The employee experience is quickly becoming one of the most important success factors for companies. A highly attractive employee experience makes life easier. Recruiting and retention efforts become cheaper. You also get more innovative ideas and pleasant people to work with. On the other hand, what happens if you have weak employee engagement? Your employees will be easily lured away by better opportunities, and those game-changing efforts to implement new ideas will never happen.
What Is the Employee Experience and Why Does It Matter?
Like so many corporate innovations, the employee experience concept first started to take off in the technology industry. Attracting, recruiting, and retaining skilled technical talent such as software engineers and developers is a tough challenge. Companies are already paying top dollar and providing significant autonomy. What else can they do to make a difference in keeping great employees? They can make the employee experience more attractive.
Some of this comes down to offering amenities such as Google’s famous free meals program. Alternatively, many start-ups offer video games, free drinks, and more to make work attractive. All these programs help. However, those strategies simply scratch the service of a compelling employee experience.
Ways to Improve the Employee Experience
To get on the same page, let’s define “employee experience.” According to McKinsey, the employee experience (EX) means: “We define EX as companies and their people working together to create personalized, authentic experiences that ignite passion and tap into purpose to strengthen individual, team, and company performance.”
Here are some of the most popular ways to improve the employee experience. Use these strategies, and you’ll face less turnover and find it much easier to attract star employees who give 100% at work.
1. Offer Clear and Compelling Expectations
Without a clear goal and a realistic chance of hitting the goal, it’s tough to succeed or feel successful. The most common symptom of this mistake is a disconnect between corporate goals and individual goals. To address this problem, sit down with employees and refresh their goals to make sure they’re aligned.
2. Increase Support for Flexible Working Arrangements
Managing work responsibilities, family, and outside interests is tough. To keep employees highly engaged, ask front-line managers to lead by example with flexible work arrangements. For example, ask them to work from home 2-4 days per month or use a flexible schedule. This management activity will show your staff that work needs can be adjusted to keep life sane.
3. Offer Interesting Problems and Challenges at Work
The first 12 months on a new job tend to be the most interesting. You’re constantly working on learning new techniques, meeting new people, and exploring new ideas. After a while, that sense of novelty and challenge starts to wear off. At that point, you settle into a routine, and work can become boring. To counter this tendency, look for ways to offer new challenges at work. For example, can you fund staff to attend technology conferences?
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4. Reassess Reporting and Management Processes
Asking employees to complete administrative work is a normal expectation. However, this type of work tends to expand over time. One week, the human resources department sends out a survey to evaluate their support. Next week, the CFO asks everyone to complete a new training related to expense claims. When you add it up, these administrative tasks can become a major distraction from your real work. As a result, employee experience will decline.
Managers and front-line staff can address this problem by using “zero-based thinking” for these management processes. Ask yourself the question, “Knowing what we know now, does it add value to mandate this request?” You might find that some weekly report process developed five years ago no longer makes sense. In that case, eliminate the process and give everyone more time to focus on higher value work.
5. Is Your Corporate Technology Helping or Hurting the Employee Experience?
Recent industry research from consulting firm PWC found that management and staff significantly disagree about staying current with new technology. Their research found that: “90% of C-suite executives believe their company pays attention to people’s needs when introducing new technology, but only about half (53%) of staff say the same.”
Using ancient technology at the office is discouraging, especially for technically savvy employees. For example, if you require all employees to call the IT help desk for password help, you’re adding a speed bump to their productivity. There’s a better way to shape the employee experience.
Introducing SSO Technology to Improve the Employee Experience
How many passwords do employees have to memorize to get their work done? Some companies mandate half a dozen separate passwords for different systems. Developers often have many more passwords to manage since they rely upon cloud tools and services to do their work. By using a single sign-on (SSO) software solution, you can make the employee experience much better.
When staff comes in the morning, they simply need to log in once. For the rest of the day, they can focus on high-value work. It’s one less distraction standing between employees and hitting their goals. By using Avatier’s single sign-on software, implementing SSO becomes much easier.
In addition to enabling the employee experience, did you know that SSO can benefit the bottom line? With Avatier’s single sign-on solution, you can track SaaS app usage. For instance, you may have purchased 50 licenses to a finance cloud application; however, only 10 staff members access the app each month. Therefore, you can save money by reducing your SaaS license.
