Employee Experience

Organisations cannot achieve much without people to fulfil the roles that facilitate essential business operations. How can they ensure they empower their people to perform to the best of their potential? 

As the front-facing contact to customers, there are high expectations placed on employees to deliver a level of service that will compel the customer to purchase from them. They have an opportunity to make or break customer relationships and influence the customer’s opinion of the company. Most organisations understand the importance of creating valuable customer experiences and they often spend time and allocate substantial resources into seeing that their customers are happy. However, the same cannot be said for organisations placing similar focus on the employee experience or making sure that employees are happy in their roles and have the necessary tools to perform their job functions. Where this has been surveyed, it has shown an imbalance of resources made available to employees versus expected efficiency output. It is strange that there is often much emphasis placed on how the end customer feels, without confirming that the employees responsible for making the customers happy, are in turn happy themselves.

Employee experience encapsulates what people encounter, observe, or feel over the course of their employee journey at an organisation. It is becoming increasingly important, and the most innovative of organisations are now dedicating entire departments to getting it right. Employee engagement, recruitment, retention, and an organisation’s bottom line are all areas that can be significantly affected by an employee’s experience, so it is worth paying attention to.
Jacob Morgan identified three domains that encapsulate the employee experience:

• Physical environment – the workspace itself and what it looks and feels like. Are the office facilities clean, modern, safe and comfortable rather than old, dirty and inaccessible?
• Cultural environment – the overall feel or vibe of an organisation which is largely impacted by its’ leadership style and team structure. Do employees feel they are supported and is there a healthy company culture?
• Technological environment – the tools employees use to get their jobs done. Everything from the internal social network your company uses, to the software and solutions they have access to. Does your tech match the needs of your employees or is it archaic and subsequently limits employee success?

Companies that can strive to provide good – excellent standards of these three environments can expect to hold a competitive edge in attracting high quality talent and keeping them engaged. Good employees contribute to a positive company culture, and companies known to have a successful employee experience generally pass on that positivity in their delivery to the customer.

Harvard Business Review reported how “companies that excel at customer experience have one-and-and-half times as many engaged employees as customer experience laggards do.” More engaged employees can also equate to more revenue; employees work harder because they want to and because they have the means to do so. Gallup found that a staggering 87% of employees worldwide are not engaged, but companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147% in earnings per share. The key takeaway here is that employees who enjoy being part of a company are much more likely to do their job better than employees who don’t think much of their company and therefore apply less effort.

Digital First can help you focus on your team's technology needs, supporting them with the right solutions so they can get their jobs done effectively.

Contact us today for a free consultation. 03 8657 0196  [email protected]