3 keys to unlocking a positive employee experience

Employee experience (EX) concerns the quality and nature of the employee’s dealings with an organisation. Getting it right can mean a more engaged and productive workforce.

Employees who report a positive employee experience are 16 times more engaged than those who report a negative one, and eight times as likely to want to stay at a company.

EX plays a role in every stage of the employee life cycle – from pre-onboarding notions about the company through to exit and post-exit relations. A concept as broad as EX can be difficult to quantify, let alone implement.

Naturally, salary, benefits, and culture play a crucial role, but EX goes deeper into things beneath and between remuneration and policy. Things as mundane as coffee runs, daily check-ins, and breakrooms can all contribute to the EX.

“The employee experience is impacted by everything employees encounter, including your business’s commitment to fair hiring and promotion practices, its relationship with the local community, and even your manager’s likelihood of checking in with their teams daily,” said Culture Amp.

Despite the breadth of EX as an organisational goal, Hays said the following three considerations are central to ensuring your business offers a positive EX.

1. Having, and delivering on, a purpose

According to McKinsey, 70 per cent of employees say their purpose in life is defined by their work. Purpose-driven employees are more productive, harder working and healthier. As many as 90 per cent of employees would take a pay cut in exchange for more meaningful work.

As noted in a recent HR Leader article, employees are increasingly looking to their work for positive commitments to values they can agree with. Like organisational values, a purpose is only as good as the commitments made towards it.

“Effectively embedding the ‘why’ of your organisation, not just the ‘what’ needs to be tended to, in some way, every day,” said Hays.

“It should be reflected in training programs, internal communications, products, services, weekly conference calls, the benefits you offer – the list is endless in how you can ensure purpose becomes part of your organisation’s DNA.”

2. Effective use of technology

You might have heard the phrase: “Every company is a tech company.” In a sense, particularly since the pandemic when workplaces went remote, this is truer than ever. As noted in an article for the Harvard Business Review, since the hybrid reshuffle: “The technology experiences that employers provide will more or less define the employee experience – technology and workplace tools are, for all intents and purposes, the new workplace.”

Despite this, employees are often underwhelmed by the tech offerings of their employers. Forty-two per cent of employees lack essential office supplies at home, while one in 10 lack adequate internet connection.

The workforce is getting younger, and business’s IT functions are under pressure to keep up with the changing demands of their workers.

“When you don’t have a clear and accurate understanding of how your people use technology in their jobs, and what they need and want from those tools, the overall experience people have at work can suffer,” said PWC.

3. A productive physical environment

“The spaces in which we work greatly influence our ability, experience, and emotional connection to the work that we do,” said Hays.

While some have suggested that hybrid working has stripped the value of a shiny office space, indeed, experts have predicted major real estate market ramifications on the back of the hybrid shift as commercial areas are abandoned, while cafes and stores in residential areas are looking forward to higher revenue.

According to Hays, however, the state of your physical office space will still be determinative when it comes to the quality of your EX: “Despite our new hybrid working arrangements, organisations are still investing in creating spaces that adapt to our new uses of the office and the employee experience in those spaces.”

“How an office space influences the employee experience changes throughout their life cycle in a role. At the attraction stage, a well-fitted-out and designed office space can create great first impressions of the entire organisation, while at the learning and development stage, a space that allows for large groups to come together can facilitate lectures and in-person learning programs,” concluded Hays.