The Employee Experience (EX): From Measurement To Action
Over the last few years, many companies have stepped up to support their employees. They have learned that empathy is key, and want to deeply understand any challenges their employees are facing to create a better working environment, increase loyalty and productivity.
As we move forward, there is an opportunity to up level the empathy. And companies can do that using their most powerful but often untapped resource – their data.
Data is key
Whether it’s through employee surveys, messaging platforms or interactions on HR management systems, there are many ways employees could be signalling how they’re feeling about a company, and yet often companies do not have a means to tap into this information and get a succinct understanding of what their employees care about so they can take action.
With continued turbulence in global markets, it’s critical for employee retention, and ultimately business growth, for companies to be listening to employees throughout their time at the company.
And that’s what we’ll look at here – how can businesses get a better understanding of the employee experience (EX) in a measurable way that helps build great experiences and retain top talent.
Why is it important to measure EX?
EX is constantly evolving in line with employee wants, needs and external factors such as the cost-of-living crisis and talent shortages. This is why it’s important for leaders to keep a constant gauge on how their people are feeling, so they can adapt working policies in line with how employees work best.
Engagement initiatives are directly related to performance
A research paper from CIPD shows that employee engagement initiatives have a direct relationship with employee performance, and can have a measurable business impact. We know engaged employees are less likely to leave an organisation. Our recent study into employee expectations highlights that 73% of UK respondents agree they feel motivated to work beyond what is expected of them because of their company’s mission, vision and values. This suggests that as long as employees feel engaged in the company’s wider objectives, they will ensure they are performing to a high standard.
Shift to measure all employee experiences
However, employees can be engaged and still want to leave their organisation, be at risk of burnout, or feel like they don’t belong. This is why it’s no longer enough to measure engagement alone, and why we need to see a shift to measuring all the experiences employees are having at work on a day-to-day basis. An organisation needs that full picture – the EX – to drive better business outcomes across the company.
How can leaders measure EX?
The first place to start is getting the right measurement in place so leaders are holding themselves accountable to taking action on the feedback they receive from employees. There are five employee experience KPIs that HR teams should look at to understand how the organisation is doing across key aspects of the EX.
1. Engagement
Employee engagement is strongly linked to organisational outcomes, such as performance, customer satisfaction, retention, and innovation.
2. Intent to stay
The feedback from employees in this area will provide a guide to how committed they are to the organisation and any challenges leaders may have and need to address.
3. Experience vs. expectations
In this KPI, you will ask employees to indicate to what extent their expectations are met at work.
Answers will provide a unique perspective, reflective of employees’ expectations. Once you’ve collected listening data, you can segment results to differentiate the experiences of employees based on whether the organization is exceeding, meeting, or falling short of expectations.
4. Inclusion
Inclusion has quickly become a key differentiator between a positive working culture and a negative one. Inclusive organisations are more innovative, productive, and have higher retention, with 80% of Deloitte’s survey respondents indicating inclusion is important when choosing an employer.
5. Well-being
This measure is becoming more critical as the lines between work and home increasingly blur. Employers must create working environments conducive to well-being, so that employees are not at risk of burnout, presenteeism, and/or low productivity.
With these five points in mind, it’s up to businesses to build programmes that support positive growth across these KPIs. This is where being able to harness all the available data across the employee experience is critical.
How can these measurements be used to improve EX?
Acting with empathy is what makes brands more human. Having the ability to get real-time insights combined with recommendations on how to take action, is what businesses need right now in order to ride out these uncertain times – and this is where HR’s role is more important than ever.
Take Goldman Sachs for example. Goldman Sachs wanted to design an EX that would best support their people, both inside and outside of work. They traditionally used benchmarking to set employee benefits, but we helped them design programmes that were tailored to their employees’ needs, and worked with the HR function to get this off the ground.
We’re seeing more and more companies across industries recognise the need to become more exacting and thoughtful when it comes to designing their employee experiences. After all, it’s something that impacts culture as well as a business’s bottom line. Those businesses who nurture the employee experience now will see the benefits – as will their people.
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Source: HRNEWS