Employee Engagement Is the New Bottom Line

Ultimately, a great employee experience boosts business growth and profits.

Creating a Positive Experience

Delivering a great employee experience means showing commitment. Employees need to feel connected to your company’s mission and know they’re making a difference. Consider their entire journey—from hiring and onboarding to their everyday work, and even an eventual departure. Employees must feel heard, understood, and valued throughout every stage of their relationship with the organization.

In this series, we will highlight five elements that are critical to a positive employee experience, and to your bottom line: Enablement, Communications, an Employee Value Proposition, a Hiring process that reflects these three to potential employees, and, as organizations scale, Operations and Knowledge Management.

While we’re sharing these elements in a sequence, it’s important to remember that they are all interrelated—no one of them automatically comes “first” when you’re looking to improve the employee experience. The factors that affect the employees’ daily lives (Enablement, Communications, and Operations and Knowledge Management) need to be in alignment with those that express and introduce that reality to the world (EVP and the Hiring process).

Employer Brand and Employee Experience are inextricably linked,
and must be aligned for an organization to thrive.

If you know that your company already has an excellent day-to-day experience, but are having trouble attracting new talent, it might make sense to look at how you articulate your EVP and engage candidates through your Hiring process. If you are having trouble retaining employees, perhaps begin by looking at Enablement and Communications. If you’re struggling with consistency or feel like work is taking longer than it should, perhaps you need to start with Operations and Knowledge Management.

Enablement

The heart of employee experience is making sure your employees have the tools, processes, and support they need to do their jobs well. This ensures they can serve your customers effectively—directly or indirectly—improving your customer experience, too. Enablement often involves some level of digital transformation, whether via the implementation of third-party tools or custom development. It also sometimes includes adjusting teams’ responsibilities or shifting their priorities. Even more important is making sure your employees can collaborate, support each other, and make the contributions that make them feel valuable and valued. This is key to their day-to-day job satisfaction.

Communications

Effective internal communications are the foundation of any organization. They create connection, transparency, and a shared sense of purpose, which inspires collaboration, aligns people with goals, and establishes clear processes. Because they impact the employee experience so directly, make sure your communications are strategic and streamlined. Constant emails, messages, and notifications can lead to information overload, burnout, and disenfranchised employees struggling to discern which messages are important. Developing a solid internal communications strategy ensures that every message your employees receive is relevant, effective, and actionable.

Employee Value Proposition

Employees today want more than just a job. They want a meaningful work experience. Beyond their tasks and responsibilities, employees are prioritizing the factors that add to their satisfaction and wellbeing. This is why a strong Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is important—it’s your company’s unique offering beyond the paycheck and task lists. A strong EVP attracts great employees and helps keep them by making them feel like they belong, have a purpose, and can reach their goals.

Hiring

While a great employee experience reduces turnover, you’ll still need to hire people. Remember, the hiring process is a candidate’s first introduction to your company’s culture. Design it thoughtfully so candidates can showcase their skills, and so your EVP shines through. And to support it, ensure recruiters and hiring managers have the right tools and processes in place (see Enablement above) to find the best possible talent for open roles.

Operations and Knowledge Management

There are teams within every organization whose key functions significantly shape employees’ experiences, their ways of working, and the information they access every day. From HR to corporate communications and enterprise technology, it’s critical to ensure leadership and stakeholders within these teams are aligned on the value of improving the employee experience and how it translates to the success of the organization—both internally and externally. Educating these teams on the role they play, identifying the priorities they can best support, establishing governance frameworks, and building consistent operating models will help them support your employees by minimizing frustrations and enabling them to do their best possible work.

A Great Employee Experience Builds Your Brand

Each of these factors is important on its own—and essential to a great employee experience. Considered together, they can be truly transformative. While engagement is always a work in progress, by making it a priority, you’ll boost productivity, customer satisfaction, loyalty, and communications. Your brand will grow stronger, leading to higher profits and success.

Keep an eye out for a deeper dive into each of these elements from One North experts in the near future!

Photo Credit: Clark Vander-Beken | Unsplash