The employee experience is something many employers used to take for granted. For so long, candidates were competing for jobs and employers had their pick of the litter. Quite frankly, employers could often get away with having a poor employee experience because most employees would still stay. Then the early 2020s hit and boom – the tables have turned.

Now, many more industries are seeing an employees’ market instead of an employers’ market, and managing the employee experience has become a top concern. That’s why we created a go-to guide on employee experience management.

What Is Employee Experience Management?

Employee experience management is the practice of providing a positive, productive, and fulfilling experience for employees. If you’re practicing effective employee experience management, you have a firm understanding of the work environment you create for your team members. You understand the challenges they face on a daily basis as well as the path toward growth and progression.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: yes, each employee’s experience will vary slightly. Some employees may face difficulties that others don’t and some may find your work environment to be more motivational and productive than others do. This varies from team to team and person to person. When you’re taking an active, engaged approach to managing your employee experience, you’ll be able to pick up on the patterns and understand how you can improve the employee experience as a whole.

Why Do You Need Employee Experience Management?

If you’re in a jungle where you might be surrounded by wild animals, putting on a blindfold doesn’t mean the animals don’t exist – it just means you don’t know where they are. The same is true with your employee experience. There are always ways to improve your employee experience if you look for them. Employee experience management is the only way to know what they are and address them.

Improving your employee experience has numerous advantages, such as:

• Higher employee retention resulting in lower attrition costs
• The ability to provide a consistent customer experience because employees remain consistent for years at a time
• The ability to hire better talent because more people want to work for you
• An enhanced reputation as a business because more customers want to support businesses that treat their employees well
• More productive, effective employees because their needs are being fulfilled

A positive work environment and great employee experiences don’t happen by accident.They are cultivated through the investment you make in a mindful employee experience management program. Let’s take a closer look at how to develop an employee experience program that benefits your business, your staff, and your customers.

Steps in Creating Your Employee Experience Management Program

Developing an employee experience management program should be a significant process that involves understanding the current experience and environment you create for your employees, identifying ways you can help your employees to thrive, and establishing a plan for continuously monitoring and improving your employee experience. As you create your comprehensive employee experience management plan, follow these 3 essential steps.

1. Establish Leadership

To have a strong employee experience, everyone in your organization needs to contribute and be on the same page: executive leaders, middle managers, HR staff, and employees themselves. To keep everyone on the right path, though, there needs to be an employee experience manager at the top of the program.

So, what does an employee experience manager do? This individual serves as the chief point of contact for your employee experience program. They direct the overall strategy, coordinate efforts, and manage the short-term and long-term plan for improving your employee experience.

As you select your employee experience manager, choose someone who holds a position of authority. They should be able to comfortably delegate and hold others accountable without disrupting your organizational hierarchy. At the same time, you need to select someone who has the schedule capacity to take on this role and has an understanding of employee relations. Consider giving the role to a leader in your HR department, for example.

2. Create KPIs to Measure and Track Progress

Like any other program, your employee experience program needs to include a way to measure success. You can’t judge the employee experience by how often employees seem to be in a good mood or other subjective observations. Tracking specific metrics on a consistent basis allows you to clearly see how you’re improving or where you need to make changes.

There are many options when it comes to KPIs to track, but some of the most common and actionable metrics include:

• Employee retention rate
• Employee satisfaction score
• Employee net promoter score (or eNPS)
• Average employee lifespan (the amount of time an employee spends working for you before their resignation or termination)
• Productivity
• Percentage of employees who stay past their first year
• Employee engagement rate
• Employee absenteeism
• Ratings on employee review sites like Glassdoor
• Percentage of promotions filled internally

No singular KPI will tell the full story about your employee experience, but collecting and comparing several of the measurements from this list will serve as a starting point. When you spot the KPIs that aren’t performing as strongly as you would hope, you can take further steps to survey employees, find out where your employee experience is falling short, and make a plan for improvement.

3. Make a Plan to Track Employee Experience Progress

Once you’ve decided what KPIs you’ll measure as part of your employee experience program, you need to create a solid plan for routinely measuring and analyzing those KPIs. After all, even the best metrics are useless if they’re only based on a single point in time.

Some of your KPIs might come from your employee database like retention rates, average lifespan, and so on. But most employee experience metrics can only come from one source: your employees.

It’s best to set up an employee experience survey for employees to complete on a regular basis, perhaps once per quarter or twice per year. In this survey, you can get to the heart of the matter. Ask employees for their honest thoughts on what it’s like to work for your organization. Ask what they appreciate about the work environment, what their top stressors are, and what you can do better.

For an employee survey to be as helpful and thorough as possible, you need to be able to ask not only multiple-choice questions but open-ended questions. GroupSolver’s advanced survey tool makes this easy because it uses AI to take in, interpret, analyze, and quantify open-ended answers, giving you clear takeaways like the most common suggestions from employees.

Within the same survey, GroupSolver can combine open-ended questions with numerical questions like, “On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with your job?” With one survey, you can measure all the KPIs you need.

Building Your Employee Experience Management Program

Now is the time to start investing in your employee experience management. As you construct your plan and assign responsibilities to your leadership team, we’re here to help you truly understand and improve your employee experience. Request a GroupSolver demo to learn more about how we can help you get all the employee feedback you need.