Ignore at your own peril

Why do we enjoy going to our favourite supermarket?

Why do we enjoy going to our favourite holiday destination or type of holiday?

Why do we enjoy going to our favourite restaurant?

Simple answer is, we prefer that experience over another.

So why should work be any different?

If our experience of our workplace, is poor, or it does not fulfil our needs, whilst we may put up with it for a time, the likely outcome is that we will eventually leave or stay, turn up for the work but fail to fulfil our own and the organisations, also likely being far less effective and/or far less efficient.

So what can we do to improve the experience for the employee in the workplace?

First determine the drivers.

Our 19 years of research shows there are 9 dimensions to a positive and successful employee experience:

These 9 dimensions are:

1. - the framework that the employee works in - this includes job design, rules, standards

2. - the purpose of the organisation, what it does, who it helps, who does it serve

3. - the direction of the company, the vision and mission and what goals it wants to reach

4. - the development and growth of the employee

5. - the means to give, receive and request recognition

6. - the opportunity to build relationships, share knowledge, growth and interests

7. - the sense that personal values are aligned with organisational values

8. - the permission and support to balance own time to personal desire

9. - the to have fun and enjoy the environment

To identify how you are doing now and what will make the metrics shift, its important to measure where you are.

This should not be an annual activity, nor is it something you should push onto your employees.

Rather, it should be something to continuously measure, using methods that the employees want to participate in and use, because they personally reap the rewards of doing so. The rewards are instant and meaningful.

The tool MyWheel in iDrive HR has a powerful element to give employees access to an area that helps them drive their own employee experience, giving leadership and those involved key metrics to discuss and make decisions on.

Harvard Business Review highlight the importance of investing in Employee Experience.

There is a significant return to organisations that focus on employee experience over the long term, not just engagement in the here and now.

As Jacob Morgan in 2017 explains in the HBR article, "When organisations make real gains, it’s because they’re thinking longer-term. They’re going beyond what engagement scores are telling them to do in the moment and redesigning employee experience, creating a place where people want, not just need, to work each day. But what does that mean, and what does it look like?"