As the Great Resignation is sweeping over the country, companies are reinventing their focus on employee engagement and experience. With the hunt for new workers becoming tougher and tougher by the day, positioning yourself as an employer of choice is first on the agenda.
A robust employee experience platform doesn’t just improve onboarding, boost productivity, and raise satisfaction rates. It helps streamline your work process by enabling your employees to contribute to the company’s success.
Let’s take a closer look at what digital employee experience platforms are all about.
Employee Experience 101
Employee experience (EX) describes what workers see, feel, and encounter during their collaboration with a company.
From onboarding and training to benefits discovery and wellness, employees expect each interaction with an employer to proceed smoothly. When this doesn’t happen, frustration mounts, productivity suffers, engagement drops, and employee satisfaction levels go down.
According to Gallup, there are seven stages of an employee lifecycle.
- Attracting – highlighting key benefits of working with the company and positioning it as an employer of choice.
- Hiring – making the hiring process smooth and transparent, from creating comprehensive job listings to arranging informative and structured interviews.
- Onboarding – simplifying and personalizing the onboarding process by giving new employees the right tools, information, and support.
- Engaging – aligning employee experience with the company’s purpose, brand, and culture to help them understand their importance in the workplace.
- Performing – assisting employees with their work process, evaluating performance correctly, and setting the right expectations.
- Developing – driving career growth by creating opportunities, providing proper tools, and offering personalized career paths.
- Departing – designing an exit program that fosters positive experience and improves return-to-work programs.
During each of these stages, experience is the key to productivity, success, and satisfaction. Poor experience pushes employees to rethink their decisions and search for better employment opportunities. That said, today, 65% of employed workers are actively seeking new jobs.
Factors that Affect Employee Experience
While 92% of HR leaders say that employee experience is top priority, only a few are truly ready to make significant changes to accommodate it. This gives your company a competitive edge. Factors that directly affect employee experience include:
- Interaction with the management – a study found that managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement. Supportive managers create an atmosphere of trust and transparency that fosters engagement and improves EX. It also minimizes job insecurity and drives career development.
- Team dynamics – trust, bonding, and support within the team can influence employees’ productivity and engagement. Employees work better together, achieve goals, and drive the company’s success. Members of a strong and well-connected team are less likely to search for other employment opportunities.
- Communication with the company – getting the information employees need from HR, other departments, and management has to be easy. When workers struggle to find touchpoints and spend hours searching for answers, their satisfaction plummets. Good EX is defined by high-quality channels of engagement.
It’s up to the company to enable employees to give their best effort. Otherwise, they don’t fulfill their potential and hurt your recruitment ROI.
What is an Employee Experience Platform?
An employee experience platform (EXP) is a centralized collection of tools that improves employee experience through all the stages of the employee lifecycle. A top-notch digital experience platform can:
- Simplify onboarding – setting learning goals, recognizing achievements, providing touchpoints, scheduling tasks, and maintaining connection with the management.
- Improve communications – staying in touch with management, team members, and HR department while at home or on the go.
- Streamline engagement – adding transparency to the employee’s role and importance within the company by giving them access to the company’s goals, needs, and priorities.
- Provide access to knowledge base – making it easy to access information and find answers to common questions inside the company’s knowledge base.
- Assist with benefits discovery – creating an easy-to-use resource to help users swim through the complex sea of employee benefits.
- Arrange surveys to seek insight and feedback – designing comprehensive surveys to gather employee feedback and gain insight into your efforts to streamline EX.
- Set goals – setting goals and designing schedules to help employees stay on track and improve their productivity.
- Provide recognition – recognizing employee achievements, creating incentives, and providing rewards for achievements and overachievements.
With an easy-to-use interface and a simple setup, an EX platform becomes an integral part of your company’s culture and workplace environment. An experience platform is a combination of enablement tools, employee portals, and communication apps.
The main benefits of using a robust employee experience platform include:
- Centralization – you get all employee-related tools on one platform. You no longer have to worry about integrating new apps into your tech stack every time you want to improve employee experience.
- Efficiency – digital employee experience platforms allow creating workflows and automating manual tasks. They also let employees handle their experience personally, giving your management extra time to focus on core functions.
- Lower costs – working with one employee experience platform instead of juggling several apps cuts your IT costs.
- Improved EX – giving your employees access to a tool that takes care of their needs within the company improves their experience tremendously.
- Mobility – cloud-based platforms allow employees to get the necessary information anytime and anywhere, thus boosting their productivity and avoiding downtime.
Today, the value of any given employee to the company is increasing daily. With the COVID-19 pandemic creating a “new normal” across all industries, top talent is in high demand.
Current employee retention strategies are becoming closer and closer to consumer retention tactics. That’s why a high-quality tool that keeps employees from considering other options is becoming a must-have for industry leaders.
How an Employee Experience Platform Can Improve Business Outcomes
Is an employee experience management platform worth your investment? Let’s see how it can improve your business outcomes and demonstrate an impressive ROI.
Higher Retention Rates
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2021, the turnover rate across all U.S. industries was a staggering 57.3%. With the cost of replacing one employee reaching 100% of their annual salary, high turnover has a serious effect on the company’s stability.
Besides high costs, employee recruitment, onboarding, and training demands significant effort that keeps your team from focusing on core tasks. This affects employee satisfaction rates. By the time you finish onboarding one person, another could decide to leave.
Good employee experience is a major driving force behind retention. By taking advantage of a high-quality employee experience platform, you can improve your retention efforts and cut turnover costs.
Increased Profitability
A happy and engaged employee is a productive employee. Highly engaged workers demonstrate a 17% increase in productivity. Eventually, this leads to a 21% increase in profitability.
Today, only about a third of the American workforce is engaged. About 13% are actively disengaged. This affects the overall business productivity and hurts retention efforts. Disengaged employees cost U.S. businesses up to $550 billion annually.
The right approach to engagement involves improving employee experience. With an EX platform, you can:
- Demonstrate to your employees how valuable they are to your company.
- Make the employee journey easier.
- Gather feedback through well-designed surveys and act upon it.
Meanwhile, you can provide employees with the right tools to stay engaged through the work process and make an effort to fulfill the company’s goals.
Improved Recruitment Efforts
Companies that work on employee experience position themselves as employers of choice for top talent. With the Turnover Tsunami hitting U.S. industries harder than ever, sourcing top talent is a tough and competitive race.
Employee experience platforms can show the top talent that your company cares for its employees and works toward improving their journey and assisting with career growth.
Top-notch employee experience doesn’t just help reduce turnover. It turns your employees into brand ambassadors, who do recruitment work for you. They become your hidden weapon that can help with sourcing passive candidates.
Higher Productivity
Enablement tools are the key to higher productivity. Workers who can’t find answers to their questions or switch between several tools daily can’t be fulfilling their potential. In fact, employees switch apps 1,100 a day, decreasing productivity tremendously.
A robust employee experience platform offers a centralized place for all experience-related tools, making it easy for your team to do its job. This in turn, improves productivity and affects your company’s bottom line.
Better Company Culture
Improved company culture can increase productivity, boost retention, and position you as an employer of choice.
An EX platform creates a virtual place that brings employees together, helps them interact with each other, communicate with the company, and receive recognition.
Streamline Employee Experience with Refresh
An employee experience platform is a must-have tool for companies that want to outrun the competition amidst Turnover Tsunami and beyond. It contributes to the company’s productivity, efficiency, success, and brand image while demonstrating an impressive ROI.
Refresh EX platform is specifically designed to cater to your employees’ needs, improving their experience and boosting productivity. For more information, schedule a demo or contact us today.