
2017 Will be the year of Employee Experience! What's Your E-Factor?
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This post is the first in our new series, The E-Factor, where we explore hot topics in Employee Experience.
The hottest trend on the planet in HR is called Employee Experience (EX). Employee experience actually started in conversations around 2014, as soon as organizations started to feel the current talent pinch.
For years, during the great recession, almost no organizations had to worry about their EX. There were few jobs, so employee turnover was mostly a non-issue across all segments of the workforce. When the economy started to pick up, we took our employees for granted.
Our current workforce started to pick up the extra hours and work that needed to get done, before we even started to hire new workers to pick up the load. We had conditioned them for this over the recession, that we all “needed to pitch in a little more for the good of the company".
Instead of focusing on our own employees after the recession, we instead poured time and resources into creating great candidate experiences - treating those who didn't even work for us better than we treated our own employees!
What is Employee Experience?
EX requires us to look at our work environment through the eyes of our employees, not the eyes of management. To understand a comprehensive view of their workspace, the technology we ask them to use, the teams and leaders we ask them to work with, each and every day.
EX is simply focusing on making the journey your employees take with you as enjoyable and as productive as it can be. EX is not about turning your work environment into a free for all. It's about removing distractions and barriers, in a noticeable way that your employee appreciate.
Why is Employee Experience such a hot topic in organizations today?
At any moment, around 60% of your employees, and maybe more depending on a number of factors, are open to looking at and accepting a new job with another organization. At. Any. Moment.
What would happen to your organization if 60% of your employees didn't show up on Monday? Most organizations would fail, almost immediately, and never recover. Thankfully, our organizations will most likely never face such a drastic encounter.
On top of your current staff being open to leave, new talent looking at your organization are increasingly using review sites to find out more about what it's truly like to work for your company. This means we can no longer make a fancy, cool recruiting video and make people believe this is what 'it's really like' to work at our organization.
The great team here at PeopleDoc call employee experience the E-Factor. Having a great E-Factor puts you in a position to retain the great talent you already have working for you and attract the great talent you need to continue to grow and succeed.
Moving forward you'll be able to find great resources right here on the PeopleDoc blog to help you increase your E-Factor and take control of your employee experience. We'll focus on what the most innovative organizations are doing to increase their E-Factor, and how you can implement those ideas into your own organization.
The next post on E-Factor will focus on how you and your team can get started on the road to a world-class employee experience. Are you ready? Let's do this together!
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Yes, You Can Measure Employee Experience. Here’s How.
Companies want to offer their customers an excellent experience. Part of doing that is offering employees an excellent experience. There are two reasons for this. In many industries, job candidates are also customers. An example is the person who loves dining at a restaurant and decides to apply for a bartender job there. The last thing organizations want to happen is to lose both a candidate and a customer at the same time. The second reason is that employees are responsible for delivering the customer experience. The way they do that is by having their own excellent experience.
Does Your Organization Have an Employee Service Philosophy?
Most organizations have customer service philosophies. Examples include “Put yourself in your customers’ shoes” and “Put your customers’ needs first.” A customer service philosophy is defined as a group of shared principles that guide every customer interaction. Often, they are linked to the organizational mission, vision, and values. Customer service philosophies include references to honesty, respect, empathy, and making customers a priority. In thinking about external customer service philosophies, it raises a question. Shouldn’t organizations also have an employee (aka internal customer) service philosophy?
How 2020 Upended the Employee Experience Model As We Knew It
In a 2019 survey, Deloitte found that 84% of business and HR leaders viewed improving the employee experience (EX) as important—and 28% considered it urgent. In the pre-pandemic world, with low unemployment and rising turnover rates, providing a positive EX was an essential talent attraction and retention tool. Then COVID-19 hit.
About Tim Sackett
I’m a 20 year HR/Recruiting Talent Pro with a Master’s in HR and SPHR certification, currently residing in Lansing, MI. Currently the President at HRU Technical Resources – a $40M IT and Engineering contract staffing firm and RPO. Prior to joining HRU, I was the Director of Employment at Sparrow Health System, Regional HR and Staffing Director with Applebee’s Intl., Retail Health Recruiting Manager and Regional HR Mgr. with ShopKo Stores and Pamida respectively. I’ve split my career half between recruiting and half between HR generalist roles – also split half between the HR vendor community and Corporate America – So, I think I get it from both sides of the desk.