Creating an Employee Experience Strategy in 5 Simple Steps

Creating an employee experience strategy is essential to improving employee engagement, performance, and productivity.

In this article, we’ll explore some strategies for creating results-focused strategies.

But first – what kind of returns can you get from an improved workplace experience?

In other words…

Why Influence the Employee Experience At All?

There are a number of reasons:

• Improved engagement
• Decreased absenteeism
• Lower stress
• Higher employee productivity
• Better employee performance

To name a few.

Today, redesigning the employee experience can even grant a competitive edge.

How to Design an Employee Experience Strategy

Each company has its own culture and its own view of the employee experience.

However, the 5 steps listed below can help you craft an employee journey that works for your business.

The first step:

1. Roadmap your employees’ journey

How does your organization map the employee life cycle?

This journey, from pre-hire to post-departure, is the total of all experiences and interactions employees have with your organization.

It includes stages such as:

• Recruitment and pre-hire communications
• Onboarding and training
• Engagement and performance
• Career development
• Departure

If you already have an employee life cycle roadmap, then begin working with that one.

If not, it’s a great idea to create one – Gallup has a 7-stage life cycle that can be found on their website.

2. Learn by collecting and analyzing data

Assessment is critical.

Otherwise, you will not know where to focus your efforts.

Here are a few simple steps that can help flesh out the roadmap mentioned above:

• Create and send surveys. Employee surveys are easy to create and distribute, especially with today’s technology. They can also help you perform investigations into targeted areas of the employee experience.
• Tap into existing employee data. Every organization has some data on its workers. The more you can access, the more insight you can gain.
• Compile and analyze. Pull every bit of relevant data you can. Use that as a lens into your employee life cycle.

With that information in hand, you can begin understanding the big picture.

3. Assess the current state of the employee experience

The data collected above should be correlated with the employee experience roadmap, mentioned above.

Doing so can help you:

• Identify weaknesses. Where are employees missing the mark? And what is the root cause? Uprooting these problems can help you develop solutions that get tangible results.
• Understand what employees want. Using survey data and information from the previous step, outline employee needs and wants. Do they want a better workplace, more training, better benefits?
• Find overlaps between employee aims and organizational aims. The most profitable areas to focus on are those that meet both parties’ needs. Employee training, for instance, can boost workers’ productivity as well as career prospects.

An impartial assessment of the current employee experience is necessary to creating your employee experience strategy.

4. Set clear, achievable goals

Each goal should be tied to one of the stages in your employee life cycle.

Here are a few guidelines for effective goal-setting:

• Find low-hanging fruit and achievable growth opportunities. Short-term rewards can benefit everyone involved. The organization sees quick results. Workers feel more confident. And employee experience projects gain validation.
• Focus on employee and employer needs at each stage. The goals for each stage depend on each party’s need at a given stage of the journey. Find ways to meet both parties’ needs in order to maximize results.
• Align your strategy to the corporate culture and purpose. Workers lie at the heart of the employee experience. But that experience and its goals should stay aligned with the brand and culture.

Finally, you can put the finishing touches on your strategy…

5. Design and implement processes for change

As change managers and employee experience managers know well, effecting change is not easy.

Here are a few tips:

• Use the proper technology and tools. Cutting-edge platforms, such as digital adoption platforms and experience management platforms, are a must. They can help automate, streamline, and enhance any employee experience initiatives.
• Stay agile. Adaptability and speed are critical. Your projects should stay nimble, and they should be able to adjust to changing data or circumstances. 
• Personalize. The more you support individual employees’ needs, the more positive their experience. Career development, praise and recognition, and one-on-one communication are a few avenues to consider.

Naturally, this short list is nowhere near comprehensive.

For more information on influencing the employee experience, be sure to browse the rest of the articles on our change management blog.

Final Thoughts

Employee experiences, like customer experiences, are delicate.

A single bad experience can throw a wrench into the entire operation – employees can become disengaged, unproductive, and turnover can increase.

And, like customer experiences, employee experiences directly impact the bottom line.

Employee engagement and performance impact every area of the business, from product innovation to customer care.

Reasons such as these should compel every organization to pay close attention to their workers.

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