10 Easy Ways to Improve Your Employee Experience Strategy

So, how can you improve the employee experience? Here’s a list of 10 easy strategies:

1. Deliver Excellent Communication

The key to improving relationships with your employees is the same as in any other relationship – communication.

Most HR leaders and business professionals agree that communication is important, but they ultimately spend more time communicating with the media, with stakeholders and with their target audience than with their own employees.

To improve communication, make sure you’re offering a conversation platform, like LumApps, that’s more than just email. Use communication tools to share good news and bad news, to celebrate major accomplishments in your employees’ professional and personal lives, and to clearly identify your purpose and values.

2. Respond to Feedback

The best way to know what your employees need from you is to ask them, and then to listen when they respond.

Today, many tools are available to help capture continuous employee feedback, like pulse survey tools, open survey tools, and performance management tools. Using them freely and frequently will allow you to understand what employees like about your organization while also learning what employees still feel they’re missing.

To receive honest feedback, however, it’s vital that a culture of respect and open communication already exists in the organization. If your employees feel neglected or disrespected in regular, day-to-day communication, they’re not likely to take the time to communicate honestly with you.

3. Focus on Employees

This strategy might sound like a no-brainer, but it’s important to focus on employee experience at every step of the employee life cycle. From onboarding to departure, view each interaction as an opportunity to create a positive employee experience.

For example, viewing employee experience through the lens of the entire employee life cycle can lead to questions like:

• Does our hiring process feel fair?
• Do new hires experience our values during onboarding?
• Do employees feel they are growing and developing with us?
• How do people feel about their time with us when they leave?

The answers to these questions will allow you to see your entire work environment from an employee’s perspective and may show where there’s room for improvement.

4. Promote Diversity and Inclusion (D&I)

A study made by Russell and Reynolds Associates in 2017 found that the presence of a diverse workforce directly improved human capital outcomes, including:

• decreased intent to leave
• increased employee engagement
• increased creativity
• greater employee belonging

The same study found even greater improvements among organizations with established D&I strategies, as well as those with leaders committed to implementing those strategies. To make sure your workforce stays diverse and experiences the many benefits that come with diversity, develop and implement a D&I strategy that focuses on talent attraction, development, and retention.

Additionally, promote diversity and show your employees you support them by ensuring your tools and systems support multiple languages.

Why is Employee Engagement Important ?

5. Provide Meaningful Work

According to a study by Deloitte, the ideal organization will provide its employees with meaningful work by:

• Encouraging autonomy: Empower your employees by allowing them to shape their work environment in ways that help them perform at their best. Hire autonomous people, don’t overreact when mistakes are made and give your employees the tools they need to reach their goals.
• Creating small, independent teams: Be open to new ideas, recognize and encourage your employees regularly, and give team members the authority to make decisions. If you’re afraid to give employees that kind of authority, consider giving them the training they need to make wise business decisions autonomously.

6. Make Management Supportive

Great managers make employees feel supported during day-to-day operations. For example, they set clear and transparent goals for teams and for the organization so that no one is left in the dark when big-picture decisions are made.

Great managers also provide coaching for employees by giving frequent feedback, encouraging employees to learn from others, building their confidence and sincerely asking how they can help the employee achieve their goals.

However, great managers are made, not born. Without investing in manager development, your organization may find itself lacking the leadership it needs to improve the employee experience.

7. Create a Positive Work Environment

A positive work environment is the result of a combination of factors, like:

1. flexibility
2. inclusivity
3. diversity

A flexible work environment allows employees to work in their preferred environment at their preferred hours. Allowing job flexibility has been proven to increase productivity, health and job satisfaction while decreasing stress, costs, and absenteeism.

Additionally, it’s important to promote diversity and inclusivity by watching employees interact, then by recognizing and rewarding inclusive behaviors. Providing unconscious-bias training to all managers and taking measures to mitigate hostile interactions in the workplace are equally beneficial steps.

Finally, a culture of recognition is a great way to make employees feel valued while motivating others to achieve similar success. Creating peer-to-peer awards, asking employees to write featured blog posts on the organization’s website or even sharing their success on corporate social media channels, are excellent ways to showcase employees’ accomplishments.

8. Offer Growth Opportunities

Research by DecisionWise found that only 43% of employees feel that their employers offer good opportunities for growth and development. This is an alarming statistic since findings also suggest that high-performing employees will only remain in jobs that challenge them and provide meaning.

There are many kinds of growth opportunities you can offer employees to improve their experience with your organization, including:

• increased income
• more significant duties
• more impressive job titles
• job-specific training
• social gatherings outside of work

9. Cultivate Trust in Leadership

In order to fully trust your organization’s leadership, your employees need to be aware of its mission and purpose. Communication from top managers should always be honest, transparent and inspiring.

Your employees also need to feel that you’re continually investing in them since they’re investing so much time and effort in your organization.

Employee experience platforms can help you inspire employees while investing in them by providing you with the tools to:

• Show your employees you trust them.
• Incentivize your employees to do great work.
• Include your employees in the organization’s big decisions.

10. Use the Right Tools

Clearly, there’s a huge variety of ways to improve the employee experience, ranging from delivering excellent communication to providing employees with meaningful work.

However, these improvements can be difficult to implement if you don’t have the right tools. To sufficiently support your employees, an intranet software solution like LumApps can help you simplify productivity, streamline communications and promote a positive employee experience.