Employee Experience Management (EEM) to Empower Workers

With employee experience management, managers can make sure their team members are productive, well-supported, and given everything they need to work wiser. Here’s how to build a world-class employee experience management strategy

With employee experience management, organizations can give new hires and established workers the tools, programs, and support they need to work wiser. This article will explore the importance of employee experience management, the elements that contribute to successful employee experience management programs, and how organizations can build an excellent employee experience strategy with help from qualitative and quantitative data-driven employee engagement insights collected from intermittent sentiment surveys and complemented by ongoing engagement measurement.

Choose where to start:

• What is Employee Experience Management?
• The Importance of Employee Experience Management
• What Makes Employee Experience Successful?
• Taking a Holistic Approach to Employee Experience
• Where to Start: Deploying an Employee Experience Program
• Real Life Employee Experience Management Examples
• Assessing Employee Experience Management with ActivTrak
• Support Your Employee Experience Strategy with ActivTrak

What is Employee Experience Management?

Employee experience management is the process of identifying, managing, and improving the ways in which employees interact with their company, technology and coworkers. By monitoring the employee experience in real-time with a product like ActivTrak, organizations can optimize processes, support employee development, and improve the workplace culture.

What Factors Contribute to Employee Experience?

The employee experience can be broken down into three components:

1. Culture: Employees work best when they have a sense of belonging. Engaged employees with positive employee experiences are productive, work well with their team members, and are a key part of solid group dynamics that drive business outcomes. Workers also tend to have more positive employee experiences in companies with clear and logical organizational structures, where everyone knows their job roles and who to turn to if they need help with a project. Also, taking DEI concerns seriously and ensuring that underrepresented populations feel welcomed and supported at work is integral to a positive employee experience. A top-down approach to employee experience, from leadership down to each individual employee, works best.

2. Technology: In order to have a good working experience, employees need access to the technologies that help them work effectively. The right digital tools — project management apps, communication tools like Microsoft Teams or Zoom, remote work setups — help employees get more done in less time and communicate effectively with their colleagues.

3. Fulfillment: Along with the ability to work effectively, employee satisfaction is essential to a positive employee experience. Workers need opportunities for personal and professional development, a healthy work-life balance, and tasks that make them feel they’re contributing to the company’s wider missions and goals.

How Managers Impact the Employee Experience

Employee experience management is a shared responsibility between human resources, IT teams, and managers. Direct team managers impact the employee experience most because they’re in charge of the daily processes and interactions that make up the employee experience. Managers are also a key touchpoint between employees and company leadership. If an individual is having a poor employee experience, they can bring their concerns to their manager, trust that they’ll take those concerns seriously, and pass them up the chain.

Managers care deeply about the success of their teams and work hard to support employee needs, and good relationships between managers and employees are integral to a positive employee experience.

The Importance of Employee Experience Management

When your organization prioritizes employee experience management, you can:

• Reduce attrition, boost retention, and prevent burnout

A positive employee experience throughout the employee journey — from onboarding to exit interviews — makes your organization a great place to work. If your employees can say they have a great employee experience at your organization, they’re less likely to leave, more likely to take part in projects that boost profitability, and more likely to encourage top talent to join your team. Also, if you prioritize employee experience management by ensuring that no employee works excessively long hours and workloads are evenly distributed, you’ll give employees another reason to stay — reduced burnout risk.

• Increase revenue

Bain & Company found companies with highly engaged employees grow in revenue 2.5x faster than those with lower engagement levels. Employees who are valued, treated well, and given the tools they need to succeed are highly motivated to ensure the company’s success and boost business outcomes.

• Improve employee performance

When organizations foster positive employee experiences, everyone works wiser. Plus, consistent and inclusive employee experience management encourages employees to improve their own employee journeys and collaborate with leadership on further employee experience initiatives, helping improve company culture from the ground up.

• Improve customer experience

Employees who are given the tools to do their jobs effectively as part of employee experience management can help customers more easily. Also, employees who can confidently use enterprise systems will be able to problem-solve more creatively and help customers meet their needs quickly.

What Makes Employee Experience Successful?

It takes more than one person, role, or department to support a positive employee experience. In order to leverage an excellent employee experience for all team members, organizations need to combine involvement at the managerial level with a systematic, data-driven approach to employee experience management. This also includes fostering a positive company culture that promotes continuous, constructive employee feedback and open conversation.

Taking a Holistic Approach to Employee Experience

Managers must consider all the aspects of every employee’s experience when forming employee experience management initiatives. The outcomes of a positive employee experience might look the same across the board — employee satisfaction, high employee engagement, perks, flexible workspaces — but what you must do to achieve those outcomes will differ for every employee.

Employee experience management initiatives should be holistic, accounting for all kinds of employee lifestyles and employee needs. Holistic employee experience management also accounts for each employee’s work-life balance plus physical and mental well-being. With a holistic approach to employee experience management, organizations can support a work environment where all employee needs are met and even exceeded.

Where to Start: Deploying an Employee Experience Program

To give your workers a positive employee experience, you must take a systematic approach to employee experience management. Here are five steps managers should take when building employee experience management initiatives:

1. Understand employee personas and types: By defining the different kinds of workers in your organization, managers can improve specific elements of the employee experience.

2. Determine your top priorities: Make a ranking list of which employee experience elements are most important to address.  There’s no right or wrong element to prioritize first!

3. Create a roadmap or employee journey: This helps you visualize all the ways in which employees navigate their experiences. Employee journey maps also clearly outline what gets done, how, and by whom.

4. Establish protocols: Identify the individuals and teams involved in employee experience management programs, and create specific guidelines that promote current success and consistent optimization.

5. Capture employee experience insights: With data-driven insights, managers can determine how well employee experience management initiatives are working. Managers can use pulse surveys, 1:1 check-ins, and workforce analytics technologies like ActivTrak to gather ongoing quantitative employee experience metrics.

Scaling the Employee Experience

To scale the employee experience, every employee, manager, and senior leader must have a clear knowledge of their role and responsibilities in employee experience management initiatives. This allows for proper resource allocation and efficient processes, as well as more open and constructive communication. You should also use digital solutions like ActivTrak to help surface the data-driven insights you need to constantly improve the employee experience. With the right data, metrics, and analysis, you can adjust quickly so your employee experience management program grows with you.

Real Life Employee Experience Management Examples

Hewlett Packard (HP)

In 2018, HP increased overall business performance and raised its stock price by $10 in two years by shifting its focus to employee experience. HP created several employee development and training programs, and in return, employees were more productive and dedicated to their roles, leading to increased revenue.

SAP

In the late aughts, SAP made employee experience management and performance management top priorities. SAP supported employee freedom and personal development in order to boost organization-wide engagement, productivity, and employee satisfaction. This secured SAP a spot on the Best Place to Work list in 2013 and as a result, SAP stock increased by $20 from 2013 to 2017.

Assessing Employee Experience Management with ActivTrak

Many organizations find it challenging to ensure employee experience management initiatives are actually making a difference. With ActivTrak, you can use the data-driven insights gathered by our workforce analytics software to complement engagement surveys and other OKRs. This helps both managers and employees to actively participate in improving the employee experience.

ActivTrak delivers a holistic view of employee engagement, employee satisfaction, and overall experience. Digging into trends in employee work habits, such as consistently long hours or too few breaks, will pinpoint employees who are having a poor employee experience and need additional support. This also helps managers spot warning signs of burnout before the problem grows. You can compare employee workloads using our workload management metrics as well, which helps managers distribute work evenly so overwork doesn’t compromise the employee experience.

ActivTrak also offers managers tailored productivity coaching for each individual employee. With these insights, managers can improve the employee experience at the individual level and make targeted interventions based on unique patterns. Employees can access these personal insights as well so they are empowered to take charge of their employee experience and uncover opportunities for self-improvement.

How will you know if your employee experience strategy is succeeding? Using ActivTrak, employees and managers can track key metrics over time against team-wide benchmarks and goals. These stats help you track where you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going in terms of employee experience management, so you can always keep a pulse.

Support Your Employee Experience Strategy with ActivTrak

Having a positive employee experience can improve employee retention and performance, drive revenue and profits, and support customer satisfaction. With the right tools, managers can optimize employee experience management and ensure that their team members are engaged, well-supported, and enthusiastic about the company’s vision.

To prioritize employee experience management and take a systematic approach that will drive change, managers must look to employee data. ActivTrak offers a suite of solutions that help managers balance workloads, ensure a healthy work-life balance, and find productivity coaching opportunities that are unique to each employee. With ActivTrak, you can create a holistic employee experience management strategy that helps employees across your organization work wiser.

Pro-Tips:

• Create a holistic employee experience management plan with clear goals, guidelines, and responsibilities for everyone involved.
• Encourage consistent, open conversations between managers and employees. This helps everyone work together to improve the employee experience.
• Use benchmarks to track the effectiveness of current employee experience management initiatives and continuously optimize the employee experience.