Your employees are your most valuable asset—they connect your customers with your products and services, maintain customer satisfaction, and ensure the day-to-day operations of your company. Their experience with your organization is integral to keeping them with you for the long-run.
But sometimes, there’s a disconnect between what you perceive as your employees’ experience and what they actually experience themselves, called an employee experience gap. Is this cause for concern? Keep reading to learn potential problems that may arise because of this gap and how you can bridge the gap.
Before we get into the thick of the employee experience, we need to explain exactly what it is. The employee experience is how employees see, encounter, and interact with your organization during their time with the company. Many organizations have been quick to ensure the overall customer experience is top-notch and engaging, but some fail to think about how their employees feel every day.
When management thinks employees are happy with their jobs because they aren’t sending fiery emails, but the employees themselves don’t feel seen, heard, or valued, this creates an employee experience gap. If your employees aren’t happy, they’re going to be less inspired to dedicate themselves to the job at hand.
Your company should pay attention to how your employees are feeling about their roles and the organization and utilize employee experience metrics to pinpoint areas of concern before they become major issues. One reason why employee experience is so important is that happy employees are more likely to go above and beyond what’s asked of them. Customer-facing employees are then going to be more motivated to go the extra mile for a customer if they feel valued by their company, which in turn benefits your business.
First off, the employee experience won’t be the same for each person at your company. What one employee considers important might not carry the same weight with another. Views tend to differ based on factors like age and job level. Basically, what motivates one person might not be stimulating to another.
These employee experience gaps need to be addressed before a customer is negatively affected or a vital employee leaves your company due to their negative experience.
Consider what can happen if you ignore what’s going on behind the curtain.
Without finding purpose in their work or when feeling unappreciated for what they do in their roles, employees can become disinterested in their daily tasks. Maybe an employee has been in the same role for a long period of time and wants to move up the ranks, but they don’t feel they can mention this desire to their boss or upper management. Boredom in a role can lead to a lack of interest in the duties of their job.
Once an employee has lost interest, their performance will be impacted next. If you see a decline in an employee’s output, it could be because of a negative employee experience. Rewards that a manager or HR think will promote a positive experience for an employee, like a company happy hour or a lavish party after hitting a sales goal, might do absolutely nothing for an employee whose work ethic is dependent on recognition and validation while at work, not their ability to socialize with the team after hours.
This employee experience gap can arise when employees are not given an opportunity to speak up and ask for what they might need to ramp up their performance again.
The worst-case scenario that stems from ignoring employee experience gaps is losing valuable members of your team because they don’t feel appreciated, resulting in them feeling very unhappy in their role.
When an employee doesn’t feel they can speak up and share their concerns with management or HR, they can start to feel isolated, invalidated, and ultimately a bit hopeless when thinking about their future with your company. The last thing you want is to lose a hardworking employee due to a poor employee experience.
So how do you improve the employee experience and avoid these costly mistakes? Well, before you can create a strategy for employee experience, you need to learn how to measure employee experience to pinpoint what issues are within the company.
One way to do this is by evaluating the current processes the company has in place. If you don’t have any, it might be a good time to pool some ideas. The old pen-and-paper way of collecting feedback hardly exists in today’s world, especially because more people are working remotely than ever before. Using digitized, add-on employee engagement software makes collecting and storing feedback simple. This way, managers can access feedback received and communicate across their teams to build people up in the ways that work best for them.
Once you’ve gathered feedback through pulse surveys, exit interviews, and other touchpoints, you can implement some of the ideas in ways that boost the confidence of employees while also making them feel seen. If your employees noted that moving into a different, more challenging role would motivate them and increase their output, you could craft a training program that will give them the skills needed for that next level. Tiled allows your team to easily craft and share content like training materials or feedback requests to help increase cross-team engagement and interaction.
We hope that you’ll use these tips to prioritize and optimize your employees’ experience. If you’re looking to improve your employee experience gap, use Tiled to create documents like employee handbooks and training manuals that will delight your employees.