What is employee experience?
Employee experience (EX) refers to the interactions, relationships, and perspectives that employees and the organization form with each other, and its impact at various touchpoints—from the time a person joins the company, their journey as an employee, until the time they leave.
The top 5 elements of EX
While the employee experience encompasses an entire spectrum of characteristics, here are a few important and influential elements:
Physical environment
Providing a safe, healthy, and clean office space for employees to work.
Technology
Using EX platforms to bring all of your employees together, regardless of where they work from or how they work.
Work culture
Understanding what employees need, their values, beliefs, and giving room for everyone to be a part of the common vision and create a positive impact.
Leadership
Building transparency and trust, leading by example, and recognizing and valuing employee contributions.
Work-life balance
Ensuring employees aren’t pressured into working long hours or pursuing unrealistic targets, making sure that their well-being is taken into account.
Why is the employee experience important?
- Over the last few years, our approaches to work have shifted. While monetary benefits and safe, clean physical work environments still matter, organizations that manage to retain talent are those that go beyond the obvious. Work culture matters too.
- With more and more young people in the workforce, organizations need to give importance to other factors such as diversity, inclusivity, and equity (DEI), opportunities for learning, experimentation, growth, upskilling, and the mental well-being of employees.
- Organizations looking to stay relevant for the long term also need to understand the relationship between EX and customer experience (CX), and mobilize internal partnerships across multiple departments to ensure that they take a people-first approach. This isn’t possible without delivering exceptional EX.
How does it impact employee engagement?
- Employee engagement is about creating a workforce that's truly invested in the success of your organization. It’s no secret that the more engaged employees are, the more motivated they are. With increased motivation, there's better job satisfaction, productivity, and retention.
- Engagement cannot be forced; it needs to be a natural response to healthy interactions and experiences your employees have with the organization, at all levels.
- At the core of any positive impact the company has on its workforce lies employee experience. For organizations to remain competitive and retain top talent, they need to invest time, effort, and technology that helps them deliver exceptional employee experiences.
How can it improve organizational success?
Happy employees make your customers happy
- It's simple. When employees are satisfied with the company, they prioritize providing good customer experiences. When they’re treated with empathy, they’ll extend the same to your customers.
- Positive EX creates a culture where employees feel like they belong. When employees are empowered to be themselves at work, they’re more willing to share their ideas. Open idea-sharing across all levels in an organization drives innovation.
- Organizations that reinvent themselves, provide creative solutions, and treat their customers well sustain profitability, regardless of competition.
Build lasting employee relations.
Ways to improve the employee experience
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Create supportive physical environments
Take care to ensure that workspaces are designed ergonomically and facilities are comfortable and hygienic. -
Strengthen internal communications
Transparent communications are essential for employees to trust the management. Whether it's an exchange of information, company news, or any other update, help employees feel like they’re part of the organization by conveying the larger picture. -
Use employee-oriented tech
With hybrid and remote work becoming the norm, digital workspaces are key. EX platforms provide the ideal space for multi-channel communication, idea-sharing, recognition, document repositories, automation of processes, and more, while still being user-friendly. -
Foster a healthy work culture
To a large extent, the success of any organization depends on the kind of work culture it has. Easy collaboration, recognition, and inclusive environments that encourage diversity are some of the key factors of healthy work cultures. -
Develop strong leadership to drive EX
Leaders set the stage for how things work in an organization. Leaders who are empathetic towards employees, employ effective communications, and care about empowering employees to grow are the ones that drive organizations to succeed. -
Focus on employee well-being
Organizations that take care of their employees survive the long game. By providing safety, flexibility in work, medical assistance, in-house counseling facilities, encouraging a work-life balance, and allowing employees to bond, companies create a culture where employees can be themselves and realize their potential. -
Being open to ideas and feedback
Improving the employee experience is a continuous process. Hear directly from employees on what they require and regularly analyze how effective your existing strategies are to improve and find novel approaches to delivering a positive EX.
Why does your organization need an EX platform?
Enhancing the employee experience is no easy feat. With teams being distributed, there needs to be platforms beyond an email or a chat that can bring your entire organization together. EX platforms are built for this, and here's how they help:
- Improving employee engagement by making the workplace more interactive, allowing the free flow of ideas and dialogues.
- Creating an inclusive culture that’s more open, where there’s constructive feedback across all hierarchies.
- Making employees feel valued by recognizing and celebrating their contributions.
- Simplifying internal communications to help HR and communicators get their message across to a large number of employees at the same time.
- Exchanging ideas and granting better access to information, improving cross-functional collaboration and productivity.
- Improving onboarding to get new hires acquainted with the company culture, giving them access to various resources like policies and best practice guides, and a platform for them to interact with other employees.
- Encouraging employee participation in any company-wide activity, event, or discussion, making them feel at home in the organization.
- Understanding employee sentiment, prioritizing wellness initiatives, and continuously improving communication and EX strategy through surveys and constructive feedback.
Why is Zoho Connect more than an EX platform?
Zoho Connect is one of the leading EX platforms designed to simplify internal communications, boost engagement, amplify culture, centralize access to resources, and improve collaboration and productivity.
Zoho Connect can help your organization with these features:
An all-encompassing organization dashboard that you can customize through an array of widgets to spotlight what's most important to employees in a single page.
Built-in peer-to-peer recognition that allows you to reward and celebrate milestones and achievements and make employees feel valued for who they are and what they do.
Live broadcasts and Town Halls to help you conduct company-wide events, deliver messages from the CEO and management, and involve all employees regardless of where they work from.
Analytics that include understanding employee sentiment so your HR team gets an idea about how employees are interacting and what resonates with them.
Surveys to create positive feedback loops and hear directly from employees about their concerns and what works for them.
Workflows, custom form-based applications, and dynamic memberships to help your organization automate mundane work and improve operational efficiency.
The best part is that you get all of this in a highly customizable and secure platform. You own your data, and you always will. Our security and privacy policies ensure this.
Wrapping up
Organizational success is dependent on various factors, but core to all of them is how companies treat their employees.
Good employee experience and a positive work culture are what retains top talent, propels innovation, motivates everyone to align themselves towards the common vision, and creates valuable, impactful, and positive brand and customer experiences.
Bringing all of your employees together on an EX platform is a head start.
