Creating a healthy workplace where employees genuinely want to work each day is the mission of employee experience. As organizations evaluate their priorities for 2024 and beyond, employee experience should be a top focus in order to set the stage for a safe and healthy workplace environment and ultimately organizational success. Whether it’s performance or culture, employee experience impacts nearly every part of an organization, and when managed correctly, organizations and their employees can thrive.
What is the Employee Experience?
The Employee experience begins when an employee is onboarded to an organization, and it ends whenever the employee leaves. In addition to onboarding and offboarding, it includes everything that an employee experiences during their time at the organization, such as training, management, activities, and more. As employees are often the heart of an organization, a positive employee experience can dictate an organization’s success.
Previously, salary and benefits were often seen as a top driver for employee retention and therefore positive employee experience. However, a recent study by Gallup found that salary and benefits were identified only 20% of the time as a reason for leaving a job, demonstrating that there is more that matters to employees now than just pay. The study also uncovered that 66% of employees left their jobs due to lack of engagement, culture, and work-life balance, highlighting the true impact of negative employee experiences. Turnover like this can be costly to organizations with studies finding that turnover of entry-level employees costs an organization roughly 30-50% of their yearly salary, while more high-level employees can cost an organization over 400% of their yearly salaries.
Recognizing the impact of the employee experience on not only an organization’s bottom line, but also key initiatives, such as employee retention, productivity, and performance, it’s imperative that organizations create positive employee experiences to ensure favorable business outcomes across the organization.
How to Improve the Employee Experience
With this recent shift in employee priorities, organizations must shift as well and prioritize solutions that protect and promote healthy and engaged workplaces to create positive employee experiences. This could be as simple as developing a strong onboarding program and processes to ensure a smooth entrance into the organization for any new employee. For current employees, organizations could consider offering flexibility to promote work-life balance and accommodate the demands of employees’ lives more effectively.
In addition to creating programs that support work-life balance and improve employee engagement, organizations should also prioritize solutions that protect workplace culture and remove toxicity before it has a chance to take root. Work Shield’s third-party misconduct solution protects and promotes a healthy workplace culture by providing a safe and secure avenue for employees to report misconduct and ensuring employers have visibility to the overall cultural health of their organization. Work Shield specializes in comprehensive incident management, ensuring that incidents are handled in a way that minimizes potential harm, and a resolution recommendation is presented in a timely manner. As a third-party solution, employers can mitigate issues of bias and retaliation, further prioritizing their employees and their experiences with the organization.
With 2024 right around the corner, employee experience should be a top priority for organizations. Whether it’s new processes, policies, tools, or solutions, creating a healthy workplace environment that ensures a positive employee experience will be a key differentiator for organizations in 2024 and beyond.
