2017 Will be the year of Employee Experience! What's Your E-Factor?

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!