Every workplace is different and approaches its strategy to improve employee experience differently. This list we’ve compiled contains ideas on how your company can put its employees first and gives you plenty of employee experience examples to base your own approach on.
Choose and adapt the ideas that work best for your team and adjust them to fit your overall work culture.
1. Focus on employee engagement
Physical engagement reflects how your employees’ mental and physical capabilities are used in doing their jobs. In other words, if your employees feel that their abilities fully benefit their work, they are more likely to be engaged in what they are doing.
Cognitive engagement is about your employees’ understanding of your company’s goals and corporate values. Employees need to understand what your company aims to achieve and how their work contributes to those overall goals.
Emotional engagement refers to how employees feel about their relationship with your company. Your employees may know what your company’s mission is and how their work contributes to it, but they must also care about that mission.
Emotional engagement is most closely tied to employee experience. For your employees to care about your company and its goals, they need to feel invested in the company culture and invested in the success of their coworkers.
To learn how to create great employee experiences, it’s important to know how engaged your employees are with their work. While there are many aspects that contribute to employee engagement, it’s crucial to measure it regularly in your workplace.
2. Prioritize employee experience in your internal communications
From newsletters to event invitations to employee conversations, internal communications are what keep your company running. They’re also an important tool for promoting positive employee experiences.
Use your internal communications to inform employees about upcoming events, benefits programs, co-workers’ birthdays and other milestones, and more. Spread your internal employee experience communications campaigns across multiple channels like newsletters, videos, mobile alerts, etc. to ensure employees are informed about what’s happening at your company.
3. Provide incentives that motivate employees
Employee engagement can boost employee experience and vice versa. For employees to care about their work and your company, they need to feel that their efforts are valued and appreciated. The most effective way to communicate this appreciation is to offer competitive compensation and benefits to your employees.
Employees want their work to have meaning, and offering them career opportunities is a great employee experience strategy to link their current efforts to future success at your company. Let employees know about advancement opportunities early on by outlining them in the employee handbook.
But employee incentives can go beyond direct compensation. Stock options help employees connect the company’s success with their personal success and encourage them to be more engaged in achieving company goals.
Demonstrate that your company cares about your employees’ personal success by offering comprehensive health plans and personal development programs. These initiatives help employees balance their work and personal lives and underscore the benefit of being part of your organization.
4. Create a supportive work culture
Improving employee experience is as much about good interpersonal relationships as it is about the relationship between employee and employer. Improving your company culture is a great strategy to encourage employees to build relationships with each other and share in each other’s successes.
Carefully communicate your company values to your employees. If your company claims to care about personal success, you need to put it into practice so that it resonates with employees. Show employees that they are valued by organizing a variety of appreciation days and other initiatives. These events are great ways to enhance the employee experience, as they allow your employees to celebrate the success of their peers.
5. Collect employee feedback to evaluate experiences
As we mentioned, every workplace is unique and employees respond differently to different initiatives.
Employee feedback is a hugely beneficial practice for businesses. Not only does it allow employees to share their opinions and improve their workplace, but it also allows you to gather direct feedback on what your employees care about.
We suggest using your internal communications to gather employee feedback. Employee surveys, whether engagement surveys or well-being surveys, make it easy for employees to share their opinions quickly and casually.
6. Act on employee feedback
Employee feedback is a two-way street. Your employees will not continue to offer their opinions in surveys or questionnaires if they feel that their feedback will not be taken into account.
While your workplace won’t be able to accommodate every employee suggestion, it’s important to recognize the effort of those who provide feedback. Follow up on feedback by asking additional clarifying questions. If an employee makes a suggestion that can’t be addressed directly, a best practice in employee experience strategy is to talk to them about their concerns to see if there is a solution that will satisfy their concerns.
Employee feedback is voluntary; your employees took the time to give you their opinions. Show them that you value their efforts by taking their concerns seriously and implementing their ideas and suggestions.
7. Treat your onboarding process seriously
While this may seem obvious, it’s still important to say: your employees’ experience starts the moment they begin interacting with your company. Which means you should prioritize their experience from the moment they choose to work at your organization.
A solid onboarding process will set new employees up for positive experiences and success at your company. Starting a new job can be an intimidating and overwhelming experience, with employees required to learn a lot of information in a short period of time.
8. Take advantage of your exit process
While it may seem counterintuitive to think that departing employees play a role in employee experience, your exit process is just as important as your onboarding process, for several reasons.
Just as your current employees are spokespersons for your company, so are former employees. If departing employees are treated positively during the exit process, they are more likely to speak highly of your company and increase the chances of attracting top talent. Make employee exit announcements an integral part of your internal communications strategy to improve the employee experience.
9. Connect employees with leadership
When employees feel like they are isolated from their workplace, they will struggle to feel in control of their career and see the value in their work. While employee feedback can diagnose this problem, encouraging leaders to connect with employees can help repair that disconnect.
Emphasize the importance of leadership communications with those in charge at your company. Feature them prominently in your internal communications through leadership messages or videos explaining the latest company news, upcoming changes, or their decisions that affect employees’ daily conditions.
10. Send eNPS surveys regularly
eNPS measures how likely your employees are to recommend your product or service to their friends or family. It also measures how likely they are to recommend your company as a place to work to that same audience. This can reveal important trends in how your employees feel about their jobs and workplace—trends that you can target with your employee experience efforts.
Schedule your employee experience initiatives and conduct eNPS surveys in a similar way. This way, you’ll be able to develop at least a general correlation between the two aspects of how your employees feel about your company.
11. Implement internal communication channels
When you use internal communications to promote employee events, benefits and initiatives, you need to make sure your employees actually engage with them.
Employee feedback can only go so far in this regard, because if employees aren’t using the channels where you’re asking for their feedback, your results will be limited at best.
Tracking internal communications is a great way to improve employee experience through concrete data. Most companies rely on email-based internal communications to reach their employees.
12. Highlight positive customer comments
A great way to emphasize the value of your employees’ work and increase the bond between them is to share positive customer feedback.
Customers appreciate it when employees help them resolve their issues and will often be very grateful to those employees who go the extra mile to ensure their satisfaction. Even if it’s just a brief comment at the end of an email chain, sharing this feedback with the entire team of employees in that department is a great way to highlight the impact of their work.
13. Provide flexible work options
Remote and hybrid work strategies are more common than ever. Allowing employees to choose where they want to work helps them balance their work and personal lives, ultimately increasing productivity and engagement. With countless software options available to businesses for remote team communication, it’s easy for employees to stay connected and avoid common remote team communication challenges.
Not only does offering these options to current employees improve their experience at your company, it also makes your company more attractive to the best talent in the job market.
14. Encourage employees to connect with each other
Positive employee experiences are a crucial part of their overall work experience. Fortunately, there are countless activities you can implement to give employees the opportunity to get to know each other better.
Allow employees to schedule coffee meetings or Slack Donut meetings with each other. These interactions don’t take up too much time of their day, while allowing them to build relationships with those they may not interact with on a daily basis.
You can take this a step further by organizing activities outside of the office, such as office sports teams, book clubs, or other group activities. Employees who know each other beyond their roles within the company have an easier time collaborating with each other at work when needed.
15. Be clear about expectations
Your employees need to know exactly what is expected of them from the start. We mentioned how a good onboarding process can set employees up for success from the moment they start at your company; clearly communicating job expectations and responsibilities is essential to this.
Include a clear breakdown of employee expectations in your onboarding materials and encourage managers to consistently update their employees on the latest company news and how it will impact their work. For more important updates, consider hosting all-hands meetings where overall business goals connect to individual efforts.
Employees who understand what is expected of them are better positioned to assess their physical and cognitive engagement within your company.
