Launching a Great Employee Experience in your Organization: The E-Factor Plan

This post is the second in our E-Factor series, where we explore hot topics in Employee Experience. To read more about the E-Factor, click here.

The beginnings of employee experience (EX) can be traced back to the customer experience. Think about how you like to be treated as a customer. What about a great customer experience do you just love?

For me, I love when an organization treats me like an individual and not just another sale. I love when an organization is transparent and open about the sales process. I love when an organization makes it super easy for me to be a customer. I love when an organization immediately takes care of a problem I have, and in the process shows incredible authenticity that makes me feel like they care about me as a customer.

• Personalization
• Transparency
• Simple
• Responsive
• Authentic

If you were going to give your employees this same type of experience, do you think you could pull this off today?

I know most organizations couldn't! Doing this would force HR to move from reactive to proactive, but it also forces our leadership to first understand that we need to make a change. A huge change!

The very first step to increasing your E-Factor is your executives need to agree that a great employee experience is critical to the success and growth of your organization. If you don't gain this buy-in, any work you put into your E-Factor will go nowhere.

A funny thing about employee experience is you can't fake it. Your employees live it every day. You live it every day. Faking employee experience will actually do more harm than good, so if that's your plan, just keep doing nothing. You'll be farther ahead!

Your executives will buy in. No, really, they will!

Your executives actually want to be successful. They also want their HR leaders to help lead the way. Part of that leadership is that HR comes to executives with plans and actions for how to increase the level of productivity of our workforce. The single greatest way to do that is through increasing your E-Factor!

The HR problem we have in launching a great EX program is that we simply don't have the capacity to make it happen, and most executives want to see some results before fully funding big projects. The fastest way to increase your HR capacity is to start using your technology to its fullest.

My first step to increasing the E-Factor starts with doing an analysis of administrative work my team is doing that our technology should be doing, but for some reason, we just haven't utilized it.

Utilizing HR self-service to its fullest will certainly increase your team’s capacity, and if your technology has the capability but you're not using it, you need to work with your vendor to fully implement. If you don't have HR self-service, you need to find a vendor to help you with this, immediately!

Once you open up capacity, now you're in a position to increase your E-Factor! Upcoming posts will lay out steps, plans, ideas, and examples of great employee experiences. Your talent acquisition team is working overtime to make sure your candidates have a great experience. It's time HR starts working overtime to ensure your employee experience is world-class!