10 ways to improve employee experience at your company

Companies today can’t get by with just offering basic benefits like PTO and health insurance, they must go above and beyond and provide employees with an exemplary experience in the workplace. The employee experience is the sum of all the interactions your employees have with your company. It involves the culture, benefits, physical work environment, and tool’s you provide for employee success, and it can be linked to revenue. In fact, companies with high employee engagement pull in 2.5 times more revenue than companies with low engagement levels.

If you’re looking to improve your talent acquisition efforts and increase employee retention rates, use the 10 tips below to provide a great employee experience for your workers.

ebook: 2022 experience trends impacting business today

1. Utilize Employee Journey Mapping

An employee journey map is a way of visualizing the various stages an employee goes through in their time with a company. It allows you to identify pain points and critical moments where employee feedback and action is needed to close the gap from a current to a desired state. The best employee journey maps start with clearly defined outcomes, utilize X and O-data, and involve key groups within the organization. The employee lifecycle is critical because even if you do yearly employee engagement surveys, each employee is at a different stage in the employee journey, and it’s difficult to understand how personal experiences shape the key outcomes of employee experience like engagement, motivation or productivity.

2. Improve Internal Communication

Internal communication teams do much more than just disseminating company information. They foster a sense of community, encourage employees to work together for a common goal, and create a cohesive company culture. When employees have an increased sense of purpose they’re more productive and become brand advocates and ambassadors for your company. Internal communication must be used for maintaining a connection with your employees and winning their trust.

In addition, as the workforce becomes more dispersed and mobile, internal communication is more important than ever. Keeping remote employees engaged is crucial and providing everyone in the company the proper tools to communicate like Slack or Zoom can help develop employee relationships and facilitate clear communication.

3. Design a great onboarding experience

Many companies don’t have a new employee orientation program, much less an employee onboarding experience, but this is critical to employee success. In fact, according to the Harvard Business Review, 33 percent of new hires look for a new job within their first six months on the job and this can be largely attributed to their employee onboarding experience. You should design a program that’s measurable, tailored to specific audiences (i.e. sales reps get a different orientation than customer service reps), and has clear objectives.

4. Implement stay interviews

While exit interviews are valuable, they don’t help you keep an employee that’s about to leave. Stay interviews are individual conversations between the manager and employee that help companies understand what’s important to employees and get ahead of retention issues. They should be an open dialogue that’s used to build trust with employees and gather their perspective on their experience. By understanding what works and what doesn’t, you can identify their motivation for staying with the organization and work towards goals that keep them interested. This technique also enhances internal talent pipelines and provides great insight into global areas for improvement as a company.

5. Invest in employee wellness

Active employees incur lower health costs, which saves your company time and money, but employee wellness is more than just physical. Programs that encourage mental, emotional, and spiritual wellness create employees who are rested and more attentive and productive at work. Companies should look to implement health and fitness programs, sick time, paid vacation, paid parental leave, on-site gyms and health clinics, and provide healthy snacks, just to name a few ideas.

6. Use employee benefit surveys

Many employees would take extra benefits over a raise, proving that providing relevant employee benefits is crucial to your retention and talent acquisition efforts. Employee benefit surveys help you understand which benefits are important to your employees. They ask questions about the quality of specific benefits, how they compare to other companies, and any additional benefits employees would like to see in the future. This can relate to PTO, health insurance, parental leave, retirement, stock options, free meals, etc.

Discover how to gain the best results from your employee surveys. 

7. Act on employee feedback

Many organizations implement employee engagement and feedback surveys to understand where their employees are at, but not all act on that feedback. This can backfire on employees and cause a loss of trust. Employees are more likely to share their opinion and engage if they feel like they’re being listened to, and may stop giving feedback if they know they won’t be heard. Successful companies communicate their action plan to employees and designate a person who is responsible for implementing the changes.

8. Offer career development programs

Employees are more likely to stay at your company if they know there’s room for career advancement. By putting programs in place to train up your next set of leaders, you’ll gain loyal employees who understand you’re investing in them. Managers should have an individual development plan for their employees and discuss long-term career goals at least once a year. Employees can also be assigned a mentor who has mastered the skill to coach them and give feedback. This will increase employee engagement and widen your internal talent pool.

9. Share customer feedback with your employees

There’s an undeniable link between employee experience and customer experience and many employees feel joy from helping customers. However, when a customer gives a compliment, the employee rarely hears about it. By allowing customers to give feedback and sharing it with employees, it can boost employee confidence and give them a sense of purpose in their job. Customer feedback should be broadcast throughout the entire organization, not only recognizing that the company is succeeding, but the employee as well.

10. Provide manager training

Personal relationships are one of the biggest factors that impact the employee experience, specifically the relationships employees have with their managers. When managers don’t know how to properly motivate or communicate with their employees, it causes loss of productivity and eventually ends with the employee finding another job. Manager training should teach delegation, interpersonal skills, time management, goal-setting, and effective ways to give praise and feedback.

If you’re ready to turn your employees into ambassadors, contact Qualtrics today or learn how to set yourself up for success with our Employee Experience eBook: