First of all, you should not underestimate the value of a positive employee experience. Happy employees are worth their weight in gold. Not only does it make your organization more productive, but it also leads to engaged workers and strong work relationships. Happy employees get work done!
What is employee experience?
Employee experience is a broad term but it basically encompasses everything your worker does, feels, learns, and sees during the employment lifecycle. Each person’s employee experience will differ greatly as it is a personal experience. It can be both positive and negative – either way it will impact your business operations and productivity.
So with that being said, here are 8 ways you can improve employee experience and make your company a better place to work!
1. Diversity and Inclusion:
Diversity and Inclusion ensure you have a diverse group of people from different backgrounds working for you. An article by Forbes.com here, illustrates that hiring people from different backgrounds leaves room for more perspectives when brainstorming and problem-solving. Ultimately, it brings fresh ideas into your business. Having a diversity and inclusion policy in place also means your workers will feel welcomed and have a sense of belonging in work which will improve their employee experience.
2. Allow Flexibility:
One great way to improve your employee experience is to build flexibility into their schedule. Allowing for flexible schedules is proven to improve workers’ work-life balance. Also, it means happier, more engaged workers. Employee scheduling software like Celayix builds flexibility with features such as self-scheduling and shift-bidding. As a result of the features, employees have more control over their schedules. Other flexible initiatives that improve employee experience are flexible start times, 4 day work weeks and working from home options. Remote working is very beneficial to employee experience. In fact, in a survey report done by Owl labs found that workers who work from home were 22% happier than those who work onsite in an office environment.
3. Communication is key:
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, communication is key for a positive employee experience at your company. Communication is also vital to build strong work relationships between colleagues and managers. To improve the communication within your company you ensure you have the right communication tools in place. Tools such as Slack, Teams and Skype are good for team environments.
Celayix mobile scheduling app is also a great way to instantly communicate with teams. Employees can see their schedule and receive messages from management all from the one place too. Try keeping things simple with everything in the one place rather than having multiple tools for workers to check. Communication is especially important for remote off-site workers who don’t have face-to-face communication with their managers. With Celayix, you can put shift tasks in place so when a worker checks in they can see a list of what is expected of them.
4. Team Building Events:
In order to have a better employee experience, your company should also provide team building and networking events. Hosting non-work-related events like parties, team-building activities, and fun runs will also allow people from other departments to get to know each other better. Often, teams can get siloed in work and you only end up talking to others on your team. These events give other workers a chance to build good relationships. This also helps create a more open work environment and will ultimately improve the experience your teams have at work.
5. Improve the work environment:
As mentioned at the beginning of this blog, the employee experience encompasses everything a worker encounters during the time with your company. The work itself needs to be interesting and engaging in order for them to have a positive experience. This can look like reducing the number of monotonous tasks that could be automated. The physical work environment also needs to be a pleasant place to work. For example, ensure the workplace is bright, ergonomically friendly, safe, and clean. This is just a basic right of a worker and something that is absolutely necessary for a good experience.
6. Training and Development:
All employees want to feel like the work they are doing is important and valued. They also want to know that they are improving and building skills as a person. Without the right tools and resources, your workers won’t be able to reach their full potential. A great way to motivate your team is to provide education and training tools. This empowers your workers and helps them be better at their job and improves life skills. When your workers are learning new things and putting skills to work they will be happier and more engaged.
7. Feedback and Employee Rewards:
Another great way to ensure your employees are getting a good employee experience is to continuously recognize good work and reward employees’ achievements. This is really motivating for workers and it gives them goals to work towards. Everyone likes to be told they are doing a job well done. So you should try putting this in place regularly. A good way of doing this is to have 1:1 meetings with your team so you can provide guidance and feedback. You can also initiative rewards such as employee of the month, and extra paid time off to encourage workers to work hard and reach their goals too!
8. Offer growth opportunities:
Employee experience will improve when they are offered more growth opportunities within the business. Tying into the point above, when a worker is meeting all their goals and is ready to take the next step in their career you should look for ways to do this. This can be in the form of a title change, a salary increase, more training, someone to report to them etc. DecisionWise found through their internal research that employee perception of internal opportunities is the lowest it’s ever been. In their research, only 61% of respondents said that they agree with the statement, “This Company provides attractive opportunities for growth and development”. When workers feel they don’t have anywhere to progress within your company they will begin looking elsewhere.
To wrap up, there are lots of things your company can do to improve the employee experience. It will be dependent on the type of work they are doing and the industry you are in but there are always ways to help create a better work environment.
You can check out our recent infographic all about employee motivation here too.
