Employee experience is the journey employee goes through in a company; also known as the employee lifecycle. It’s how employees navigate their jobs, collaborate with colleagues, and more.

When a company provides a positive employee experience, its productivity and retention rates increase, resulting in higher profitability. Investing in a great employee experience design not only ensures that employees are motivated and engaged but also boosts profits.

Here’s a guide on how to create a successful employee experience to boost employee morale and company productivity.

What is Employee Experience Design?

Employee experience design is more than just making sure employees enjoy their jobs. It’s about optimizing every touchpoint your employees have within your organization to keep them engaged and motivated to be efficient.

Employee experience begins when they begin working for your company and ends when they retire or resign.

The primary goal of employee experience is to keep employee happiness and productivity high. But it has to be tailored to each department to be effective.

Importance of Employee Experience Design

Providing a positive employee experience keeps your company’s employees engaged, deeply committed to their jobs, and productive. Also, tailoring employee experiences to different departments helps keep employees’ morale high across all departments.

Developing a successful employee experience design increases company revenue significantly because happy employees are more productive. They are also unlikely to leave the company, which translates to a high employee retention rate.

Having a high employee retention rate increases company profitability because the company does not have to incur recruitment costs regularly.

How to Design Employee Experience

• Measure Employee Motivation

The first step in creating a successful employee experience is determining the level of employee motivation.  Employee motivation demonstrates their enthusiasm at work, the factors that contribute to it, and how it affects their work ethics.

So, if employees are disengaged, unmotivated, or struggling, it indicates that the current employee experience isn’t working.

• Personalization

Employee experience is not one-size-fits-all; you must tailor the experience to reflect your organization’s values while also providing a healthy workplace for employees. Ensure that workplace policies address issues that may cause employee dissatisfaction or lower productivity.

You can accomplish this by gathering employee feedback on the company’s culture, policies, and suggestions for improvements.

• Prioritize Employee Wellness and Safety

Employee wellness is a crucial component of the employee experience. Employees tend to feel undervalued, burnt out, and dissatisfied at work if their workplace culture does not promote wellness.

Invest in employee wellness by providing health insurance, paid time off, and other benefits. Also, employee wellness isn’t always physical, so encourage mental health activities and other activities that boost employee morale.

Employee safety is a major reason employees leave or stay at a company; enforce policies that provide a safe working environment. You should also evaluate workplace culture regularly to ensure that it is not fostering toxicity.

Related – Workplace Safety & Hazards: Types, Examples and Prevention Tips

• Devise a Roadmap and Strategy for Employee Experience

Creating an employee experience roadmap allows you to improve all employee touchpoints within your organization. It also helps you identify and channel your resources toward the touchpoints that need improvement.

Roadmap for Designing Employee Experience

Here’s the roadmap for creating a successful employee experience:

• Recruitment

While not all applicants will be hired, providing a positive experience is a good place to start. Ensure your brand voice and tone are consistent across all invitations, assessments, and even when candidates are dropped off.

For example, sending generic messages to applicants that do not clearly articulate your company’s culture and values does nothing to improve your brand image.

• Onboarding

After you’ve completed the recruitment process, the next step is to welcome the employee to the organization.

Sure, you hired the employee because they are a good fit for the position and the company culture. But they have to be properly onboarded to avoid being overwhelmed.

Start by setting up an onboarding flow for new employees that introduces them to their team, other departments, and company executives. Also, provide them with technical support, such as company gadgets, a desk, and other items that will help them do their task effectively.

Use this: Free Employee Onboarding Survey Template

• Departure

When employees leave the company, ensure they are recognized for their contributions to the company’s growth. Also, keep the communication channel with them and support them in their future endeavors.

For example, you can write letters of recommendation or act as a referee for former employees. You can also provide extended healthcare to retired employees.

Saying goodbye positively keeps the company’s image in good light with former employees and motivates them to recommend the company to others in their network.

Explore: How To Conduct an Exit Interview

Strategies for Designing Employee Experience

• Observation and Feedback

The most effective way to create an employee experience that reflects your organization’s values and workplace culture is through observation. Identify employee touchpoints in the company and monitor how they interact with them then figure out how you can improve their experience.

For example, you can conduct an employee satisfaction survey regularly to gauge how employees feel about their jobs, the company, and what you can do better.

However, conducting company-wide surveys in large companies with thousands of employees can be difficult, especially when there are open-ended responses. Opting for departmental surveys makes it easier to collect feedback to design a better employee experience.

• Brainstorming

After observing and gathering ideas for improving your employee experience design, the next step is to determine how to implement the ideas.

In most cases, HR is in charge of employee design, but having a panel with representatives from each department and executives to brainstorm ideas for employee experience is always a good idea.

Ensure that the ideas generated by the employee experience team during the brainstorming session address the employee suggestions and observations you made about existing employee experience flaws.

Also, not all ideas will make it to the implementation phase, so sort through the suggestions and choose the most viable ones.

• Testing and Implementation

After deciding which ideas to integrate into your employee experience design, the next step is to test the viability of the ideas, especially if they are completely new. Start by asking employees how they feel about the idea; will it make things easier or harder for them?

Your new ideas may overlook some facts that would negatively affect employees, thus creating a problem while attempting to solve an existing one. For example, you may be solving a problem for your engineering team, but the solution may put undue strain on your design team.

The tricky part is that you won’t know how the new idea is affecting the design team unless you ask them or implement the idea.

The testing stage is not straightforward; you may need to remodel most of the brainstorming session ideas for everyone to benefit from the new experience design. You should only implement an idea if it solves the existing problem and does not create a new one.

After implementing a new employee experience design, collect feedback from employees and evaluate the company’s productivity to see how the new experience design is working. It will help you decide whether to continue or discontinue it.

Also, while the company’s mission and vision do not change, its goals do, and so do the employee requirements to achieve these goals. As a result, you must review the implemented experience design regularly to ensure that it is effective in achieving the organization’s current goals.

Signs of Great and Poor Employee Experience Design

Great Employee Experience Design

• Seamless Communication and Collaboration

Most employees who have no hesitation to provide feedback do so because they understand that their opinions matter to the company and that the feedback will be used to improve their experience.

When employees have a positive experience working in the organization, they are more likely to collaborate within their teams and with other teams without friction.

• Positive Employee Attitude

Employees in organizations with a good employee experience design have a positive attitude toward their roles, which increases their motivation to do their jobs and grow with the organization.

• High Employee Development and Retention

A positive employee experience provides satisfaction to employees, which makes them open to developing their skills within the company and contributing to its growth.

Poor Employee Experience Design

• High Employee Turnover Rate

When employees are constantly bolting through the company after a short period of working with it, it’s a sign that the employee experience isn’t meeting their needs. 

Keep in mind that the process of recruiting and onboarding new employees takes time and resources. Constantly channeling your resources toward new hires can have a significant impact on your company’s profitability.

Also, the company’s productivity may suffer as a result of the gap caused by having to ease new hires into the role. For example, the timeline for meeting the company’s goals may be pushed back to give room for the new hire to adjust the company.

The accumulated tasks may also overstretch the new hire, resulting in burnout or even resignation, further lowering the company’s productivity and profitability.

• Unengaged Employees

Poor employee experience often causes employees to become unmotivated and unengaged at work. They can become unengaged at work because of constant roadblocks to information, an unfavorable workplace culture, or insufficient resources.

Assessing employee attitude and motivation helps monitor employees’ engagement and how to improve their workplace experience. You could also include benefits that boost employee morale, such as a competitive salary, a safe workplace, a positive culture, safety policies, team bonding activities, and more.

• Low Productivity

Poor employee experience demoralizes employees and significantly reduces their productivity. The more engaged employees are, the more productive they are at work.

When employees are constantly taking breaks to unwind, it could be a sign that the company is stressing them out.

Also, time off does not solve poor employee experience; when employees return from their time off, they are probably going to have the same frustrations. Employees may eventually opt to leave the company if their issues aren’t resolved.

Conclusion

Employee experience design is employee touchpoints in a company from when they are hired until they leave. Employee experience also has a direct impact on employee motivation, loyalty, and productivity.

To successfully design an employee experience that will keep your workforce engaged and satisfied, assess their satisfaction with the current design and then solicit their suggestions on how you can improve it.