If you want to drive performance, it’s only smart to listen to the performers – yes, your employees. That’s especially crucial right now, what with so much uncertainty and tumult. The same is true for recruitment and retention, in terms of the importance of feedback. But alas: the traditional annual employee survey no longer alone cuts it. You need a way to remain continuously attached to your workforce and gain actionable employee insights.
Read on for more on monitoring your employee experience.
What is Meant by Employee Experience?
Let’s start there. Essentially, employee experience crystallizes what employees encounter and perceive during their tenure at an organization.
Increasingly, employees are looking for more than a paycheck. For one thing, they want to be proud of their organization and to feel part of a community that is contributing positively to society.
Read More: 5 Tips for Hiring Employees for Your Team
Why is the Employee Experience Important?
Tightening up the employee experience has advantages that are all tied to job satisfaction, which is directly linked to profits and marketplace growth. Some of the benefits include:
- Heightened productivity. If your workers are engaged and motivated, they tend to be more productive as well as loyal. They’ll hang with you if they feel like they and their viewpoints are valued. On the other hand, unmotivated employees can have a major, deleterious affect on an organization’s reputation, standing and bottom line.
- Employees show up. It’s simple: satisfied employees are absent from the job less. By contrast, unsatisfied employees are absent more, which drags down productivity, profits, and workplace morale.
- Better work quality. Not to get all metaphysical, but it just makes sense: happy workers tend to be more invested in the organization, which in turn promotes creativity and getting employees’ best. What you don’t want are workers who are doing just enough to get by.
- Better customer relations. Employee experience is directly tied to customer experience since happy employees tend to go out of their way, subconsciously or not, to make customers happy.
How Do Organizations Gauge the Employee Experience?
There are various ways to measure the employee experience, which typically comes down to physical space, workplace technology and organization culture. So, how do you assess it?
Well, you can conduct employee experience surveys, examine workplace data, and see what other organizations are doing. Surveys are particularly effective, which is why they’re so widely used. If you’re strategic about it, you can gain deep employee experience insights that can increase employee retention and performance and improve your organization’s culture.
Pulse surveys seem to be most effective since they’re carried out on a regular basis (monthly, quarterly, etc.) to gauge employees’ views on work-related subjects — such as the overall work environment — that are not confined to specific subjects or content.
The thing about pulse surveys, which are usually part of an employee listening program, is that they’re short and quick, which is more conducive to full participation. Different from engagement and ad-hoc employee surveys, pulse surveys track the same item over time, are shorter than other employee surveys and are easier to complete and occur at regular intervals.
In sum, monitoring your employee experience is more important than ever. No longer can workforce decisions be made in “silos” or boardrooms by the organization’s brain trust with no consideration of employee perceptions or attitudes. Gaining actional insights is part and parcel of enhancing the employee experience, and we know that satisfied employees result in satisfied customers, promulgating a bottom line with which everyone is satisfied. If you need help “listening” to your workforce, we suggest giving Mercer a call.
