
HR and Investing in Employee Experience
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In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, Jacob Morgan explores the difference between short-term employee engagement programs and investing in long-term employee experience. While engagement programs can boost engagement scores for a short time, they are generally costly and their effects wear off over time. In contrast, creating real change in your work culture can make your company a place employees want to come to every day. Based on Morgan’s research, improving employee experience can have valuable and long-lasting effects.
“Experiential organizations,” like Adobe, Facebook, and Microsoft, invest in cultural, technological, and physical employee experiences, and ultimately see significant gains over comparative companies. For instance, experiential organizations were almost 25% smaller than other companies but showed 4 times the average profit and 2 times the average revenue. Additionally, experiential companies were included 28 times more often among Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 11.5 times more often in Glassdoor’s Best Places to work, and 2.1 times more often in Forbes’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies, among other impressive stats.
Innovate Your Work Culture by Starting with HR
The obvious benefits of investing in employee experience require companies to “focus on how people experience your organization day by day.” If you’re considering shifting your organization’s focus to improve employee experience, why not start with the area you can most easily control? Employee interactions with HR are easy to redesign and can have far-reaching effects on how employees experience their work culture every day. Because HR is the only function in the business that touches every single employee, you have the power to make a real impact.
Providing fast and personalized HR support through top-of-the-line technology can save employees time and empower them to access the information they need anytime, anywhere. And with PeopleDoc, digital innovation can be implemented in 8-12 weeks. Launching a best-in-class HR system in just a few months gives you a fast return on investment, and effectively jumpstarts a long-term focus on creating highly positive employee experience.
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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 Nicole Lindenbaum
Nicole Lindenbaum is the Director of Product Marketing at PeopleDoc by Ultimate Software. Nicole leads the global messaging strategy for PeopleDoc by translating technology into business benefits HR can actually understand. With significant experience in HR technology, Nicole writes and speaks about HR service delivery, employee experience, digital transformation, and the future of work. Nicole holds a BFA from Syracuse University and an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.