Evaluating Your Employee Experience

By
IntelligentHQ

In this tight labor market, in which people are reassessing their work lives, it’s more important than ever to foster a positive employee experience.

Why? Because doing so goes directly to organizations’ ability to lure and retain talent. Also, satisfied employees are more productive, which helps your bottom line.

But how can you measure employees’ attitudes and perceptions? Well, keep reading for what you should know about evaluating your employee experience.

What is Meant by Employee Experience?

This is essentially how an employee experiences all facets of their work life, from culture to their physical working environment to the technology and tools they use for their job.


Why is the Employee Experience Important to Organizational Success?

For several reasons, including:

• Recruitment and retention. You simply want to be able to compete in your field, which you can’t do with mediocre talent and high turnover rates.

• Improved productivity. Content employees collaborate better, make for great teammates, and generally tend to give you their all.

• Heightened engagement. Engaged people are amenable to doing what it takes to help the organization prosper.

• Increased creativity. A direct line can be tied between bolstered creativity and innovation, which can pad your bottom line.

• Better mental health and overall wellbeing. Healthy employees show up for work and produce more.

• Improved organizational standing. For better or worse, word does get around. Employers that offer a great employee experience will develop reputations that ultimately allow for better recruitment.


What Does Employee Experience Measure?

• How recruitment went. This is an employee’s first impression, and it often sets the tone for their organizational tenure.

• Onboarding. How a new employee feels about their company early on in their tenure will tell them a lot. A subpar experience can lead to a search for a whole new gig.

• Development opportunities. People want the opportunity to grow and develop, and that requires you to offer training.

• Performance management. How you assess employee performance should be linked to both your overarching goals as well as their development objectives.

• Health and wellbeing. Establishing such programs demonstrates that you care about your people. It also nudges your employees to focus more on their health so that they can be happy and more productive.

• Culture. You want to foster an inviting, welcoming, and respectful workplace culture sans stress and toxicity so that you can hang on to your people. This is one of the issues commonly broached in the employee engagement survey.

• Technology and tools. Having poor resources such as obsolete or underperforming tools can lead to stress, frustration, and, yes, negative feelings about the organization. Don’t let that happen. 


Evaluating Your Employee Experience

In the main, there are two methods for assessing employee experience: quantitative and qualitative. 

Quantitative measures include:

• Conducting surveys about certain topics like workplace culture.

• Using engagement surveys, which are typically more comprehensive.

• Doing pulse surveys, which are short, conducted at intervals (monthly, quarterly, etc.), and usually focus on a single topic.

• Reviews of internal data such as absences, the number of applicants for promotions, employee turnover rates, etc.

• Calculating an employee value proposition, which defines what makes your organizational culture distinct from someone’s else’s.

• Analyzing employee efficiency data.

• Calculating your employee engagement return on investment. Employee engagement is clearly linked to business outcomes.

Qualitative measures include:

• Workshops and focus groups

• Exit interviews

• One-on-one discussions

• Anonymous feedback from surveys

So that you can gain the best picture of your workplace experience, be sure to break down your data and categorize it. Why? Because workplace experiences may vary according to distinct demographic groupings.

Pay attention to factors such as where employees work, what their roles are, the composition of employees’ teams, and other variables such as gender and age. For instance, older and younger employees may have widely contrasting experiences, when it comes to things such as workplace culture.

The bottom line is that it would greatly behoove you to evaluate your employee experience, for the myriad of reasons listed earlier in this article. And now you know the various ways to achieve it. If you need help, don’t hesitate to contact leading HR consultant Mercer, which has vast experience in this area.

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