Employee Experience: Its Need, Benefits & How to Improve It?

You must have seen plenty of add-ons in the recent corporate culture such as meditation (and yoga) rooms, Fun Fridays, and even laid-back workspaces. The primary reason behind this trend is to encourage employees to boost their overall productivity.

As per a National Business Group, Health, and Fidelity Investments survey, most employers across the world are spending a surprising $3.6 million on employee-oriented wellness initiatives.

However, almost all these companies are prioritizing employee-centric benefits and perks instead of focusing on the actual employee experience to forge and strengthen workspace relationships.

One of the most thought-provoking employee experience examples includes a survey by Deloitte, wherein only 900 out of the 10,000 respondents felt ready to openly address the issue of employee experience and support. Thus, without a hint of doubt, working towards a positive employee experience (EX) should be the top most priority of businesses across the globe.

What is Employee Experience?

In its essence, employee experience refers to a perfect balance of employee-oriented technology, diverse work culture, and an employee-friendly workplace.

Employee experience is aimed towards making employees content, confident, motivated and proud of the work in which they are engaged. One of the main benefits of employee experience-centric companies is the creation of a positive, exciting, and cherishable work culture.

Companies falling short of delivering a positive employee experience fail to understand the sheer significance of the employee experience and precisely map it to generate profitable business outcomes.

Why is Employee Experience Needed?

One needs to understand the importance of employee experience and its need in today’s era. Let us take you through some poor employee experience-induced issues:

• During and post the pandemic, the global workforce engaged in what was later called “Mass Resignation”- an unprecedented mass exit. Nearly 11.5 million employees ranging from frontline workers to senior executives quit their jobs during April, May, and June 2021 as per the US Department of Labor. Now, as employee experience falters, furthermore, 40% of employees are planning to quit their jobs as per a global report by McKinsey.
• The corporate world is bracing itself for the Recession predicted in late 2022 and early 2023. In the light of poor employee experience strategic approaches, 2/5th ‎Gen-Z and 1/4th millennial employees in a recent Deloitte survey are planning to leave their current position by 2023.
• The phenomenon of burnout (physical/emotional exhaustion along with loss of personal identity and a sense of reduced achievement) has become very prevalent. Around 57% of respondents in the 2022 study by Owler felt medium-high burnout levels. While 25% of them considered sleeping more as a solution, more than 50% preferred to take time off for avoiding burnout.
• Quiet quitting is another rising phenomenon wherein employees are making cooperative and conscious efforts to reduce their work output. This includes behavioral patterns such as no email engagement during weekends, no late-night extra work at the office, and no additional tasks outside their exact job roles. As per Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report, over 79% of employees worldwide are advocating for steadier work-life boundaries for improving employee experience.
• A recent job seeker survey by Bankrate found that around 56% of the respondents intend to take up a new job by next year due to maladjusted working hours, particularly in the remote-work environment.

Thus, organizations must realize the need for employee experience and make conscious efforts towards positive work culture, stable work-life balance, and better benefits.

Benefits of Positive Employee Experience

Now that you have realized the importance of EX, let us look at some astonishing benefits of employee experience:

1. Better Customer Experience
Creating great employee-centric experiences is directly correlated to achieving positive customer-centric outcomes. An Employment Engagement Benchmark study conducted by Temkin Group revealed that companies with excellent customer experience have over 1.5 times better-engaged employees than those with average customer service.

2. Reduction in Turnovers
As per Gartner’s recent report, highly engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their organizations than those who are poorly engaged.

3. Higher Revenue Rates
One of the most crucial benefits of employee experience is that superior EX leads to 27% higher revenue rates for new services and/or products.

4. Garnering Better Talent
According to a Harvard Business Review report, the heaviest investors in employee experience are 5 times more likely to show up in Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work than their average EX counterparts.

5. Better Innovation
Deloitte's research shows that businesses with a top-quartile EX witness twice the technological innovation than those with a bottom-quartile EX.

How to Improve Employee Experience?

The three main stages of the everyday experiences of employees are:

• Employee Engagement
• Professional Performance
• Career Development

Since all three are also the prime responsibilities, experts recommend that the core of any EX strategic model should be the sheer employing, training, and development of extraordinary managers.

One of the best employee experience practices includes improving EX by examining your workers’ experience in terms of financial stability, physical health, and overall work-life satisfaction.

In LinkedIn's Global Talent Trends Report, more than 1,000 companies rated highly on fundamental EX components such as benefits, flexibility, and training were cross-referenced with behavioral data of employees available on LinkedIn. The following observations were made:

One can also enhance EX by understanding some of the most talked about efficient employee experience examples like:

• AT&T’s investment in reskilling to boost internal talent
• Virgin Australia’s holistic support for diversity with flexible work options

Conclusion

To efficiently function in today's competitive, employee-exhausting, and modern-day business environment, organizations must make efforts to attain sustainable growth, holistic productivity, and employee engagement.

Taking pride in its class apart services, Altudo believes in promoting and cultivating the best employee experience practices, such as: Connecting EX with an organization’s higher purpose of achieving excellence

• Offering seamless employee engagement
• Positively influencing organizational outcomes
• Regulatory cross-organizational compliance to help you with EEPs and Asana Requests

The team at Altudo helps in creating a top-drawer employee experience through strategy, implementation, and managed services.

Feel free to get in touch with us to receive the very best of employee platform support.