What is Employee Experience, How Can You Design?

Although many companies give priority to customer satisfaction, there is something they forget: the first and the most important customers are employees. The overall success of a company depends on an inclusive employee experience design regardless of responsibilities & titles and how motivating and people-centric it is. 

What is Employee Experience?

Employee experience is much more than an HR term: it is the sum of all employees’ interactions with their stakeholders, colleagues and the company. Employee experience begins with the recruitment process and continues throughout the whole work lifecycle. It is not just about increasing employee satisfaction but the whole experience that creates uniqueness and competitive advantage.

Equation of Employee EX

Employee experience has a simple but effective equation. Culture, workspace and technology are the components of this equation, and each part has its own importance. This equation forming the working experience can be summarised as follows:

• Culture: It includes the values ​​and goals of the company, attitudes of employees and managers, the way they work, wages and fringe benefits.
• Technology: It includestraining tools that will enable employees to improve their competencies, internal communication techniques and applications that will increase performance and productivity by reducing the workload.      
• Physical (and Digital) Workspace: It includes the design, décor and physical advantages of the working environment where employees spend most of the day.

However, the physical workspace component can be challenged given the remote working and hybrid models. For this reason, the weight of technology component gets a higher share with the pandemic.

Although every step of this equation is not the same for every company, it lays the groundwork for a strategy that every company can use.

How Should Employee Experience Be Designed?

There are certain steps that must be followed to ensure a positive employee experience. The company culture, technology and workspace equation that creates the employee experience can be made more detailed. Feedback should be received throughout recruitment, onboarding, development and even leaving, which are the milestones in employee experience. 

All these stages for the design of the work experience are provided by certain processes and services. Work experience design is created by the actions of not only HR professionals but also all managers. The prominent stages in the design process of a positive work experience are:

> Physical and Digital Workspace

Employees spend most of the day in their work areas - may be no more with pandemic but this is still one of the most important components that create employee experience. It is important to stimulate positive vibes when coming to work and having a motivating space to spend their time while keeping them focused. This mostly shifted towards digital with remote working, which led companies to find digital tools that allow community feeling and a digital playground that employee can share their voice virtually. 

> Performance Management

Performance management is related to a company choosing the right processes to achieve its goals. One of the ways to optimise performance management is to improve the competencies and behaviours of employees. Providing employees with new competencies and encouraging them to develop their competencies helps employees increase their motivation, improve business processes and work more efficiently. It is associated with performance management and company culture.

> Improved Communication

It is important to provide certain communication channels so that employees can communicate both healthily and professionally. Employees who can easily express their thoughts and feelings through these communication channels are strengthened and relations are improved. In case certain applications are needed to ensure this communication, both the company culture and the technology part of the employee experience are contributed.

> Feedback

The most important action in the improvement and further development of the employee experience is to receive continuous feedback from your team. There are specific surveys and evaluations that the employee and the company can apply for each process and service. Feedback from these surveys and evaluations enables solutions to improve the employee's experience. Prominent among the survey and evaluation methods applied for feedback are as follows:

• Employee Satisfaction Survey: Itis a tool that enables the employees to measure their loyalty to the company, to what extent they are satisfied with the company's services and processes, and to make improvements and developments in this direction.      

• Pulse Survey: These are short surveys prepared for employees' feedback on job satisfaction, work relations and work environment in shorter periods.

• 360 Degree Evaluation: It is an evaluation method that aims to improve the employee's competence, behaviour and competence by receiving feedback from assessors at different levels.

Sorwe offers you all the solutions your company needs in designing an effective digital employee experience. You can contact us to benefit from Sorwe solutions and to reach case studies of different companies.