are some problems for which, providing quick and efficient solutions is the responsibility of the IT team. And measuring employee experience becomes possible only after these solutions reach everyone in the organization. Tough work, isn’t it?
#3. Creating The Ecosystem
The IT teams tackle multiple employee experience problems at once, and the job is not done even after the solutions are found. Why? Because these are mostly individual solutions and not a part of any common ecosystem.
Creating a structure for this pool of solutions becomes vital for efficient employee experience management & improvement. And the IT team spends a good chunk of time understanding an automated workflow or framework for this. So, if finding solutions are tough, then putting it into a proper system is not a cakewalk either.
Cisco, the giant networking solution provider, has adopted the concept of employee experience really well. They’ve found nagging problems of their employees and their IT team has turned the office building into a solution provider. How? By putting the different solutions & software under a well-developed framework and system. So now, if any employee comes up with a new problem, they know how to get to the solution real quick, and their office building helps them do that!
#4. Maintaining Transparency
After the whole system is laid with the proper framework, it becomes requisite to keep it transparent, right from the leaders to the new employees. Why is it so important? It’s because it builds trust among employees in their leaders and the organization. And that takes the employee experience to another level. As when they trust the system and the process, they trust the organization. This proves that they’re working at this place not just for the perks and monetary compensation, but because of this transparent environment, which empowers them to do and be better every day. And that’s powerful, isn’t it?
Here’s a recent example from NVIDIA, a graphics processing giant, that I want to give here. They, with their 3,000 strong employees, took a major and completely transparent decision amid the coronavirus crisis. What’s more, they allowed their employees to work from home before the California Governor declared a statewide lockdown.
Additionally, NVIDIA moved the yearly employee performance reviews by nearly six months to put salaries into their workforce’s hands so they can fare well during the pandemic. And just look at the way NVIDIA is performing now! This transparent “people first” commitment helped them send a message that being transparent about your decisions, tough or easy, is how you get loyal employees who’re willing to give their all for your organization.
#5. Keeping it Up And Running
This segment of work by the IT team in measuring employee experience and managing it often goes unnoticed. But this is crucial in the overall process too. Because employee experience and employee journey are turned into a robust system only when there are constant iterations and optimizations in the solutions. As new problems arise constantly and they need to be solved quickly so the productivity isn’t compensated. And this makes running this integrated system efficiently crucial, and a good IT team would do that effectively.
There you go. These are the top roles that the IT guys and their teams play in creating a system where measuring employee experience becomes easy, thereby giving some concrete insights. But things have changed a bit because of the ongoing pandemic, and your IT team need to make the system more robust now. How can they do it? Read on to find it.
#6. The New Normal
The pandemic is not over yet, but I’m optimistic it’ll be over soon. However, it did bring some changes that would stay post the dust settles down. The most prominent one was the WFH culture, where employees were asked to work from the comfort of their homes. In the beginning, this step looked promising, but we quickly saw the clear downsides of it, especially when there’s no efficient employee experience management system to tackle the changes.
It took them time, but companies have finally started to get a grasp of the situation now, which is commendable under the given scenario. And if your IT team needs help in measuring employee experience and improving employee satisfaction in the new normal, I’ve pointed you in the right direction in the Bonus section!
Bonus: Bringing Employee Experience in The New Normal
- Employee Wellbeing: After witnessing this pandemic, every company must think about their employee safety and well-being. According to a BCBS poll, most employee’s biggest wellness concern in 2020 is mental and emotional health. Employee wellness is not just a feel-good initiative by companies anymore. After pandemic, it has become one of the crucial reasons for employee experience management.
- Training The Employees: It has become a necessity to think of ways to solve this problem in the WFH culture. Here’s a possible solution. You can create strong employee experience management by introducing your employees to online training platforms. You can create custom development programs according to your employee’s requirements here. Such employee experience software can create, track, assign, and manage the training effectively. From Looop, Tovuti, SkyPrep to LearnUpon LMS, you’ll get multiple options to assign a wide range of training courses.
- 360-Degree Assessment: As an IT leader, you have an important role to play in employee experience management. You can help the HR team evaluate their performance and provide feedback over their entire employee journey. Constructive feedback will help them boost productivity and create a better work environment.
- Effective Collaboration: Remote work has become a new reality. Before the pandemic happened, 7 million people were already working remotely. Now while working remotely, your employees can’t afford to work efficiently without digital collaboration. They have to connect via video calls, file sharing, and chat to collaborate with their team in real-time. Only then they’ll be able to focus on improving customer experience effectively.
Wrapping Up
You’ve read it till here, so you already understand your IT team’s massive role when it comes to providing the right employee experience. From addressing the problem, to maintaining the system, they do their work effectively, and in-turn helps their organization immensely. And if your IT guys are struggling to cope with this because of the pandemic, the bonus section would get you started on the right track.
All that remains is for you to start implementing these steps and take your organization’s employee experience system to the next level. We’re sure you will!
