*Six Key Factors for Optimizing Your Employee Experience Strategy*
Workday Staff Writer
Our 2022 Workday survey Closing the Acceleration Gap: Toward Sustainable Digital Transformation found that 50% of HR leaders are focusing on positive employee experiences to accelerate transformation across their business. But employee experience has moved beyond being solely a CHRO initiative. CFOs, CIOs, and other key business leaders are increasingly focused on providing employees with a personalized omni-channel experience.
According to this Deloitte report, 68% of executives agreed that future workforce strategies will be more customized to individual needs. So how can businesses ensure they meet each employee’s long-term needs? Here are six factors every company should consider.
Any effort to improve employee experience has to start with the essentials. These are the base requirements that any employee should be guaranteed, regardless of their location, identity, or even their job performance. At a basic level, an employer is expected to provide an employee with the equipment and solutions necessary to do their work. In turn, an employee carries out their work as outlined in their contract.
But guaranteeing the essentials doesn’t only refer to tools and pay. Employers need to consider how each person functions best when evaluating their onboarding processes, work environments, and remote work options. For such an evaluation to be successful, self-reporting is critical, since what’s considered essential will typically differ between people and cultures.
Employers also have to ensure that support is in place for employee burnout, stress, and well-being. A 2022 Mercer study found that 81% of the 13,384 respondents said that they were concerned about burning out. If you treat your people like cogs in a machine, the effects can be as damaging as they are widespread.
Remote work has forced many organizations to reassess their company culture. Part of that is ensuring that an employee who onboards remotely has the same quality journey as someone joining in person. To truly bridge the global workforce, we need to meet each employee where they work, on their own terms.
That level of personalization requires a renewed focus on digital solutions. If a company’s HR systems are confusing to an employee on location, then they’ll actively hinder a remote employee. The power of the IT function is in providing employees with adaptable experiences. Companies that put their people first will face the next seismic shift in how we work from a far stronger position.
In the new world of work, every company has to consider how their teams interact digitally. Our CFO Indicator Study of 267 global CFOs found that 97% believed technology was critical to attracting and retaining talent. In addition, nearly half (48%) were actively looking to invest in such technology over the next 5 years.
In the past, working with clunky digital interfaces was commonplace. But today employees expect work applications to be of the same quality as the ones on their mobile phones. That means companies have to employ intuitive user interfaces, strong integrations between applications, and smooth user experiences.
Not only does this shift necessitate user-friendly technology, it also increasingly demands solutions with artificial intelligence baked in. Machine learning is promoting major changes across the workplace, including automating employee experience surveys and delivering hyper-personalized employee journeys. With workforces becoming increasingly tech savvy, companies have to match the current pace of technological development.
There’s no glossing over employee needs when it comes to skills development and talent performance. Our “Employee Expectations Report 2022” found that scores surrounding professional growth are 13% higher with employees who stay over those who leave. Ensuring your employees are supported in their development is critical to employee retention.
While traditional career growth has been fixed to salary increases and promotions, workers now expect regular opportunities to develop. These might include learning new skills or finding “sprint projects” where they can contribute expertise outside of their existing position. Those small moments that matter are often essential to increasing employee sentiment around growth.
By working together, the offices of the CIO and CHRO can create a skills taxonomy and identify potential skills gaps, enabling employees to contribute skills that fall outside of their existing roles. Companies that provide their employees with internal opportunities promote a culture of growth that doesn’t rely solely on financial reward and employee migration. The resulting benefits to employee satisfaction and business performance will speak for themselves.
Every individual within your company has unique aspects of their identity. Creating an inclusive work environment is about enabling those unique attributes to flourish together. If people lack the psychological safety to bring their best selves to work, there will be major negative consequences.
The Deloitte “Global 2022 Gen Z and Millennial Survey” analyzed sentiment toward employer progress in creating a diverse workplace; 52% of millennials who were “very satisfied” expected to stay beyond 5 years. Conversely, 52% of millennials who were “not satisfied at all” said they wanted to change companies within 2 years. To create sustainable change, it’s critical that businesses gather, assess, and act on their diversity metrics.
It can be a humbling experience to acknowledge past and present shortcomings, but without proper diversity analytics you won’t be able to create an effective employee experience strategy. By forming a cross-functional partnership, HR can use the data acquired by IT to reduce biases in hiring practices, create dedicated diversity roles, and cultivate a culture where everyone belongs.
By measuring employee engagement through regular surveys, you give employees a chance to speak up on all of the above issues. Additionally, you enable employees to see how their opinions contribute to wider business initiatives. When you empower the employee voice, employee experience will always benefit. But what does empowering the employee voice actually entail?
The first step is committing to asking your employees questions regularly and reliably with pulse surveys. By asking employees the right question at the right time, you enable them to speak about issues as they happen. Consistent employee feedback is at the backbone of positive experiences and performance management.
Next, you need a platform that provides people leaders access to real-time employee sentiment data. In Workday Peakon Employee Voice, you can break down engagement scores by topic, team, and other influencing factors. Then you can also benchmark your scores against the market. By acting on what you learn, you create a culture where employees not only feel listened to, they also feel heard.
Ultimately, the insights your business needs to succeed aren’t online, they’re with your employees. To create a positive employee experience, every branch of your company, from the CFO to the CIO, needs to take a people-first approach to strategy. At each stage, your employees and their voice have to be the focus.
The best employee experience is one that’s scarcely noticed, where each employee feels that their needs are being met automatically. By freeing them of unnecessary frictions, each employee will have space to develop into their best selves. In turn, your business will flourish too.
Go deeper into employee experience with our eBook The Evolution of Employee Experience.
