The total employee experience is affected by the work environment you provide to your employees as well as how they are treated.
There is no doubt that with a rather positive experience, even your leaving employees are worthwhile for you. So, learn everything you need to know in this regard below.
What is Total Employee Experience?
The view that employees have of their journey at an organization throughout their employee life cycle is a total employee experience. It begins with recruiting and extends until the employee leaves the organization.
It is important to consider how employees are regarded and whether they feel valued by their employer company or not.
While bonuses and financial incentives can temporarily motivate employees, creating a pleasant employee experience is more about becoming an employee-centric company by placing employees at the heart of every decision or employee experience strategy.
Why is Employee Experience important?
Employee experience, as explained above, takes into account every aspect of an employee starting from their first day to the day they exit. As for, why it is important, it is discussed below:
Productivity: When employees are engaged, they are more productive, and businesses are more profitable. Disengaged employees, on the other hand, cost businesses up to $550 billion in the form of lost productivity every year.
Employee Retention and Absenteeism: Highly engaged employees have a 41% less probability of being absent from work, and engaged organizations have up to 59% lower turnover.
Improved Customer Satisfaction: The customer experience may be directly influenced by the staff experience. Furthermore, employees who are happy and engaged may form positive emotional relationships with consumers and go beyond the job’s fundamental responsibilities. As a result, companies where employees have positive experience with company may have a high rating regarding customer satisfaction.
Enhanced work quality: Workplaces where employees are found to be highly engaged report a 41% decrease in quality incidents or product faults. And this indicates that employees are more focused and engaged when they care about their jobs and feel well-treated.
Elements involved in the Total Employee Experience
Employee experience factors such as lifecycle, personal, and daily experiences can help you in handling the complete employee experience improvement through various segments.
You may make use of these elements for a better employee experience management, and they’re explained as below:
1) Lifecycle Events
Lifecycle moments are key milestones in an employee’s career at an organization. They cover the time they join your company’s team until they leave for a new opportunity elsewhere. The lifecycle moments include the following: (they are discussed in detail in a later section)
- Recruitment
- Onboarding
- Engagement
- Training
- Exit
2) Personal Experiences
Personal moments are another aspect of the employee experience. They focus on personal development and the impact of large-scale organizational changes on your employees’ opinions about the organization and how it is operated.
3) Everyday Experiences
Everyday moments are associated with the experience that focuses on day-to-day operations. It covers topics such as:
- Experiencing time-consuming approaches
- Needing IT assistance
- Having creative ideas and seeing how people react to them
Remember that the creation of a culture that welcomes and appreciates employees throughout their employee life cycle is at the heart of the employee experience. Some strategies for improving employee experience include:
- Bringing an employee’s career ambitions and values in line with the values and mission of the company. EX (Employee Experience) increases when individual and company goals are linked.
- Making it possible for employees to combine their interests into their work.
- Investing in employee training and development to help them advance in their professions and careers.
- Employees should be recognized for their accomplishments, both as a group and as individuals.
Employee Experience and Employee Engagement: The Difference
It is the employee experience that transforms engaged employees into top performers. Additionally, the total employee experience covers all areas, from hiring until off-boarding. It also includes:
- The procedure for applying
- The interviewing procedure
- The process of onboarding
- Professional growth and training
- Career discussions and collaboration with internal teams
- Collaboration between managers and leaders
- Off-boarding
As we can see, the total employee experience encompasses all of the events that occur between an employee’s decision to apply to a company and their eventual leave.
Thus, the whole experience is influenced by day-to-day contacts, large-scale discussions, and access to education, learning tools, and relevant software to execute their job.
On the other hand, employee engagement is an element of the total employee experience; it involves so much more.
Employee engagement especially assesses the employee’s emotional outcomes and feelings regarding the aforementioned experiences.
Employee engagement’s outcomes should be the following:
- Feeling inspired to do good job or going above the board for their organization
- Being a part of the organizational culture (including in the remote setup)
- Feeling encouraged by the teams they collaborate with
In conclusion, you should understand that the total employee experience is a comprehensive approach to the employee lifecycle that is influenced by everything employees believe, feel, and experience. Employee engagement, on the other hand, focuses on dedication to the company’s aims and objectives.
Read: 5 Benefits of an Employee Experience Strategy for Travel & Hospitality
Measuring the Total Employee Experience
The total employee experience have a critical component: Employee experience metrics
Employee lifecycle evaluation should take place to track changes as people develop in their careers.
Employee views can change substantially over time, even if some feedback remains consistent.
A fresh employee, for example, may be enthusiastic about the job and extremely engaged, whereas long-term employees may lack passion.
To acquire a complete picture of the experience, data points should be measured using a variety of metrics.
You can collect feedback in a variety of ways, including:
a) Data from the workplace
The workplace itself is an important aspect of EX.
While surveys can provide valuable information on employee views about the workplace, hard data can also be obtained.
For example, if you have perks like an exercise area or a game room, you may track usage or examine data to see if employees are taking advantage of the opportunities.
b) Employee polls
Employee surveys might take the form of questions or yes/no questions. They can be open-ended questions. They could also include employee scores about their working satisfaction based on a range of factors.
Lastly, to track changes based on employment, it is useful to ask certain basic questions regularly throughout the employment lifetime.
c) Analyze the competition
It is critical to keep a check on other employers, not just in your business but across all industries. It is because excellent culture and leadership are not limited to one type of organization.
Therefore, doing regular competitive studies across numerous businesses to examine their positive employee culture along with the leadership strategies will help you effectively serve your people.
Your employees should also follow the social media accounts of companies they admire and conduct research on trends related to their own role.
Doing so, they’ll learn if your pay scale is below the industry or what your competitor’s offer. They will also learn about the benefits of working for other companies, especially if one of your rivals is attempting to hire them.
The five stages of Employee Experience
It makes sense for a reader to understand the stages of EX in rather detail so they could better comprehend the total employee experience.
These five stages are discussed in depth below one after the other:
- Recruitment
- Onboarding
- Engagement
- Training
- Exit
1. Recruitment
It begins with an applicant responding to your company’s job advertisement and continues through the complete recruitment process until the job offer letter is accepted by the employee.
Because most job searchers look for information about the company and work culture on sites like Glassdoor, it is critical to provide your current employees with an experience that will result in positive evaluations and referrals.
On the contrary, unfavorable encounters result in negative reviews, which may deter prospective new talent.
One of the factors that you should be considerate of at this stage are:
- Are your job postings attractive enough to attract top talent?
- How long does the hiring process take?
- Is your interview procedure interesting and effective?
- What is the acceptance rate?
- How did the candidate rank his or her whole recruitment experience?
2. Onboarding
The employee’s lifespan begins when the offer is officially accepted.
It also begins when new employees are introduced to the business culture and educated on the tasks, methods, and technologies.
At this point, it is critical to create confidence and ensure that the new hire will properly transition into the new role’s requirements.
A positive onboarding experience helps new workers in efficiently advancing, being productive, and, in the long run, creating meaningful relationships with the organization.
It would also be beneficial to consider the following:
- Is your mission in line with what your new employee aspires to?
- How long does it take to enhance performance
- How are you incorporating them into your work culture?
- Are they able to build trust, collaborate, and innovate in their teams?
3. Engagement
At this stage. the new staff have settled in and begun their work, but what comes next? Actually, this is the time the company must make efforts in regard to the engagement.
Employee engagement will keep your employees (the newer ones in particular) engaged, productive, and hungry for more.
That said, this is where you must guarantee that you give the best possible work environment and experiences for your employees while also continuously measuring their engagement.
You may also need to address the following questions:
- Is the work exciting and meaningful?
- Do you consider their contributions to be valuable?
- Do they have the necessary technology resources to carry out their duties effectively?
- Is the workplace a healthy, encouraging, and comfortable environment?
- Can they work flexibly?
- What is the rate/score of engagement?
4. Training
This is a continuous element of the employee’s entire life cycle during their time with the organization.
Every employee grows at a different rate and with distinct talents. However, every organization must help each individual in developing, growing, supporting career goals, upskilling, training, and enabling them to be their most productive selves through positive social interactions.
This stage also helps you develop an effective retention strategy, which may help motivate employees, keep them on track for advancement, and align them with the company’s goal.
At this point, try answering the following:
- Are you offering the necessary incentives and chances for training, developing skills, and development?
- Have you established clear KPIs and KRAs for measuring performance?
- What is the productivity rate?
5. Exit
Despite offering the appropriate motivation and experiences, some employees will still leave the company for a variety of reasons: Personal/ family reasons, relocation to a new city, retirement, professional change, and so on could all be reasons.
However, simply because one of your employees has opted to go, the organization cannot abandon their experience objectives.
This is the most important stage since leaving employees are the finest brand ambassadors and write the best recommendations about their time at the company.
A successful exit survey can assist the organization in identifying gaps and areas for improvement for prospective employees, which can help reduce turnover.
Undoubtedly, learning these five stages in detail helps us understand the phenomena of total employee experience.
Read: Using Employee Experience for the ‘New Possible’
Stats on Employee Experience
Employee satisfaction is related to company performance.
It will reflect on your company if you create a people-first culture focused on care, compassion, development of employees, work-life balance, and a commitment to wellbeing.
In other words, a good effort in employee experience will pay off significantly.
Companies with positive employee experience are:
- 2.4 times more likely to please customers
- 5.2 times more likely to be a great company to work for
- 5.1 times more likely to make employees engaged and retained
- 4.3 times more likely to become pioneers effectively
Last but not least, 80% of employees believe that EX efforts boost their productivity and job quality.
Use BRAVO for a Positive Total Employee Experience
Employee turnover rates and costly practices such as ‘Quite Quitting’ are on the rise. Furthermore, employees leaving can cause problems for a variety of reasons. It is why employee experience is extremely important in employee retention.
Additionally, it makes sense for organizations of all sizes to use a platform that helps influence the employee experience for the better. Without a question, such tools are an important part of any company’s long-term staff retention strategy.
Relevantly, BRAVO is one such product that can substantially help you develop a better employee experience model.
While BRAVO is primarily intended to recognize employees’ efforts to keep them going on the right track, utilizing it has numerous benefits in terms of employee experience: making employees more happy, more satisfied, and, subsequently, more productive.
Remember that employee satisfaction, happiness, and engagement are the keys to providing better experience to employees.
So, by adopting BRAVO, you will inevitably develop better experience for your employees throughout their employment as a result of honoring their hard work and commitment to the company’s organizational success.
To discover more about BRAVO, schedule a free demo.
