Employee experience management

Your business might talk a lot about customer satisfaction and the customer experience, but does it focus on what employees experience in the same way? Your workforce is your company’s biggest asset and improving what your employees experience while at work should be a management focus.

Employee experience management considers ways that businesses can:

• ensure employees have the appropriate tools to do their work
• ensure the physical workplace is comfortable and engaging
• set employees up for success – through training, coaching and other development opportunities
• improve engagement and emotional connections
• accommodate the changing face of work.

Employee experience captures all the ways that employees interact with your organisation throughout the employee lifecycle. It incorporates employee engagement (i.e., the emotional connection people have with their work and workplace) and employee satisfaction (i.e., how happy people are with their work and workplace).

Strong employee experience management – where organisations focus on the employee journey – lifts employee satisfaction levels and leads to more engaged employees.

Read more about EX trends.

The role of learning and development

Formal training, on-the-job coaching and other career development opportunities benefit both employees and the businesses they work for. Investing in employee development demonstrates that the organisation cares about its employees’ professional and personal goals (while helping to create a more capable and agile workforce that can meet business needs).

Starting point: Start by auditing your current learning and development system. Ask:

• Is it achieving results?
• Are the results measurable?
• Are our learning interventions enjoyable or just tick-the-box exercises?
• Is our learning system ensuring people are being promoted from within?
• Do our people enjoy learning?

How employee coaching plays a critical role

Employee coaching, delivered by a team manager or leader to individual team members, offers an opportunity to facilitate individual learning and to meet an individual employee’s needs and dreams. This personalised approach can build a strong connection between an employee and their manager and also helps to build a strong emotional connection between the employee and the organisation.

Employee coaching involves several steps, including (briefly):

• evaluation and self-reflection on current skills and capabilities
• goal setting, including identification of performance and behavioural goals
• action planning (i.e., practising a certain behaviour xx times a day)
• regular coaching conversations and check-ins
• feedback and evaluation

These steps help close capability gaps and lift performance and are also a great employee experience management tool. Coaching:

• creates a space to focus on employees’ personal and career goals
• provides a forum for coaches to provide feedback and for employees to talk about any challenges or issues they’re facing
• encourages employees to take charge of their learning and development.

In these ways, coaching can help to motivate and engage employees, improving the employee experience. Read Improve employee experience by supporting learning to find out more.

Starting point: Start by reviewing the current coaching culture within your business. Ask:

• Do we have one?
• How often are people provided the opportunity to sit with their leader to be coached?
• How is coaching tracked?
• Is coaching visible?
• How do we know if coaching has been conducted?
• How would we rate the quality of the current coaching capability?

Diversity, equity and inclusion

Our workplaces are diverse places. How your workplace addresses diversity, equity and inclusion strategies will impact the employee experience and staff turnover. Diversity, equity and inclusion strategies should help to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to contribute and feel valued at work. This includes:

• people with a disability
• people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds
• people who are Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islanders
• LGBTIQ+ people
• older people.

Encouraging and supporting our differences creates a better employee experience for all. Workplaces may need to provide training, but should also consider how they can incorporate inclusion across the workplace and workspace.

Starting point: Start by performing a diversity, equity and inclusion audit to determine where your focus is best spent to create more balance across your workforce.

Wellbeing and mental health

Many of us will experience poor mental health at some point in our lives. Poor mental health at work can impact turnover. There are ways that work can influence mental health, including ensuring that people:

• are treated fairly
• are clear about what they need to do in their job and are given the support, skills and training to do it
• are recognised for the work they do.

The physical environment and resources that are provided and the ways that leaders communicate can also impact mental health. Workplaces should ensure that they are managing factors that can impact mental health.

Starting point: Think about how your organisation is currently set up to support your team members. Ask questions such as:

• Does my company have an employee assistance program?
• Do team members know what to do or where to go if they need assistance?
• Are our leaders adequately equipped to manage their team members’ wellbeing and mental health?

Company culture

The role of technology

Lifting employee experience and employee engagement can be challenging. Tools like YakTrak can help improve employee experience while also lifting business performance. Using YakTrak helps embed a coaching culture, which impacts employee experience. YakTrak can support your people development program by setting up a rhythm for on-the-job workplace coaching – inspiring people to keep improving after they’ve completed formal people development courses and training.