6 Best Practices to Create a Positive Employee Experience
Employee engagement isn’t just a nice to have. It has a very real impact on business success. According to Gallup, businesses with higher levels of employee engagement showed 21% more profitability and 17% more productivity.
When employees are engaged, they are inspired and motivated to do — and to want to do — their best work. It’s up to leaders to help nurture an environment where their employees can not only succeed, but thrive. A recent study from Deloitte found that 80% of executives said they consider the employee experience to be either very important or important, yet only 22% reported that their organizations did an excellent job of creating a differentiated experience for employees.
It’s important to think holistically about the key factors that affect your employees’ experience (their role, their relationships, their work environment, and the organization as a whole)— and what you can to do improve the way they all coexist.
6 Best Practices to Create a Positive Employee Experience:
- Listen to your people. Understand what inspires and motivates them, and in turn, what demotivates and disengages them. Put yourself in your peoples’ shoes and truly understand their day-to-day experience — by listening to what they have to say in focus groups, surveys, and through crowdsourcing.
- Keep an open channel of communication with your team. Connect with your employees through storytelling and transparent communication. Give them feedback and encourage them to give you feedback in return. Keep employees feeling connected through executive hosted two-way communication forums, social media campaigns, and town halls. Be explicit in telling employees their perspective is welcome and encouraged.
- Support your employees’ development. Make it known that you are committed to each individuals’ professional growth and career development — and provide them with resources and opportunities that support this. Support your employees journey through regular coaching, feedback, and check-ins, as well as tangible learning methods like e-learning, training tools, and courses.
- Equip and enable leaders and managers. Be the support managers need to support their teams. Provide managers with toolkits, conversation guides, and trainings to help them engage their employees more effectively.
- Create space for peer-to-peer support. Cohorts, Employee Resource Groups, and peer networks are a great way to increase the amount of connecting employees are doing. The more connected teams are to each other, the more effectively they can work together.
- Reinforce the desired employee experience through all touch points. Make sure all high-level touch points of the employee experience (Employee Value Propositions, performance management, learning and development, onboarding, etc) are consistent in the messages and desired mindsets they convey.
Creating a positive employee experience in your organization goes a long way in keeping employees engaged and your business thriving. Make sure that — in the day-to-day of keeping clients and customers happy — you always stay focused on ensuring your employees are happy, supported, and thriving, too.