How You Can Improve Employee Experience

Wondering why everyone’s talking about improving the employee experience? Read our blog to find reasons and ways to strengthen EX in your organization with an employee experience app. 

Is there a reason why leaders focus a lot on improving employee experience? Should employees' sentiments matter when you’re compensating them well? Short answer - Yes. That’s because employee experience impacts employee motivation and drives organizational performance. Several studies back this up:

• Positive employee experiences improve well-being by 83% and engagement by 77%. 
• High employee confidence levels lead to 22x higher retention. 
• A sense of belonging improves job performance by 56% and reduces absenteeism by 75%.
• Employee experience experts confirm that companies in the top quartile of EX are twice as innovative as those in the bottom. They also see an up to 25% increase in profitability. 

How do you instill good employee experiences to achieve such results? What needs to dominate your employee experience strategy? Does the formula change depending on whether your workforce comprises in-office or frontline staff? This blog explores what shapes employee experiences and discusses ways to improve them using unified employee experience platforms like Speakap.

Understanding Employee Experience 

Employee experience covers everything that shapes how employees perceive your organization throughout their employee journey. 

Ensuring excellent experience is crucial as it influences their engagement, productivity, and output. Pursuing an employee experience strategy steps in here as a holistic framework to help you improve and manage that overall experience. It comprises a plan covering the entire employee journey, encompassing aspects like: 

• Presenting the organization as a desirable place to work.
• Providing a conducive work environment with suitable facilities and tools.
• Taking care of employees' needs, well-being, and safety, from inclusivity and work-life balance to mental health.
• Offering personalized experiences and support to optimize engagement.
• Providing learning and development opportunities to grow.

How do you implement this?

Enter: The Role of Digital Employee Experience (DEX)

Improving employee experience starts with recognizing the modern workplace’s evolution towards digital transformation. From onboarding to exit, digital tools are extensively used throughout. Therefore, a large part of employee experience factors in their digital experiences. Friction while using the available tech, leaves employees annoyed and less productive. 86% of frontline workers highlight they need better technology. Another 46% state that their company needs to invest in better communication technology. This is where you need to step in and optimize their Digital Employee Experience (DEX).

What’s DEX? It encompasses employees’ experiences with everything from the software and hardware they use to perform daily tasks, communicate, collaborate, or access company resources. Optimized DEX ensures that employees can work more effectively and with greater satisfaction.

Overview of Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Solutions: Understanding what they entail

Perhaps your organization already provides several digital tools to streamline and optimize workflows. DEX solutions don’t require you to add more technology. Instead, they aim to ensure that different technological solutions help employees work better.  Thus, DEX solutions take care of essential aspects like:

• Easy Communication: They simplify accessible, transparent, two-way communication among employees. Frontline workers, for example, cannot read emails due to the nature of their work. They need something more hands-on, like a mobile-friendly instant messaging app. Alternately, remote in-office workers may need face-to-face interactions, for which secure video-conferencing tools are necessary. DEX-focused comms tools account for such varied frontline and in-office workers' needs.
  
  
• Feedback systems are necessary to enable employees to express themselves, share real-time feedback, and report problems easily while choosing whether they want to be identified or anonymous. For instance, an anonymous feedback tool can empower a minority group facing discrimination to report to their superiors safely.
  
  
• Integration: This introduces simplicity and boosts the ease of working with the diverse tech stack. Most businesses use multiple tools, often leading to chaos and digital fatigue. This affects employees’ work satisfaction. DEX-focused solutions support their integration into a unified interface and improve employee experience.

This leads us to the next obvious question: How do we implement this all?

Introducing Speakap: An Employee Experience Platform, Your Employees, Will Love

Using proven employee experience platforms like Speakap offers a simple way to address DEX aspects. Speakap is designed to unify your employee journey for both in-office and frontline workers. Since it’s built with a mobile-first philosophy, it caters to the needs of both groups and supports seamless two-way communication and collaboration. Employees can communicate and engage easily. They can share feedback, and management can track responses using the app's data analytics capabilities. The best part is that you can customize Speakap to suit unique organizations' needs while integrating it into your existing tech stack. 

To make the most of it, don’t ignore these best practices

• Ensure you get leadership buy-in to get the desired budget for your EX strategy and give it the push you want. 
• Choose any technology based on your organization’s unique needs and ensure it has a user-centric design for the best outcomes.
• Train your employees to use your EX tool for optimum adoption and proper usage.
• Work on your culture. For example, prioritize open communication. Ensure synchronous and asynchronous communication styles are encouraged to preserve work-life balance and employee experience. With digital, lines often blur if you don’t pay close attention. 
• Establish and regularly track employee experience KPIs such as tool adoption rates, employee engagement scores, employee net promoter scores (eNPS), and absenteeism. Use them to proactively identify and address any unique experiential challenges of desk and non-desk workers.
• Revisit your employee experience framework for regular improvements.

Bottom Line: Optimize organizational success by using DEX platforms 

With the modern workplace undergoing rapid digital transformation, improving the digital employee experience is vital. A positive DEX translates into higher employee engagement, productivity, talent retention, agility, and innovation. Establishing employee experience frameworks and using supportive employee experience platforms like Speakap is the easiest way to connect these dots. 

Are you looking to supercharge your implementation of employee experience platforms? We’ve compiled insights and best practices from the Employee Experience Platform ‘Super Users.’  Download the whitepaper: Insights & Best Practices from EXP ‘Super Users’ - Download Now! (speakap.com) To explore how Speakap can work for your organization and help improve your employee experience, request a demo.