Study after study has proven that the most successful companies put as much effort into creating a workplace environment where employees feel safe, happy and motivated as they do into attracting long-term clients and customers. When employees enjoy their jobs, they arrive at work each day feeling energized and driven to share their best ideas and perform to the best of their abilities.
Here are 14 critical ways to improve your company’s employee experience, which will ultimately boost retention rates as well as lead to a better customer experience, as recommended by the expert advice from the members of Forbes Communications Council:
And remember Making Happiness A Habit Is Equally Important for both your Customers & Your Employees!
1. Prioritize Effective Communication
The key to prioritizing employee experience is to first prioritize communication. Whether you choose skip level meetings, virtual roundtables, or any other formal or informal type of communication, you need to find an effective two-way communication channel to crowdsource an evolving approach to the experience. Core values will permeate each communication channel if they are reinforced by people leaders.
2. Start By Trusting Them
Talented employees are experts in their particular disciplines and want to be respected enough to do their work with minimal interference. Demonstrating trust in employees by providing them with autonomy and not micromanaging their every working moment ensures you will create employees who love their jobs. This attitude will bleed through your entire company.
3. Make Listening An Important Part Of The Culture
Listening is the best way to learn what your employees value. Make listening part of the culture of your organization, from having team meetings where everyone shares ideas, to following up by actually executing some of them.
4. Get To Know Your Employees Personally
Get to know your employees personally and communicate with them the way they like to be communicated with. Good and clear communication means adapting your communication style to each employee’s unique blend of background, personal circumstances, and personality.
5. Make Every Touch Point Supportive
The employee experience is like the customer experience: every touch point matters. One negative experience can derail an employee’s perception of a company, so it’s imperative to focus your entire organization around supporting each employee. To make employee experience part of your company’s core values, you must have total buy-in from leadership and listen to what employees are saying.
6. Purposefully Create An Employee-First Experience
Most companies’ commitment to employee experience starts and ends with that slide in the corporate PowerPoint. This isn’t out of ill will, but rather just getting caught up in the day-to-day. If a company wants to make an excellent employee experience a real thing, then they have to be purposeful about creating that experience. It’s the adage, “Employees first, not customers”.
7. Collect Feedback From Your Employees
What gets measured gets managed! To create an excellent employee experience, companies need to collect feedback from their employees in a structured way and then act on those insights. By measuring employee engagement with regular pulse surveys, companies can gain real-time insights about what is working well and which areas need attention.
8. Focus On Positive Values And Aspirations
Focus on aspirations of all kinds. Values aren’t just words to repeat aloud; they’re standards to live by, day in and day out. To sustain an exceptional employee experience, identify themes that will help you constructively tackle the things your organization can and should do better. This approach creates a shared vision and communal excitement around the next evolution of your organization’s values.
9. Involve Employees In Creating Core Values
First, involve your employees in the creation or review of your core values. Make sure they resonate with everyone, not just your senior leadership team. Second, live the values every day and make sure you demonstrate them to employees. Incorporating them into an everyday routine will enhance your employee experience.
10. Celebrate The Small Things
It is all about the little details! Celebrating small things, such as birthdays, anniversaries, promotions or achievements, shows how important you think every individual is. For each celebration, make sure to include some kind of reward, such as a small amount of money on their birthday, extra vacation time for staying with the company, raises for cross-training, and more.
11. Be Committed And Proactive About It Every Day
It takes a day-to-day commitment and proactive management to make the employee experience a core aspect of your culture. Define your ideal employee experience and introduce initiatives to support those values daily. Whether it’s flexible scheduling, showing appreciation or professional growth, provide managers and employees with tools and resources to make them a reality.
12. Build A Culture Of Space, Tolerance and Capacity
Companies need to build a culture of space, tolerance and capacity for employees to perform at their best as humans and as business leaders. Companies need to champion cultures of “work-life blend” that are as unique as their employees are, and as fluid as their ever-evolving lives.
13. Make Employees Your Best Advocates
User experience isn’t just for customers and end users! Your best advocates and brand ambassadors are your employees. Creating an excellent employee experience involves fostering a culture of diversity, opportunities for growth, empathy, recognition, work-life balance, and offering incentives for contributions and staff retention.
14. Always Encourage Open And me Honest Communication
It’s important to create a culture where employees feel safe voicing their opinions and sharing ideas. Encourage open and honest communication because employee feedback is such a valuable tool for growth. And also celebrate failures because they can be even more informative than successes. Together, these two values help employees feel heard and they give them the confidence to think big.