Building a Better Employee Experience
Every interaction your employees have at work – whether in the office, jobsite, or in between – contributes to their cultural viewpoint of working with you. In an era of workplace upheaval, it is more important than ever for leaders to focus on engineering intentional employee experiences to help retain and excite the best people.
Watch Digging Deeper this week as Dennis suggests different ways for making the employee experience better every day. We’d love to hear your stories about how you engage with your people. Please share with us in the comments below.
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Good morning, everybody, Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper.
Today, I want to talk about the employee experience. What? Yeah, the employee experience. I know we've recommended
in the past that everybody read a book called the Experience Economy. And we talk a lot about your customer experience
in developing customers for life, customer loyalty, and making the experience construction great for your customer so
that they'll want you to build for them again and again and again. Well, today it's all about people. So today I want you to
think about the employee experience, that journey that the employee has with your company from the time they first
heard about your company, interviewed for your company, got onboarded with your company, got hired, got in their
position, moved through, got training up the line or whatever, but what is that employee experience like? And you could
say, well, isn't that really the same thing as culture? And it is in a sense, but what I want you to think about today, certainly
your culture affects your employee experience, but I want you to think about the ways that you can improve the employee
experience.
And by doing that, I'm going to suggest that you map that employee experience through all of the things that, put on your
employee hat from your leader hat and say, "What does it feel like to be an employee?" What does it feel like when I walk
into the office in the morning? What do I see? How am I greeted? What's that experience? Is it a happy experience? Is it
an uplifting experience? Is it a downer experience? What happens when we onboard? Do we have solid onboarding? Do
people feel alone, lost or do they feel cared for, engaged?" So, each of those things, even going back to the interview
process, "When I interview folks, do they feel like this is going to be a special place to work? Or do they feel like, do you
have a pulse? You're hired, come on board. We need everybody with a pulse." Or is this going to be a special place? How
do you make them feel? How are they going to connect with the culture of the company, the purpose of the company,
the mission of the company?
So, every place your employee interacts with the business, what is that experience like? And where can you improve it?
Where can you make it better? So that that employee enjoys their job more, they're more fulfilled by their job. They're
more connected to their job. They're more engaged in their job. They're driven to care more about the company, about
the company's clients, about their fellow employees. Again, everywhere you see your employees, or they interact, there's
an effect being made. It could be from the pictures on the wall, the sayings that you have on posters around the hall, the
history that you have written on the wall, it could be the sound environment, the lighting environment, what your
meetings are like, are your meetings downers, or are they uplifting? Are they boring or are they exciting? Are they
motivating? Everything that goes on in your company is part of that employee experience.
So, socialization, appreciation, recognition, community involvement, the heart of the company, where is the heart of the
company? How do employees feel that? And then even the pay, the benefits. With pay and benefits, by the way, the key
issue there a lot of times is fairness. As important as being paid well and having good benefits is that they feel like they're
being paid fairly, and fairly may be with respect to their industry, it may be with respect to their fellow employee, even
though they may not know exactly what they're getting, but they still, fairness is a feeling. And again, so as part of your
employee experience, how do you make sure your employees feel like they're being compensated fairly? The future is key
to the employee experience and how are you painting that future for them? How are you making sure that they feel
secure, that they feel that the future is bright, that they feel like the future is understood, that there's a clear pathway to
that future? All of those elements.
So again, if you thought about charting a process, how does an invoice go through your company? Well, it goes to this
person, they check on it, they put it in the system, they move it on here, it gets an approval, et cetera. Think about your
employee experience that way, all the places in which the employee intersects with the company, its facility, its fellow
employees. And where are the ways that you can make that a little more enjoyable, a little more special, a little more
connected? And that's what we're talking about with the employee experience. So, focus on it and I think you're going to
have better retention, you're going to have better customer care. And in the end, you're going to have better performance.
So, Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper. Thanks for tuning in.
