What does a good employee experience look like?

This is a question I have been asked by business leaders and people managers throughout my career. And the answer is always changing.

The reality is today, companies cannot get by with offering basic benefits like leave and health insurance. Businesses need to go above and beyond because a superior employee experience is the sum of all the interactions employees have with your company.

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It involves the culture, benefits, physical work environment, and tools you provide for employee success, and it can be linked to revenue. In fact, companies with high employee engagement pull in 2.5 times more revenue than companies with low engagement levels.

In this new era of HR your role is to attract, retain and motivate people. And, the companies that get that have the best products, best services and best customer experiences in the world.

Qualtrics recently spoke to HR leaders across several industries to uncover their secrets to attracting and retaining people, which we have shared below. 

For more examples of businesses breaking through in employee experience with Qualtrics, make sure to visit the X4 Singapore 2019 Content Hub. There you will find insights into the work brands like Cathay Pacific, GOJEK, and JAPFA are doing to design and deliver great employee experiences.

Seven ways to improve your employee experience

1. Create multiple ways to listen to their people

Highly successful employers gather feedback from their employees and listen to their ideas. They develop a culture that is engaging, creative, and highly sought-after. Culture is built on a strong mission, vision, and values that employees have bought into.

These employers also invest in their employees and understand what they want. One way to listen is to ask for feedback through employee engagement surveys, which are critical to understanding your employees’ attitudes at work and how they view your company. 

2. Offer the right perks

Perks like free lunch are great, but your people might surprise you with the benefits they care about most. By offering the right perks, you are saving money on underutilized benefits, and creating a better employee experience.

According to a study by LinkedIn, employees actually care more about healthcare coverage, PTO, and flexibility than other perks. Consider increasing your health and wellness benefits and offering more time off around the holidays. You could also offer remote options, unlimited paid time off, or time-shifting as a policy.

To understand exactly which benefits your employees want, ask them directly for their tradeoffs instead of just assuming – the Qualtrics Employee Benefits Optimiser makes that easy. 

3. Provide growth & development opportunities

The Qualtrics employee engagement study of 6,000 workers found that two of the top three drivers of retention are having a manager who helps manage their employee’s’ workload and managers that consistently acknowledge their employees for doing good work. In addition, having a manager who helps their employees solve work-related issues is a top driver for job satisfaction. Needless to say, managers play a key part in employee satisfaction.

Samantha Hammock, Chief Learning Officer at American Express, believes that the future of work will value leadership and management skills more than ever. She says American Express is “doubling down and investing in leadership and human skills. Most leadership development only readies a small portion of your population, but we’re focused on scalable leadership development for everyone.”

4. Rethinking how to make work better for working parents

Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In states an alarming statistic: “43% of highly qualified women with children are leaving careers or off-ramping for a period of time.” Many of these women do not return from maternity leave because their companies do not offer flexible work environments or on-site childcare facilities. 

In addition to on-site childcare, generous paid parental leave is increasingly becoming a critical benefit to attract and retain working parents. Paid parental leave easies the financial burden on families, helps with employee retention, helps attract talent, lowers the infant mortality rate, and longer leave can lower the rate of postpartum depression.

5. Incorporate stay interviews

Companies often perform exit interviews when an employee is leaving, but rarely do they incorporate stay interviews to help with employee retention. A stay interview is a conversation with an employee to help managers understand what is important to the employee. It should be an individual conversation with an employee and their manager. 

6. Frequently audit compensation

Even if your employees are totally bought into your brand and company values, they still want to be paid a fair and competitive rate. Payscale research found that only one in five employees feel like they are fairly paid, and this can make or break your company culture. 

To make sure you are paying employees competitively, use 3rd party data to conduct an audit on your compensation and compare what you’re offering to current market rates. If you find your salaries are lower, make a 3-year plan to get them where they need to be. SHRM also says important to close the pay gap between genders and you must correct the cause of the disparity to prevent it from happening again in the future.

7. Encourage a healthy work/life integration

The Qualtrics state of play survey found that being happy with your work/life integration is the #1 driver of job satisfaction. Employees who have a healthy balance feel in control of their lives, are less stressed out, and more motivated at work. Providing comp time after a large project that required an additional workload, or half-days on Fridays during the summer can encourage employees to take time off and recoup their mental energy.

This also includes allowing employees to attend career and professional development conferences and training sessions that get them out of the office, but still engaged with work. Company and team outings also foster team unity and contribute to a greater work-life balance.

ABOUT QUALTRICS

Qualtrics is the technology platform that organisations use to collect, manage, and act on experience data, also called X-data™. The Qualtrics XM Platform™ is a system of action, used by teams, departments, and entire organisations to manage the four core experiences of business—customer, product, employee and brand—on one platform. Over 10,000 enterprises worldwide, including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100 and 99 of the top 100 U.S. business schools, rely on Qualtrics to consistently build products that people love, create more loyal customers, develop a phenomenal employee culture, and build iconic brands.

To learn more and for a free account, visit:

Qualtrics Australia  //  Qualtrics Singapore  //  Qualtrics Japan