7 Tips to Improve Your Employee Experience

Workplaces have evolved tremendously in recent years. With the advent of remote and hybrid work, people are more likely than ever to switch jobs if they don’t feel fulfilled or valued in their current position. Providing a good employee experience is the best way for employers to ensure longevity in their workforce.

According to a recent Glassdoor poll, 77% of employees consider employee experience a primary motivating factor when looking at jobs. Employee experience is one of the best investments businesses can make toward their hiring efforts.

This article will give seven actionable tips for building or improving your employee experience program.

1.  Provide growth opportunities for a better employee experience

It’s a no-brainer but keeping your employees engaged and fulfilled in their position means they are far more likely to stay. Whether it’s because your company offers growth opportunities or relevant perks, you should see these initiatives as reasons for your employees to stay with you.

While employees are expected to grow naturally in any position, companies nowadays hold an even bigger role in that regard. The best way to show your staff you genuinely care about them is to offer them opportunities to better themselves, like training courses or mentorship.

To ensure these perks are used, companies must formalize them into programs. At first, courses can be as simple as lunch-and-learns from fellow employees to gauge interest and grow into programs with invited professionals and formal education credits. Here are some ways to build an environment where your employees feel like they can grow:

Employee development programs

Whether this is achieved via education credits or on-the-job training, it is crucial to remember that your employees are always seeking to improve their skills. This can be daunting while juggling a full-time job and other responsibilities. People who are supported in that endeavour by their employer will always be more likely to look into growing within the current company instead of leaving for a new job to do so.

Cross-functional experiences

Your company’s various departments have much more in common than you might think. In fact, certain skills can only be taught by co-workers within a specific context. For example, high-management roles should spend at least one day a year shadowing someone doing the lowest level of tasks at the company or even executing them to get an idea of the working conditions and gain insights to improve them.

Mentorship programs

Mentors can be a crucial part of any career development, but it can often be a difficult ask for most people. A formalized mentor-mentee matching process is the best way to skip the awkwardness of finding a mentor. This will also ensure a proper match between the two people involved since your company has the people insight data to make the best connections.

2.  Streamline your hiring process

Putting in place a formal employee experience program not only forces you to review your hiring process, but you’ll also end up optimizing it to get the best return possible. Employee experience should begin in your hiring process and is often the most crucial step.

Blind hiring

By anonymizing all resumes, your company will effectively promote inclusiveness and highlight the most important qualifications: the candidate’s skills and experience. This will also make candidates more comfortable knowing that there are reduced chances of biases or conflicts of interest.

Streamline your hiring process.

No one likes a long, drawn-out interview process. It’s a burden on the organization and often turns away potential candidates. A phone screen, meeting with the direct manager, meeting with co-workers for culture fit, and a skill test, if needed, should be more than enough to assess the adequacy of a candidate for any role. 

Data-driven hiring

In addition to the point above, keeping track of a few key metrics about your hiring process is a good idea. These should be personalized to your organization, but general ones like time from first contact to hire, the time between interviews, and conversion rate are crucial for any company to assess the health of their hiring process.

Candidate Experience

Asking job candidates for feedback on their experience with your hiring process is an important step in helping you optimize your program. A candidate experience survey should be sent at the end of the interview process, regardless of what decision you make.

3.  Build Employee advocacy

The ultimate goal is reaching a point where your employees are so content with their work experience that they brag about it to their friends and family. If you have the best employee experience around, you’ll hardly need to invest in finding workers; referrals from your existing workforce will be more than enough.

Referral bonuses

Offering a monetary reward remains the single best way to increase internal referrals. The typical bonus amount ranges from $500 to $1000 and is consistently cheaper than typical recruitment discovery methods.

Social media advocacy programs

Sharing success and events isn’t a reflex, but it can play a crucial role in building your company’s brand. It must be part of a fully-fledged program to be successful. For example, write a few examples of your company’s success so people can copy and paste them into their social media. This can be tied to small in-office incentives or gift cards to larger successes like acquisitions, funding, etc.

Be the result you want to see

Many employees look up to their managers to understand what is expected of them. If they see the executive level of their employer consistently advocating and sharing news about the company, your staff will surely follow suit.

4.  Don’t overestimate material offerings

A common trap for employers is to focus on perks like food and coffee, thinking it’s enough to build a pleasant workplace. Not only is this now a very common perk, but fewer employees value the offerings at a physical office.

Offering physical activity, transportation subsidies, or home office credits are much more flexible perks that align with what people are currently looking for in an employer.

5.  Spend time on onboarding and offboarding.

These are often the most overlooked aspects of employee experience. According to a recent Gallup poll, only 12% of employees say their organization does an excellent job at onboarding new employees. Not only is onboarding your first impression to new staff, a good one will allow you to get them up and running as quickly as possible to start getting a return on your investment.

Offboarding when employees leave is another aspect that often doesn’t get enough love from employers. Exit interviews and last-day surveys can provide you with critical data points and can often be the only way to uncover specific issues within your company.

6.  Identify employee traits that matter

When hiring and building your team, it’s crucial to have the executive team agree on a series of traits they are looking for in their employees. Make sure these aren’t boilerplate qualities like “hardworking” and have them truly align with your goals.

It’s a good idea to crowdsource these traits by asking your top employees how they see themselves and how they’d like to grow. This practice will make you hone in on qualities that made your business successful while ensuring your staff feels represented.

7.  Invest in an employee feedback tool

All of these measures hinge on one main resource: proper employee data gathering. Companies can only know if their workforce needs mentorship, is using the perks provided, or if they identify with their employer by regularly gathering insights.

Using a holistic People Insights platform like Explorance Blue to accomplish this task allows you to automate the process, making it much less tedious while establishing this as a tradition within the company. The very act of feedback collection shows that the employer cares about the voice of their employee by making decisions based on data.

Next steps toward improving your employee experience

The tips mentioned in this article only work if they become formal programs that your organization fully supports. Employee affects every single portion of a business, and the first step toward improving it is always to get executive support.

An employee experience program must start from the top in order to have an impact. It also must be regularly updated to reflect the changing nature of any workforce. Again, this is only possible if you have the proper employee insights to allow you to make these decisions.