Employee Experience: A Key to Organisational Success

Shep Hyken said, “A brand is defined by the customer’s experience. The experience is delivered by the employees.” To this, I would like to add that employees deliver the same experience delivered to them.

Over the years, for a really, really long time, customer experience has been at the base of organisational operations. Employees were mandated to do “whatever it takes” to make the customer happy. This looked like a great way to go then, but then the world of human resources came to the discovery that customers are treated better when the people attending to them feel valued. For this reason, in recent times, the way of work has changed.

Employee experience is the perception a person has about his or her employment in an organisation. It is the totality of the encounters that the employee has with the company from the moment they come across the vacancy ad to the day they resign or retire.

There are two major misconceptions of employee experience across organisations, and one of them is that employee experience only has to do with the physical workplace. HR departments in many organisations have the opinion that painting the office walls with bright colours, stringing up lights everywhere and bringing in comfortable seats is all it takes to create a positive employee experience. The second misconception is that organisational culture is a substitute for employee experience and so they hold cool parties and have catchy mantras and print fancy t-shirts, but that’s not nearly enough.

Happy People Do Good Work

Employee experience is a combination of a healthy work-life balance, a comfortable physical workspace with good ergonomics, an inclusive organisational culture, events that contribute to personal development, and good technology that enables productivity.

It sounds like a lot, but employee experience is simple; engaging employees and delivering on their expectations and their needs. The process to achieving this may sometimes be complex, but the principle is simple. The more people feel that they are valued, the more they are convinced to stay and put in their best. The concept borrows heavily from the concept of customer experience.

We all know that customer experience focuses on making the target audience, as well as the existing customers, feel wanted, included, and valued by the company from which they acquire their products and their services. Customer experience aims to show customers that to us (the company), they are considered to be more than just numbers in the bank.

Employee experience borrows from this concept in the sense that it focuses on creating encounters for the employee(s) that shows that they are not considered tools or parts of a machine; it focuses on building relationships and showing the employees that we care what they think of us.

I have been an employee myself, and in the decision to choose an organisation to move into, money has never been the only consideration, and the same goes for the top talents around the world. For employees who will actually work to contribute to the success of an organization, the considerations are a combination of salary, physical workplace, cultural inclusion, development potential, technological advancement, and in simple terms, how much the organisation cares about the people, the service providers who they employ.

You can be certain that this is true, considering the fact that I quit a job at the beginning of the year because I was the only employee from a different ethnic background, and I felt like an outsider the whole time.

Every organisation wants to have the best, but the people who will give you the best care about how working in your organisation makes them feel. They want to see you put in effort to make them feel good about working for you. Everyone else will settle for anything, because their prospects are low, but those are not the people you want on your team.

Considering all of this, the fact is that employee experience is an avenue that organisations looking for top talent should invest in. People want to be cared about, and taken care of; if they don’t have options, they’ll settle for just being paid. If they have options on the other hand, a well-ventilated office and bright walls that say “you rule” just won’t cut it.

Employee directly influences organisational growth, because the simple truth is this; happy people do good work. Believe me, you want happy people working for you. They’re the ones who will go beyond their job descriptions to see the company grow, they’re the ones who will invest their ideas and not just their efforts, they are the employees who will develop themselves to serve you better.

Every business owner/manager with plans for success should invest in employee experience and you will benefit from the limitless potentials of people, or you will look around one day and find that you are surrounded by grumpy people who really do not care if you swim or sink.

Keep an eye out for the next article on "3 Ways that Businesses can Promote Employee Experience"

Thank you for reading!