An Often Overlooked Component to Build a Better Business
With the continual rise of globalization, changing demographics, and ever-shifting economies, the dynamics of how we must interact with each other must also change. And in today's virtually driven world, the workplace must also adapt in the often neglected area of how employees experience their entire journey at work.
While the path to launching for many entrepreneurs is exciting, it is often filled with anxiety, doubt, fear, and the urgency to get things up and running quickly. It stands to reason that factoring in the quality or even the existence of the employee experience can often get lost in the hustle and bustle of competing requirements. The same is also true for more seasoned corporations and educational institutions.
Organizations often fail to get this critical component right, and it's understandable how this can happen when the primary focus is usually placed on revenue-generating business units such as marketing, business development, and the enhancement and innovation of the products or services offered.
Considering how the dynamics of communication continue to change, organizations are increasingly challenged with providing the best way to meet the demands of a multi-cultural, multi-generational, and multi-geographical workforce with diverse needs and capabilities.
Failure to establish the importance of the employee experience at the executive level has a trickle-down effect which often results in:
Employees feeling disconnected and disengaged
A scattered onboarding journey with a cumbersome mix of manual and digital processes
Employees who are unaware of how their role aligns with the company's overall purpose
Ambiguous departmental goals
Low job performance and productivity
Increased employee absences and a decrease in profits
Factoring in that only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job of onboarding new hires, what does that say about the remaining 88%? (Gallup Report. State of the American Workplace).
Only 53% of employees worldwide feel engaged in their work (Qualtrics Report. 2020 Global Employee Experience Trends), while the cost of actively disengaged employees in the US costs around $483 billion to $605 billion per year (Gallup poll).
These staggering deficiencies call upon all types of organizations to invest in creating seamless, engaging, and inspirational experiences from recruitment to retirement and everything in between for their current and prospective employees.
To remain competitive in this ever-changing hybrid landscape of onsite and remote workers, it's up to employers to actively invest in this area by establishing, practicing, and enforcing methodologies that support inclusion, engagement, and connectedness to the world around them in a way that upholds the innovation foundational to the company, and intelligently meet the demands of the business while mitigating financial and operational risks.
Although the solution appears simple, the implementation and ongoing support required to maintain these programs can be much more complex. Some companies tend to lean heavily into their recruitment and retention efforts and again miss the target. Because building the employee experience does not begin with the recruitment strategy, and it doesn't start with the onboarding process either.
Building a world-class corporate culture begins with investing thought, time, and energy in creating the company's mission, vision, value, culture, and goals.
The metric then becomes how well it is all communicated and experienced by your first customers - your employees.
Entrepreneurs, startups, and even seasoned businesses have the opportunity to get this critical component right by building programs that attract, engage, and retain the attention and investment of their workforce throughout the entire employee life cycle.
It is important to remember that just like with any relationship, the mental and emotional wealth and vibrancy that is cultivated directly impacts how well one can experience joy and also extends to how deeply employees connect with that joy in performing their daily jobs.
Ultimately, the employee experience is really about People Experience Management because your employees - your workforce, are people too.
Join the first release of our seven premium courses, built on the strength of the KM360 Blueprint. Our People Experience Management (PEM) course is designed to help individuals and organizations create the foundation for a world-class corporate culture - no matter the type of business or size.
It's a golden opportunity to get it right for your startup or course-correct for those organizations that strive towards creating a deeper employee experience program that resonates with all.
