Four Steps to Help You Actively Measure & Manage Your Employee Experience

For the past 3 years, employee attrition has been and continues to be a significant pain point, costing brands millions in lost revenue and negatively impacting customer loyalty/advocacy. A key to understanding and managing a culture and environment conducive to building and maintaining employee morale, learning, and career growth is through measuring and actively managing the employee experience. While this is no easy feat to undertake, I’ll walk through 4 steps that can help you build and navigate your path towards improving your employee engagement.

1. Define and Align

Begin with clearly defining your objective. What are you looking to better understand about your employees? What gaps in engagement are you looking to target? 

Once the objective is stated and agreed upon, align your organization around specific metrics that you will use to measure progress. This will help keep you on a collective path forward. Which metrics will best help your organization understand and assess your employees’ experience? A few examples of metrics companies can leverage to better assess employee engagement include:

• eNPS?
• Employee satisfaction?
• Likelihood to recommend the company to friends, family?
• Likelihood to look outside the company for another job within the next 12 months?

Once your goal is set and your metrics identified, it’s time to move on to the next step.

2.  Engage and Measure

You know what you want to measure, but how are you going to do it? You need to engage your employees to gather their feedback. I recommend a combination of three methods for doing this:

1. Frequent pulse surveys,
2. In-depth relationship surveys performed once or twice per year, and
3. Qualitative feedback posts and focus groups to understand a 3600 view of the employee.

Important tip: When collecting feedback, always make anonymity job #1 to encourage honest and open responses and build trust. Without it, employee’s lack trust and will be hesitant to share their true opinions, experiences, and concerns without fear of repercussions.

3. Benchmark and Analyze

With employee feedback in hand, now what? It’s time to benchmark your performance to truly understand your gaps. Compare your brand's employee experience assessments against industry and cross-industry benchmarks to gain insights into how you’re doing relative to top performers. This will help you identify specific areas where your brand excels and areas that require attention and focus in order to retain your talent.

Analyze the data by different demographics such as department, location, tenure, and job level. This will aid in identifying trends, focal points, and gaps where targeted improvements are required. This is a perfect place to layer in the insights you’ve gathered from focus groups as they can help you identify where issues lie along the employee journey. For example, they can help you understand what the employee onboarding, training and first 90-days on the job look like. Employee exit interviews/surveys can give you insights on the opposite side of this. You can now look at a more complete picture of what issues exist and when and where they are occurring. You can then use this combined insight to improve retention and engagement.

4. ACT

The most important step of all is to act on employee feedback. The biggest mistake brands make is collecting employee feedback and letting it sit on a shelf. This often comes across to employees as ingenuine, fueling and reinforcing employee skepticism and leading to failed future efforts as employees won’t be encouraged to put in effort to provide the feedback you need. Nothing states “check-the-box” more than not acting on feedback; you must take action. Analyze the data, identify key themes, and develop action plans to address identified issues and opportunities. Include an employee-based team to work with leadership to assist in identifying, prioritizing, and executing the action plan. Communicate early and often on learnings and progress to further demonstrate your commitment to improving the employee experience.

Let’s Get Started

Creating a positive employee experience requires a comprehensive and ongoing effort. By implementing these steps, you can effectively measure employee experience and make informed decisions to improve employee retention, engagement, productivity, culture and employee satisfaction – all which ultimately lead to an improved experience for your customers.

The Next Level: Best Practice Sneak Peek

While the steps above help you get started with measuring and managing the employee experience, there are numerous best practices that can help you build a high-performing culture across your organization. Here is a sneak peek at 5 best practices from top performers that you should be incorporating into your overall employee engagement strategy:

1. Offer programs that support well-being and work-life balance.
2. Invest in training and development programs that help employees develop the skills required to grow and advance their careers.
3. Acknowledge and celebrate employee achievements and milestones.
4. Empower employees by providing them with autonomy and decision-making authority within their purview.
5. Train managers to lead by example. Coach them to demonstrate a positive attitude, encourage open communication, and engage in continuous learning, especially through taking calculated risk and learning from failing.
   
   
   

About the Author: Rich Bongiorno is Managing Director of the Customer Service Advisory Practice at J.D. Power and is responsible for the Retail Experience Certification and Performance Improvement programs and insights.

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