Employees come before customers. In fact, many organizations believe employees are the new customers. And rightfully so.
Many organisations are customer driven but few worry about employee happiness. And even fewer do something about bad employee experience.
Employee Experience (EX) is like Customer Experience (CX) but outlines the happiness quotient of an employee in a company. It is just as crucial as CX because happier employees keep your customers satisfied.
Gathering employees’ genuine views on workplace culture and job satisfaction is challenging. Rolling out initiatives for improvement is even more challenging without reliable data.
If you are wondering if measuring employee experience is worth considering, here are a few reasons that showcase why it is crucial.
You may have taken many initiatives to create a safe and happy employee environment. But not knowing their effects would be like driving when blindfolded.
Here are the five primary reasons why you must measure the employee experience.
Left unchecked, a poor experience can reduce employee engagement with the organization. And lesser engaged employees show the following behavioral traits:
Sadly, around 70% of American employees feel disengaged at work.
They are 13% less productive than happy workers and cost the North American business economy up to $350 billion yearly in lost productivity. Plus, they can influence other workers and deteriorate the work environment.
Unsatisfied employees are likely to make 60% more mistakes and oversights, and are involved in 49% more accidents. They cannot concentrate on their work or stick to performance standards, that is until they start disappearing altogether.
Absenteeism is up to 37% higher among unhappy employees. They usually find reasons not to go to work which causes backlog and interruptions in workflow.
This trend refers to new joiners quitting the job during probation or within six months.
Taking EX seriously needs to start from the first day of joining. Despite your efforts to keep new workers happy, studies show that employee experience deteriorates by 22% in the first six months. According to PWC's Global Hopes and Fears Survey 2022, 23% of millennials and 27% of Gen Z workers are expected to quit their jobs during the first year.
Wondering what your employees think of their experience? Then, don't lose sleep; just use one of the methods below to find the answer.
Gather groups of employees based on specific projects, events, teams, or backgrounds, and you've got yourself a focus group. Focus groups can bring deep insights into your employees’ feedback about the company because people often find their voice in a group.
Both techniques involve nudging your employees to share their views on the company culture and picking up clues for areas for improvement. Interviews are conducted not only when an employee is joining or exiting but also to make them stay. While sitting across, you can also read their body language (and between the lines!) to foresee if they will stick around for the long run.
Skip-level meetings are also a great tool to gauge employee experience. These are conducted between senior leaders and someone who reports to their minus one or immediate subordinate.
You can conduct a survey at all stages of an employment cycle. For example, beginning from the onboarding process, probation period, and engagement and rewards to gauge their overall satisfaction with the company. And then, there are the employee exit surveys to know if anything went wrong and could have been done better.
Surveys usually tend to be generic and impersonal, making employees uninterested. Shorter surveys have a better response rate of 83%. But they don't show the complete picture of what's going on in the employee's mind. This is where bots can help.
Bots engage employees in a more personalized manner to pick up their thoughts on the overall experience with the company in real time. Plus, they are handy for companies that employ remote workers and a hybrid environment.
More and more companies started using employee engagement bots during the pandemic to stay associated with employees on a personal level. Now, bots have become the WhatsApp equivalent for employee engagement.
And if the bot is as good as Amber, your employees can get more comfortable talking. Around 40% of employees believe Amber is real and are more likely to share their true feelings. Using Amber, you can monitor employees' mental health and happiness quotient. From the employee interaction, Amber can also help you predict if any employee is planning a resignation. This means that you, as their manager, can worry less and save time connecting with each worker individually.
Next, you will need to know the returns on all your initiatives to enhance employee experience.
Returns on Employee Experience (ROX) is a relative figure, or a percentage, which tells you the level of employee satisfaction, engagement, and overall experience. It works like Returns on Investment (ROI), showing you the profits compared to the expenses incurred.
There are tangible and intangible metrics to calculate ROX.
You can calculate the ROX as:
ROX(%) = Net value of benefits to experience X 100
Cost of investment
Here’s an example. Say you invest $50k in enhancing the employee experience. Your initiatives reduce attrition by 10%, thus saving you $40k. With these initiatives, you can increase your employee satisfaction (ESAT) rate by 5 points, bringing you $75k more revenue.
Here, your ROX will be:
[($40,000 + $75,000) / $50,000] x 100 = 230%
Measuring employee experience is all about gauging the experience you provide your employees that ultimately drives results. ROI figures do a good job of showing how much you earn back on your investment. But they don't show the complete picture.
Since employee experience is mostly intangible and concerned with their emotions, its metrics will be too.
The following components are hard to measure. However, they are good indicators of overall employee experience and expected returns.
You invest in many initiatives to engage your employees better. So it becomes equally important to seek their feedback on the same. You can measure employee engagement through pulse surveys, employee net promoter scores (eNPS), mood scores, and engagement scores.
This figure helps you evaluate the employee engagement levels. You can access this figure on the Amber dashboard.
Employee experience deeply affects their productivity and commitment to work. You can rely on figures of set targets like total sales or revenue numbers, performance against KPI, and 360-degree performance reviews. They tell you everything about employee productivity.
The employee turnover rate is an excellent indicator of employee engagement levels. Employees experiencing growth and career progression don't look out for opportunities elsewhere. Higher attrition is a clear indicator of poor employee experience and unsatisfied employees.
Employees who like their jobs and have a good time at work don't look out for reasons to be absent. Your company's absenteeism levels can indicate lower employee engagement levels and high workplace stress leading to burnout.
This includes your company’s and the top management’s ratings as an employer. A happy employee will rate you higher on most parameters and give you a good score. Plus, you can get ratings and reviews from external agencies like Glassdoor where your employees rate your top management, company culture, and overall recommendability.
If these parameters seem too much work, Amber can help you. Here's how it works.
Powered by advanced AI, Amber is highly intuitive at understanding your employees' emotions. It is built using inFeedo's research-backed EX framework, created after carefully considering feedback and insights from HR leaders just like you.
With inFeedo's analytics, companies have witnessed returns as high as 24x for employee engagement.
Amber is inFeedo's most innovative creation and has spoken with over 700,000 employees in more than 60 nations. It is trusted by 250+ CXOs, like you, worldwide to help them connect with their most crucial resources in a better and more personalized way.