5 Ways To Improve Employee Experience (EX) in 2024

The pandemic has created a state of global workplace turmoil. Currently, many employees are leaving their jobs due to disruptions created by the pandemic, and there is a global shortage of workers. Changes in the workplace, economic uncertainty, and other factors caused by the pandemic are changing employee needs and behavior. 

According to McKinsey, organizations need to focus on improving the experience they provide for their employees to overcome these disruptions.

We’ll explore 5 ways of improving employee experience (EX) that can help organizations not only increase employee retention but also improve their overall business performance.

1. Ensure effective onboarding

Onboarding is an essential part of the employee’s experience in any job. While it can be filled with excitement and motivation, it can also be overwhelming for a newcomer. Whether it’s a remote or on-site job, onboarding requires employees to familiarize themselves with the applications, processes, colleagues, and more. 

Effective onboarding can increase employees’ confidence and quicken the process of them getting up to speed. HBR provides 7 effective elements of a successful onboarding process that can help organizations improve employee retention and overall experience.

Figure 1. HBR’s 7 elements of a successful employee onboarding

1. Know their challenges

New hires face various challenges during their onboarding stage. They don’t know how the work is done, they are not established any work relationships, and they can feel overwhelmed by these challenges. If employers understand and map the challenges a new hire faces, they target those challenges and streamline the onboarding process.

2. Accelerate their learning process

The employer also needs to ensure that the new hire gets the following 3 learnings:

• Technical learning: Regarding the products, customers, technology, and systems.
• Cultural learning: Regarding the employee attitudes, behavioral norms, and values of the organization.
• Political learning: How decisions are made and where to seek support.

3. Introduce them to the team

Introduce them to other employees to help them build work relationships so they can benefit from a collaborative learning and working environment.

4. Introduce them to relevant stakeholders

Provide information on all relevant stakeholders and ensure that they are a part of the new hire’s network.

5. Show them the direction

Set clear expectations, goals, and objectives and ensure the new hires understand them. Provide a clear understanding of what the work is, how it needs to be done, and why it needs to be done.

6. Help them achieve early wins

Employers need to ensure that new hires focus on their objectives and the small wins, and they need to ensure they do it according to the organizational culture of progress. Communicating the progress of new hires can motivate them and give them the confidence to maintain their efforts.

7. Be a part of their learning process

Employers should be a part of their learning journey. Instead of just providing the guidelines and walking away, they should intervene when the new hires struggle and stay in touch. This can be done through weekly meetings to discuss progress and issues.

2. Support growth and development

Employees appreciate when employers make efforts towards their training, growth, and development. According to IBM, it helps significantly increase employee retention since employees feel cared for and become more loyal to the organization. In the post-pandemic world, the willingness of employees to learn new skills has increased. 

Providing career development opportunities can be an effective way of improving EX. Employers need to show their employees that they care for their career growth and want them to learn new skills not just to improve their current job but also to strengthen their resumes. This can increase employee motivation to learn new skills and increase employee retention.

Watch how a San-Francisco-based startup created a tool to make training more fun for employees.

Employee reskilling and upskilling is also becoming crucial to surviving in the current business environment where digital transformation is being accelerated and rapidly adopted by organizations and industries worldwide. Check out our comprehensive article on how companies can reskill and upskill their employee towards better digit dexterity. 

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You can also consult a digital transformation consultant like WowLabz to help you efficiently implement training and reskilling digital tools in your business. WowLabz works with enterprises, startups, and R&D labs from all industries to guide them at every stage of their digital transformation journey.

You can also check our sortable/filterable list of digital transformation consulting companies to find the fit that best suits your business needs.

3. Focus on employee well-being

In the last 2 years, employees have had to face various disruptions and changes in the workplace and life, which had a significant impact on their mental health and well-being. As they run between the office and work in an increasingly popular hybrid working model, they can get emotionally exhausted.

All these factors have made employee well-being an important element of an overall good EX. Employee well-being and mental health are being prioritized by 68% of HR executives, according to a recent survey. 

Organizations can consider these 5 pillars of holistic workplace well-being while creating their employee well-being strategy.

Figure 2. 5 Pillars of workplace well-being

Check out how Microsoft leverages data to improve its efforts towards employee well-being and mental health:

4. Receive and give feedback

Exchanging feedback can be an effective way of improving EX. Providing feedback to employees can help avoid ambiguity and confusion for employees as they try to identify areas of improvement. Quick and constructive feedback can help employees understand what they are doing right and what changes need to be made. This can result in better employee performance and overall experience.

Employers should also be ready to receive feedback and encourage mutual communication. Getting feedback from their employees can also help them pinpoint the areas they need to work on to manage their workforce better.

5. Measuring employee experience

There are various tools that can be used to measure employee engagement and experience.

• Surveys: Pulse surveys are short surveys that can be used to get information quickly on small things or individual things that might impact the EX. Annual engagement surveys are longer surveys and cover the big picture of the overall EX. They involve much more data and a larger view of areas to improve.
• ENPS: Employee Net Promoter Score (ENPS), is a tool that can be used to measure employee loyalty to the organization. Through this tool, employers can categorize all the employees based on their willingness to stay in the organization or recommend others to join the organization. Based on those categories employers can adjust their employee engagement efforts. 
• Employee experience mapping: Employee experience or journey mapping tools can be beneficial in improving the overall EX. Managers can analyze every stage of an employee’s journey in an organization and identify difficulties and areas of improvement. 

Qualtrics provides 5 effective steps of employee journey mapping, which can help employers increase employee retention and improve the overall EX.

Source: Qualtrics

Check out the video below of how EY leverages data through SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics to improve employee engagement and experience:

Further reading

To digitally revamp your human resource strength, check out our comprehensive articles:

• HR Automation: Top 8 Processes to Automate
• What is RPA for HR? – Top 9 RPA use cases in HR
• 10 HR Digital Transformation Applications/ Use cases
• AI in HR: In-depth guide with top use cases

If you have questions about improving your employee experience, let us know: