10 Effective Employee Experience Management Strategies to Boost Retention and Engagement
According to a cultural survey conducted by Glassdoor, with 77% of job seekers opining that employee experience is one of the deciding factors for choosing an organization, it’s time when organizational representatives worked highly on improving employee engagement and retention to boost morale within and outside the workspace.
Employee experience, essential in decreasing the turnover rate, can influence employee engagement and retention rates. A motivated employee's psychological bearing would impact an organization's cultural aspects, increasing morale and loyalty at a high rate. A study by Gallup has found that organizations with an engaged workforce have experienced 59% lower employee turnover.
In addition, when satisfied and found purposeful, an engaged employee is more likely to have longevity with the company and more likely to recommend the organization to their peers. The same report by Gallup has recorded that engaged employees are 23 times more likely to recommend their company as a pleasing workplace.
However, the secret of keeping your employees engaged and motivated at work is undoubtedly more than just assigning everyday tasks and tracking their progress. Providing a positive employee experience is just as crucial as offering supreme customer satisfaction. This is where employee experience management comes into play.
It entails listening to your employees throughout their entire employment journey and creating personalized experiences to keep them happy and fulfilled and retain them for a long time.
But what exactly does employee experience management mean, and how can you improve it in your organization? In this blog, we'll simplify this complex idea and give you actionable tips for enhancing employee experience and retaining top talent for the long haul.
Let's dive in!
What is employee experience management?
Employee experience management refers to designing and implementing strategies to enhance and optimize employees' interactions and experiences with their workplace, colleagues, and job responsibilities.
This can include everything from onboarding and training to recognition and feedback, with the ultimate goal of creating a positive and engaging work environment that improves employee satisfaction, retention, and overall performance.
As you gather feedback, you will gain insightful information highlighting any shortcomings in your employee experience. These shortcomings reveal certain areas where performance can be enhanced. Your company can then use your gathered data to make informed decisions, from little improvements to broad policy changes.
Employee experience management is typically a top priority for those who work in the HR and IT departments of their organizations. Similar to how companies strive to deliver excellent customer experiences, these professionals will put efforts into creating a positive experience for the employees of their company.
Also read: 21 employee productivity tools to maximize your employees' performance
Why is employee experience management important for a business?
Employee experience management creates a framework for recruiting and retaining engaged employees while boosting your organization's operational efficiency.
These employees are essential to maintaining initiatives to improve the client experience, improving your offerings, and developing a unique and reliable brand.
So, why is employee experience management vital to a business?
The experiences that employees have, both good and bad, will ultimately determine how hard and dedicatedly they work each day. It will decide how well they communicate and collaborate and whether they are committed to enhancing your company's operational performance.
Here are three benefits of employee experience management:
1. Increases employee engagement
Organizations with engaged employees are more successful than businesses with disengaged employees. Fully involved employees become proactive and put effort into achieving goals from their end rather than waiting for instruction from managers or supervisors.
For instance, your SEO professional will strive hard to get inbound links to boost traffic and refine old content without being reminded to do so.
2. Promotes customer experience
Employees serve as a bridge between clients and the business. Therefore, building an employee-centric culture in the company is crucial to positively influencing purchasing decisions and boosting customer retention.
Customers that receive excellent service are 54% more likely to try additional offerings from your business. On the other hand, dissatisfied employees will provide poor customer service and raise employee turnover rates.
3. Reduces turnover costs
An inevitable aspect of running a business is employee turnover. 96% of workers are seeking a new job in 2024, mostly in search of higher compensation.
According to another study, replacing an employee who quit their job costs about 20% of their salary. When you manage a large firm, these expenses might impede profitability.
Even if you can't completely prevent employee turnover, providing an excellent employee experience will minimize costs for your business.
So, how do you achieve that?
10 Strategies to improve employee experience management in your organization
Here are 10 practical strategies that can help you improve employee experience management in your organization:
1. Promote a supportive and collaborative workspace
Employees can work at their preferred time and in their preferred setting thanks to a flexible work environment. It has been proven that allowing flexibility in the workplace increases productivity and improves health and job fulfillment while lowering stress, organizational expenses, and absenteeism.
Additionally, it's critical for employers to foster inclusivity and diversity by observing how employees interact and collaborate, then by recognizing inclusive actions. Educating all managers about unintentional bias and taking action to reduce hostile interactions at work are sensible measures.
Finally, fostering a culture of appreciation is a fantastic approach to boosting employee morale and inspiring others to strive for similar accomplishments. Excellent ways to highlight employees' achievements include:
- Awarding for their achievements
- Encouraging them to write blog posts for the company website
- Publicizing their accomplishments on company social media networks
2. Respond to employee feedback
The most effective way to learn what your employees need from you is to ask their honest feedback and pay attention to their responses. Nowadays, several technological solutions are available to help collect continuous employee feedback, such as the employee surveys tool from Xoxoday Empuls.
Using this tool frequently, you may learn what employees appreciate about your company and what they believe still needs to be incorporated.
However, it's imperative that a culture of respect already exists in the company in order to receive genuine and constructive criticism. Employees are less likely to open up to you honestly if they feel ignored or disregarded in everyday conversations.
3. Enhance your management skills
Managers themselves are employees of the company. Therefore, they must be open-minded to recognize distinct employee personalities and adopt a different approach to deal with them. This is especially useful for businesses with staff members from diverse work divisions, age groups, seniority, and even ethnicities.
To become a better manager, develop soft skills like empathy, one-on-one coaching, and conflict resolution, host or attend mentorship programs, and organize support groups.
Also Read: The evolution of human resources: 11 essential hr skills for success
4. Offer growth opportunities
Employees need good work opportunities that challenge them, provide meaning to their jobs, and promote career growth and development. You can provide your staff with a variety of growth opportunities to enhance their experience with your company, such as:
- Increased earnings
- Higher-priority tasks
- Job-specific training
- More impressive job titles
- Social gatherings outside of work
5. Create a flexible work-life balance
Nowadays, most employees seek to work in hybrid models because it works better for their mental health and helps manage personal responsibilities well. A hybrid work model essentially helps employees balance their work and personal lives with ease.
However, if you haven't already, consider the following criteria before transforming your corporate culture to the hybrid work model:
- Your company's budget for maintaining the hybrid work model
- A balanced workload distribution to accommodate the needs of on-site and remote employees
- Offering tailored training courses that can help remote workers upskill themselves
6. Define your parameters
While you might be tempted to evaluate all facets of employee experiences at once, doing so in a comprehensive strategy would take too much time and can turn out to be confusing.
Instead, set aside some time to define the goal of your research. Choose the aspect of the work cycle you wish to track, such as technology, workplace culture, or touchpoints for onboarding. Next, specify your expectations and decide which potential result is pertinent.
7. Deliver excellent communication
Better communication is the key to strengthening your connections with your employees, just like in any other partnership.
Although most HR managers and executives acknowledge the value of communication, they ultimately spend more time talking to the media, stakeholders, and their target audience than they do communicating with their own staff.
To improve communication and collaboration, introduce a robust platform, like Empuls' employee communication tool.
You can use employee communication tools to share good and bad news, celebrate your employees' significant accomplishments in their personal and professional lives, and clearly define your company's mission and vision.
8. Establish policies and define guidelines
Remote employees typically sit in front of their screens for a prolonged time. This could have a negative effect on their health and eventually lead to burnout.
Therefore, establishing guidelines helps to ensure employees don't feel overburdened with work and keeps them from slacking off. You can adopt the following policies to regulate the remote work model in your company:
- Limit phone calls and emails to specific times of the day Most business phone systems have the option of making these kinds of limitations.
- Plan virtual meetings with both local and remote employees
- Define compensation and benefits for remote employees
9. Incorporate surveys and questionnaires
When anonymity is preferred, surveys and questionnaires provide a quick and discrete way to evaluate employee experience. Establishing KPIs and then creating pertinent questions around them can help you get the most out of them.
Employee satisfaction can be determined by asking them to rate how meaningful they find their work on a scale of 1 to 5.
Employee productivity can be evaluated on a scale of 1 to 5 by asking about the resources and tools offered to staff to help them complete their daily tasks.
Asking about whether or not employees are likely to stay with the company if offered an identical position by another company might help you evaluate employee engagement.
10. Adopt automation
Improving the employee experience is a multifaceted task that requires various strategies, from effective communication to providing meaningful work. However, implementing these improvements can prove challenging without the proper tools at your disposal.
Automating some steps of the orientation and onboarding procedures is one method to make things easier. Video calls, for instance, can be used to introduce new personnel to existing staff members.
Additionally, allocating work assignments and partners can be streamlined by adopting a learning management system (LMS) or an employee experience management platform like Xoxoday Empuls.
Leverage Xoxoday Empuls: A robust employee experience management platform
Leveraging platforms dedicated to managing employee experience will allow you to acquire valuable metrics and insights that will guide you in the best ways to improve the experiences of your staff.
With the help of the powerful employee experience platform, Xoxoday Empuls, you can help your employees have better experiences overall by giving them a clear idea of what they can anticipate at every step of their employment with your business.
Empuls enables you to understand your employees and their requirements better, allowing you to make more informed decisions that can boost employee engagement, productivity, and satisfaction.
Take advantage of this chance and use Xoxoday Empuls immediately to improve employee experiences. The best part of all?