Employee Experiences: The New Key to Retention

Over the past few years, employee expectations about their jobs and job-related experiences have dramatically changed. In fact, according to a survey conducted by Oxford Economics and SAP Concur, 60% of U.S. employees say the pandemic caused them to reevaulate what they value in a workplace. And, a survey by Accenture found that 78% of employees believe employers are responsible for their job satisfaction and well-being.

Because of this, it’s more important than ever for your organization to create positive experiences for your employees, especially new hires. Below are four tips on how to get started:

1. Improve your employees’ onboarding and training experiences.

According to Gallup, only 12% of employees feel that their organization does a great job of onboarding people. (That’s 88% of organizations that miss this opportunity, even though it can result in higher retention.) When employees have a negative onboarding experience, they are twice as likely to look for a new job.
A great place to start is to set up a formal, personalized onboarding process for new employees. This can include:

• Preparing employee workstations in advance—whether they are working in the office or remotely—so they have everything they need (e.g., a computer, software, a telephone, etc.) from day one.
• Providing technology onboarding experiences can make a huge impact, but is often overlooked. Equip new employees with personalized training and set up guided walkthroughs of your applications that will appear in context as they navigate through a platform.
• Gathering feedback during the onboarding process to ensure all questions and uncertainties are answered, and to optimize and improve the process for future employees.

Improved onboarding and training processes will go a long way in making new employees feel welcome and like they made the right decision to work for your organization.   

2. Empower your employees to get their job done from wherever they work.

Employees today are working from more places than ever—in the office, in home offices, on the road, from cafés, from other countries, and everywhere in between. As a result, your organization needs to design experiences to support employees across all of these environments. Look for ways to make their work lives easier, like moving to the cloud, so they can access applications from anywhere and collaborate with other people. Or, alternatively, optimize your employees’ use of legacy systems.

3. Streamline and simplify your employees’ experiences across your technology stack.

Start by looking for ways to standardize and streamline your business processes and automate tedious tasks. Then, automate workflows across your technology stack. Finally, empower and proactively guide your employees to complete your businesses processes across single or multiple applications.

4. Improve the experience your employees have with software applications.  

The more you understand how your employees use and consume applications, the more you can create a positive experience when they use those applications. There are several software solutions available that can provide you with complete visibility into your technology stack, as well as give you the data you need to understand employee sentiment and behavior in using your applications—including where employees struggle. Then, you can design better experiences to improve product engagement, adoption, and usage of your digital assets on any device.

Not only will taking the above steps help you improve your employee experience, but they can also be highly beneficial to your organization. In fact, a Gallup poll shows that organizations with exceptional employee experiences achieve:

• 3 times higher revenue per employee
• 40% lower employee turnover
• 17% higher productivity

And in a world where employee experiences and corporate results matter, that can make all the difference.