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Milton Nyamadzawo

Correspondent

There’s an undeniable link between employee experience and customer experience and many employees are overjoyed by helping customers.

However, when a customer gives a compliment, the employee rarely hears about it. It is a widely accepted view that customer experience is elevated at the expense of employee experience.

Maybe it is from the old adage that the customer is the king and the lifeblood of the business. For organisations to maintain their competitive advantage, their people need to be performing to the best of their abilities.

However, in a world of increasing stress and pressure, rapid technological changes and digital overload, supporting and developing employees has never been more difficult.

To develop top performing employees, human resources professionals need to move beyond ad hoc engagement initiatives to design and embed employee experience.

Companies that are able to offer a great employee experience are the ones that successfully attract, retain, and engage the best talent.

According to Gallup, “employees have become consumers of the workplace.”

Creating a winning employee experience does not mean offering competitive salaries and decent benefits. Crafting a great employee experience calls for involvement across the entire company.

It is a holistic process.

A Holistic Employee Experience (HEX), leads to an appreciation that employee experience management implies a strategic approach in the design of today’s workplaces.

Employee experience (EX) is not a synonym for employee motivation, employee satisfaction or employee engagement.

However, all these three elements are connected: employee satisfaction has a direct impact on employee experience, employee motivation is a result of employee experience and employee experience has a great impact on employee engagement.

So, what does employee experience mean?

Essentially, employee experience includes all the observations, perceptions and feelings employees have about their role in the company and the company itself: its vision, values and goals.

The way employees feel about the company and their role has a great and direct impact on their morale, productivity and engagement.

Companies today cannot get by with just offering basic benefits like medical aid and funeral cover. They must go above and beyond and provide employees with an exemplary experience in the workplace.

How do we co-create employee experience?

There is a need to utilise employee journey mapping. An employee journey map is a way of visualising the various stages an employee goes through in their time with a company.

It allows you to identify main points and critical moments where employee feedback and action is needed to close the gap from a current to a desired state.

The best employee journey maps start with clearly defined outcomes. The employee lifecycle is critical because even if you do yearly employee engagement surveys, each employee is at a different stage in the employee journey.

It is difficult to understand how personal experiences shape the key outcomes of employee experience like engagement, motivation or productivity.

Improve internal communication

Internal communication teams do much more than just disseminating company information.

They foster a sense of community, encourage employees to work together for a common goal, and create a cohesive company culture.

When employees have an increased sense of purpose they are more productive and become brand advocates and ambassadors for the company. Internal communication must be used for maintaining a connection with employees and winning their trust.

In addition, as the workforce becomes more dispersed and mobile, internal communication is more important than ever. Keeping remote employees engaged is crucial in providing everyone in the company with the proper tools to communicate.

Design a great onboarding experience

Many companies do not have a new employee orientation programme, much less an employee on-boarding experience.

This is critical to employee success. In fact, according to the Harvard Business Review, 33 percent of new hires look for a new job within their first six months on the job and this can be largely attributed to their employee onboarding experience.

Implement stay interviews

How many of us conduct stay interviews in the workplaces? While exit interviews are valuable, they do not help you keep an employee who is about to leave.

Stay interviews are individual conversations between the manager and employee that help companies understand what is important to employees and get ahead of retention issues.

There should be an open dialogue used to build trust with employees, and gather their perspectives on their experiences.

By understanding what works and what does not, you can identify their motivation for staying with the organisation and work towards goals that keep them interested.

This technique also enhances internal talent pipelines and provides great insight into global areas for improvement as a company.

Invest in employee wellness

Active employees incur lower health costs, which saves your company time and money. However, employee wellness is more than just physical.

Programmes that encourage mental, emotional, and spiritual wellness create employees who are rested and more attentive and productive at work.

Companies should look to implement health and fitness programmes, sick time, paid vacation, paid parental leave, on-site gyms and health clinics. They should also provide healthy snacks, just to name a few ideas.

Act on employee feedback

Many organisations implement employee engagement and feedback surveys to understand where their employees are at, but not all act on that feedback.

This can backfire on employees and cause loss of trust. Employees are more likely to share their opinions and engage if they feel that they are being listened to.

They may stop giving feedback if they know that they won’t be heard. Successful companies communicate their action plans to employees and designate a person responsible for implementing the changes.

Offer career development programmes

Employees are more likely to stay at the company if they know there is room for career advancement. By putting programmes in place to train the next set of leaders, the company will gain loyal employees who understand that the organisation is investing in them.

Managers should have an individual development plan for their employees and discuss long-term career goals at least once a year.

Share customer feedback with your employees

There is an undeniable link between employee experience and customer experience. Many employees are overjoyed by helping customers.

However, when a customer gives a compliment, the employee rarely hears about it. Allowing customers to give feedback and sharing it with employees can boost employee confidence and give them a sense of purpose in their job.

Customer feedback should be broadcast throughout the entire organisation, not only recognising that the company is succeeding, but the employee as well.

There are no quick fixes to improve your employee experience. Creating a great EX is a total commitment. Because it includes every aspect of your business, you need to look at every employee lifecycle stage to craft a winning employee experience.

Employee experience begins with the discussions your recruiting team has with candidates, and it continues with your onboarding process and the professional development opportunities you create for your employees.

Do not forget that the off-boarding process will also impact the employee experience and your ex-employees’ willingness to advocate for your brand.

With employee experience now being recognised as a competitive advantage, employers are now working hard to clearly differentiate their experience from companies competing for the same talented people.

Questioning and challenging the status-quo in a way they have not done before, businesses and CEOs have never been as open to new approaches as they are right now. Attracting talent is at the forefront of their mind, and for real success, businesses worldwide are going deeper — much deeper — into the experience of work.

Before we embark on defining, designing and delivering new experiences, we must understand the core purpose of the business.

Behind every experience, our purpose will be seen, heard, and felt every day. It will be aligned, clear, and — increasingly — positioned in a way that connects the employee community to the outside world.

In this sense, every process, procedure, or policy can be viewed as an experience. It is this truth, when acted upon that sets the great HR functions apart from the good or average ones.

They deeply understand that anything they interact with affects the quality of the employee experience, and in turn, performance and business outcomes.

A compelling example, and a beat that we can all dance to, comes from Spotify, a company leading the music streaming industry with 70 million subscribers, and 140 million active users.

Leading the market is one thing, but staying ahead is an entirely different proposition when faced with competitors like Amazon and Apple.

To stay out in front, businesses need to consistently innovate, and not just maintain, but strengthen the connection with staff. For this to happen, there is no better way than focusing on the employee experience.

It is fact that every colleague can relate to the public holidays that are placed on the intranet or company notice boards, at Spotify.

They went beyond that and allowed staff to choose holidays that matter to them. Thus, staff can choose to work on a day that is a public holiday in the country they work in and swap it for another workday instead.

This means they can be off work on a day that fits their observations or beliefs better. This practice elevated inclusion, flexibility, and autonomy.

This purposeful ‘experience’ quickly captured the attention of a global audience (resulting in major brand outcomes); and shows what can be achieved when we apply the lens of ‘experience’ to HR work.

One of the best eating experiences in the world can be found at Haidilao, a Chinese hot pot restaurant chain.

It is as close to customer experience (CX) perfection as you can get, and it is quite difficult to find any other chain that can compete with it.

Behind the scenes, there is an industry-leading employee experience (EX) with some unique characteristics.

One of them is to immerse every employee into restaurant operations. Every entry-level employee will rotate around 50 different types of job.

Jobs include serving customers, preparing food in the kitchen, performing the pre-dining services, and a variety of other jobs.

Employees are supported with best-in-class technology to facilitate restaurant operations and services with a high degree of local autonomy.

Employees choose the kind of work they want to learn. The company then trains them directly and gives them opportunities to practice. People grow and develop in an engaged way, which also helps to create a vibrant, fun, and energetic working environment.

It is time now we see local brands adopting this important employee experience tool.