You may get some value from your annual employee survey, but in terms of understanding your people, that isn’t nearly enough. Not in today’s unprecedented and still-evolving business environment. After all, regularly “listening” to your employees leads to an improved employee experience, which ultimately boosts productivity and your organization’s bottom line. But to pull it all off, you do need actionable insights.
Read on for what you need to know about measuring and enhancing your organization’s employee experience.
What is Meant by Employee Experience?C
In essence, an employee’s experience is a snapshot of what he or she has experienced, viewed, and perceived over the course of their tenure at an organization.
Just How Important is the Employee Experience?
Driven in part by the ongoing pandemic, employees have become more circumspect when it comes to where and how they want to work. Increasingly, a nice paycheck is not a given, when it comes to attracting and keeping your best talent. What you want are happy employees. Why? Well for one thing, such employees are up to 20 percent more productive. But it’s challenging to get there when 64 percent of employees don’t feel their workforce even has a strong culture.
Another reason to bolster the employee experience is because unhappy employees tend to skip out on work. They’re absent more often. In fact, unhappy employees take 15 more sick days annually than the average worker, according to the New York Times best-selling book “The Happiness Advantage.”
The good news for you is that if you can get your employees to their happy place, they’ll be more engaged. That leads to increased productivity and profits. As a Gallup survey found, organizations that have highly engaged workforces beat their peers, in earnings per share, by a whopping 147 percent.
How Can I Produce Happy Employees?
By improving the employee experience. And improving the employee experience calls for listening to your staffers, and more often than through that annual employee engagement survey, which you may or may not even act on. No, you must hear your employees throughout their tenure with you, from their start to life events and transitions.
Listening on an ongoing basis allows you to draw key associations between what your employees experience and how your organization fares, performance-wise. If you pose the just the right questions at just the right times, you can continually craft ways to enhance the employee experience.
How Mercer Can Help
More than others, the consultant Mercer can help you use “employee listening” to gauge and improve the employee experience, gain insights, unlock performance, and empower your enterprise. Mercer’s employee research covers all areas of the employee experience, including organizational culture, leadership, team effectiveness, and employee engagement. The consultant’s calling card is that it produces listening programs that meld the appropriate methodologies with content and nimble technology.
The importance of measuring and enhancing your employee experience cannot be overstated, particularly in today’s business milieu. You need to be able to attract and retain top talent, and that’s not possible if the employee experience is, shall we say, less than to be desired.
To properly enhance and improve the employee experience, you need to be doing a lot of listening. That means listening throughout the employee lifecycle, from onboarding on. Doing so also gives you the opportunity to directly connect disparate experiences your staffers have at work with your company’s performance results.
If you need help, which you likely do, we’ve found that the consultant Mercer has the right combination of expertise and experience to set you up for success.
