Article: Enhancing employee experience & improving productivity

Employee Relations

Enhancing employee experience & improving productivity

The data is clear that there aren’t many other business investments that can offer the same level of measured and meaningful impact as is the case with employee experience.
Enhancing employee experience & improving productivity

There has been an increased interest in employee experience over the last few years. As work started taking many forms, it became increasingly clear that the one assured way of ensuring productivity in the workplace is by creating a positive employee experience. Organisations are now examining employee experience from different perspectives to improve it further. At the People Matters Workforce Productivity Conference, Marta Turba, Vice President of Content Strategy and Education at WorldatWork shares her understanding of the challenges and opportunities associated with this strength.  

 

Why you must focus on employee experience

The advantage of well designed workforce experiences that truly impact an organisation’s employees is very clear. A recent economic study estimates more than 43% improvement in productivity, 36% improvement in customer experience which translates to customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and eventual brand growth. There's a 31% improvement in profitability overall, which translates to sustainability and reinvestment and growth and innovation. Innovation itself is reported to improve 20% in those organisations that invest in designing those amazing workforce experiences. There aren’t many other business investments that can offer this level of measured and meaningful impact as is the case with employee experience. So there is a proven need to focus on employee experience as a key strategy to impact human capital investment. Human capital investment is a business investment just like any other type of capital investment and the workforce experience is the one thing that has the power to truly elevate and escalate the return on that investment.

How can HRs influence employee experience?

It is not easy to deliver exceptional workforce experiences. Employee experience is a journey of every single touch point experience and intersection that an individual has with the organisation from the moment they consider applying for a job until the end of their employment tenure. This includes all the decisions related to their role, their manager, their career path, their well being  and their rewards. This experience is really vast and is different for everyone.

Turba emphasised on the importance of selectively focusing on the things that truly matter to employees through their lens by HR professionals as a method to bring positive employee experience. According to her, this can be achieved through collaboration and cross functional teamwork. Employee experience is holistic in nature and in most organisations it is cross functionally owned by a group of top executives. There is a role for everybody in employee experience but the most important thing is to consider how the employees want to share their role within that experience.This creates blurred lines of accountability whose primary objective is to increase the positive impact on employee experience with higher levels of collaborative work.

There is ample data proving that work friendships increase productivity and engagement. However, there has been a slight shift in recent years. In the current age of remote work, digital transformation and the systems that one uses in the workplace has become the new best friend. They have become the secret sauce to how engaged and how productive an employee can be in the work environment. Employees are demanding more from their technical experiences and the employers that are delivering those demands are the ones making a difference in their industries.

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Topics: Employee Relations, Culture, Employee Engagement, #PMWPC, #EmployeeExperience

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