Connection, consistency and courage: The key to employee experience

Getting employee experience right is crucial in the modern workplace. The pandemic encouraged people to place more importance on wellbeing, and the talent shortages that plague many industries are forcing employers to take the experience of their workers more seriously.

Businesses that understand this are able to better engage, retain, and attract employees. Kincentric’s Global Employee Experience Trends 2023 outlined the importance of effective employee experience policies and how to properly implement them.

Kincentric commented: “High-performing organisations add sand and water by looking for ways to ensure the employee experience consistently supports the business goals, and by ‘personalising’ the work experience to address the needs of different cohorts and groups. This creates a more cohesive and distinctive experience.”

There is good news. Many aspects of employee experience have improved over the last year, such as:

• Career development
• Workload
• Clarity
• Manager effectiveness

Each of these areas grew by up to 9 percentage points. According to Kincentric, generally, employees are more positive about processes and procedures. Workloads are becoming more manageable, and perceptions of managers are improving.

These positive feelings permeate through the business. Happy employees work better, and businesses should continue this growth to ensure workers stay engaged, happy, and productive.

It’s not all good news, however. Perceptions of senior leadership have seen a decline. Employees are dissatisfied with their leaders, and many feel as though organisational values aren’t being upheld by those at the top.

While values are being understood, many respondents agree they’re not being demonstrated. In fact, just 51 per cent believe their organisation is delivering on the experience they were promised.

Leaders must realise the importance of delivering on promises, as it’s still a candidate’s market and people have the option to look elsewhere for what they’re after.

To assist in implementing an effective employee experience policy, Kincentric said three factors must be considered: connection, consistency, and courage.

Connection

Kincentric said employers must connect employee experience to culture and business strategy. In fact, engagement is 5.5 times stronger when employee experience is aligned with culture and strategy.

However, many aren’t realising this, as just 36 per cent of organisations have shown that strategy, culture, and employee experience are aligned.

Some things, Kincentric said, that should be avoided when striving for this connection are:

• Over-reliance on managers to drive employee experience
• Overfocus on engagement as a metric rather than a focus on the experiences that drive engagement
• Survey measures as a “feel-good” process rather than a tool to drive change

Consistency

Being consistent with employee experiences is key to getting it right. It’s not a “one-and-done” process.

The benefits of this speak for themselves, as consistent employee experience resulted in two times higher rating of financial performance. So why aren’t employers leveraging this? Just 42 per cent of employees said their organisation has consistent employee experience.

Kincentric gave some advice: “Reducing the noise in your work experience by making it more consistent across all elements and all employees is how you translate employee experience into real business outcomes.”

Courage

Courage must come from the leadership to promote employee experience effectively, said Kincentric. One-third of employees believe their senior leaders do not take the right approach to long-term business success.

The change needed is some courage from the top. Kincentric said this can be achieved by:

• Shifting ownership back to the leaders
• Empowering managers to amplify through personalisation
• Driving HR with intention