Businesses need to get serious about employee experience

If businesses put as much time and effort into the employee experience (EX) as they do their customer experience (CX), they’d have few problems retaining their best staff. Plus, EX directly impacts CX – happy employees equal happy customers, after all – so there’s a commercial reason to ensure employees experience positive interactions as they go about their business.

Just to ensure that we’re all clear on what EX is, one definition calls it the “sum of everything an employee experiences throughout his or her connection to the organisation — every employee interaction, from the first contact as a potential recruit to the last interaction after the end of employment”.

Forbes is predicting that we are in an era of “employee experience”. In other words, businesses will start to recognise the commercial benefits of a superior EX and prioritise actively trying to cultivate it.

It’s not only commercial benefits which make EX important. Offering a superior EX can also give a business a competitive advantage when it comes to attracting and retaining new talent. And what business doesn’t want to do that?

If you’re still pondering whether you should be spending more time cultivating a positive EX, consider the findings by Jacob Morgan, author of The Employee Experience Advantage. He found that organisations which invested most heavily in EX were:

• Included 11.5 times as often in Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work
• 28 times more often listed among Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies
• Listed 2.1 times as often on the Forbes list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies
• Generating four times the average profit and more than two times the average revenue

But, before pressing ahead and increasing investment in EX, it’s important to be aware of what EX isn’t. Forbes asserts that it’s not:

• Just the responsibility of HR. It is the sum of all an employee’s experiences, not just the interactions during recruiting, onboarding, performance reviews and planning.
• A quick fix. “Feel good” tactics such as free gym memberships can help with EX, but they won’t be the deciding factor.
• Employer branding. Employer branding is about projecting an external reputation, while EX is all to do with the internal reality.
• Employee engagement. Commitment only comes with great EX.

At Cognition24, we know all too well how important EX is in getting employees to work in an organisation’s vision. Just you try implementing new technology to people who have had their fingers burned in the past.