A Step-by-Step Guide to Enhancing the Employee Experience

Enhancing the employee experience is fundamental to driving employee success.

Today, this has become a central focus for many companies.

There are a few reasons why:

• Employee engagement is at an all-time low. Gallup surveys have found that global engagement numbers are as low as 13%. And that nearly 2 out of 3 employees experience burnout.
• Disengaged workers are actively hunting for new jobs. More research from Gallup has found that 63% of employees feel they could find a job as good as the one they have. And 51% are actively looking for new work.
• By and large, workers are not satisfied with their workplace experience. According to Deloitte, around half of workers are satisfied with their job design. Around 42% are satisfied with their day-to-day work practices. And 38% were satisfied with the tools and technology at their disposal.

On top of all this, businesses are also facing a global digital skills crisis.

The demand for digital skills is skyrocketing – putting more power in the hands of highly skilled employees.

Reasons such as these should convince any business to put more effort into enhancing its employee experience.

Enhancing the Employee Experience: A Step-by-Step Guide

Below is a straightforward, step-by-step guide to enhancing the employee experience.

It is designed for those starting from scratch. 

But even those with a more mature employee experience program may learn a few things.

Let’s start at the beginning…

1. Define your employee experience journey map.

This journey map is the roadmap of your employee life cycle.

It should include stages such as:

• Recruit – Recruitment, candidate selection, interviewing, and other pre-hire activities.
• Onboard – Orient new employees, complete required documentation, set up initial training, and integrate employees into the workplace.
• Engage – Increase involvement and investment in daily activities, build enthusiasm, help workers find meaning and purpose, and help them stay productive.
• Develop – Assist employees with career development, training, and upskilling.
• Exit – Ensure employees have a positive experience leaving the company, learn about employees’ reasons for leaving, and discover where employees are going.

Your model may have a different number of stages. And each stage’s purpose may differ.

Or, if you don’t have an employee life cycle model, it is a good idea to create one.

There are plenty of resources online – simply google “employee life cycle” to find a few.

With this roadmap, it is possible to clearly articulate your employee experience aims for each stage of the journey.

2. Define aims for each stage of the journey

There are two types of aims to look at here: organizational aims and employee aims.

Let’s look at the previous 5-stage employee life cycle:

• Recruit – Organizations want to find and hire top talent that fits with the organization. Employees want to find good employers with good compensation, the right culture, and good career opportunities.
• Onboard – Organizations want to minimize friction, decrease time-to-productivity, reaffirm the employee’s decision, and so on. Employees want to know that they made the right choice, settle in quickly, and become productive.
• Engage – Organizations want maximum employee productivity and performance. Employees want a job that is purposeful, meaningful, and aligned with their own aims.
• Develop – Organizations want loyalty, longevity, and long-term workers. Employees want learning opportunities, effective training, and long-term career opportunities.
• Exit – Organizations want to leave employees with a positive impression, while understanding why the employee left. Employees also want to leave on good terms.

From here, it is possible to establish more concrete, quantitative goals.

3. Create metrics and KPIs

KPIs and metrics will be your employee experience health gauge.

Different metrics will apply during different stages of the journey. And some can be applied throughout.

Following the 5-stage employee life cycle, here are some examples:

• Recruit – Marketing spend, cost-per-hire, time-to-fill, source of hire
• Onboard – Onboarding spend, time-to-productivity, training engagement and completion metrics
• Engage – Software usage statistics, employee satisfaction, productivity rates
• Develop – Career development spend, available career development opportunities, impact of career development programs
• Exit – Reasons for leaving, post-exit destinations, employee longevity, turnover

Current numbers will establish the baseline – your starting point.

They should also offer some indications as to what works and what needs fixing. 

Poor feedback or metrics during any stage can indicate that a particular stage needs improvement.

4. Set new goals

By this point, you should know which areas to target.

Here are example goals for an employee experience management project:

• Recruit – Decreasing recruitment spend.
• Onboard – Reducing onboarding costs.
• Engage – Achieving a target employee satisfaction and performance level.
• Develop – Boosting longevity and productivity.
• Exit – Gaining better insights into specific parts of the employee journey.

For example.

5. Develop an action plan

Your action plan is part change management and part employee experience management.

Here are examples of methods to improve the employee experience:

• Recruit – Outsourcing candidate selection and pre-interview tasks.
• Onboard – Develop a more sophisticated, agile employee onboarding strategy.
• Engage – Implement an automated employee training solution.
• Develop – Offering in-house training or sponsoring outside education.
• Exit – Outsourcing exit interviews or aligning questions with current employee experience targets.

The solutions to any given problem will be unique – based entirely on your culture, your situation, and your employees’ needs.

Following the above steps can help you enhance the employee experience and improve key business metrics in a variety of areas.

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