5 Easy Ways to Improve the Employee Experience
Today’s shoppers (especially millennials) buy “the experience” as much as they buy the actual product. The same goes for today’s employees. Workers place a high value on employee experience. Company culture, career development, and other soft benefits go far beyond salary, PTO, and health insurance.
Did you know that companies with high employee engagement are 21% more profitable than companies with lagging employee buy-in? Keeping employees excited and passionate about their work is key to reducing turnover—and to your bottom line.
It’s your job as an employer to make sure that your teams are enthusiastic about their jobs. And given the new normal brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, you may have to do so from a distance. As more teams work remotely, and sometimes asynchronously, keeping teams aligned and engaged is as important as ever.
Use the tips below to help improve the employee experience for your workers, whether you’re in the office, social distancing, or all remote, all the time.
1. Promote Genuine Communication
As always, but especially during a crisis, your employees need to be kept informed. As this new and uncharted business climate challenges workers at every level, adopt an environment where respectful and honest communication is priority number one:
- Check-in more often – Have more frequent one-on-ones and see how your team is doing, professionally and personally
- Don’t make them ask you – Be proactive about updating and sharing policies based on rapidly changing circumstances
- Be flexible – People may have kids, pets, and older family members to look after
- Encourage a “people first” mentality – It has to be ok to have a bad day, and to know that productivity may not be at its all-time high
2. Utilize Stay Interviews
Exit interviews are worthwhile, but knowing why an employee left won’t help you keep them on board. By contrast, stay interviews help companies get ahead of retention issues by understanding:
- What’s important to employees
- What works and what doesn’t
- Top employees’ motivation for sticking around
You can use the insights from stay interviews to develop employee appreciation plans, referral programs, and enhance your internal talent pipelines. Not to mention tapping into global areas for improvement as a company.
3. Actively Collect Employee Feedback
And don’t forget to use it! While many businesses conduct satisfaction surveys to understand employee motivations, fears, and frustrations, far fewer organizations actually act on that feedback. Your internal teams are much more likely to share their opinion when they feel like their voices will actually be heard.
Start by demonstrating that telling the truth comes with no major consequences. Then, let employees know what your action plan is for implementing the changes, and let them be a part of making it happen. Employee engagement tends to skyrocket when they have skin in the game.
4. Share Customer Wins and Losses
Want to make your employees feel immediately more connected with your brand? Share your numbers from the last quarter. Want to give them something to collectively work towards? Share your revenue goal for the upcoming period.
Sharing your company’s progress, including notable customer wins (and losses) shows employees that their actions do matter. It allows them to take ownership of both failures and successes and boosts confidence.
5. Use Employee Benefit Surveys
Remember those soft benefits we mentioned? Employee benefit surveys let you hone in on which ones they value the most.
Even before the coronavirus crisis changed all of our work lives indefinitely, employees placed major value on having the option for remote work. Whether it’s a free gym membership, employee retreats, parental leave, free meals, or stock options, providing your employees with the most attractive options often proves more valuable than a raise.
Employee benefit surveys will ask about the quality of your current benefits, how they compare to other companies, and what perks employees would like to see in the future.
We offer virtual strategies that let you for you to perform most, if not all, of these research processes safely online. You might be surprised how simple it is, and blown away by the power of asking your employees what needs to happen in order to improve their experience with your company.
