With labor pools dwindling, skilled workers job hopping, and important roles remaining vacant for months at a time, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) can no longer afford to haphazardly throw pay and perks at their talent troubles and hope they go away.
Now, more than ever, SMBs need to think critically about how to deliver a stellar, cohesive employee experience (EX) that not only convinces workers to stay and engage but also to advocate the company’s awesomeness to others.
In other words: SMBs need an employee experience strategy.
Of course, that's easier said than done. Not only does your employee experience strategy need to marry culture, technology, and process into personalized solutions at the most impactful junctions of your employees' lives, it also needs to be viable long term.
Luckily, the perfect template for your employee experience strategy already exists in the form of the customer experience (CX)—an established practice that sales, marketing, and customer service teams have been implementing for years.
3 CX best practices to steal for your employee experience strategy
Proven best practices from the customer experience provide the ideal blueprint to build a winning employee experience strategy.
Let's look at three such best practices that you should steal from customer experience for your EX strategy.
1. Apply 'voice of the employee' to consolidate worker feedback
To deliver an optimal employee experience, you need good employee feedback. What constitutes “good" in this case is clear: honest, comprehensive, and delivered as close to real time as possible.
If you're planning to build your employee experience strategy around that one annual engagement survey you send out to your workforce, that won't do.
Worker priorities and sentiments change sporadically, so it's vital that the feedback you collect and analyze reflects your SMB's reality.
Historically, sales and marketing teams experienced similar frustrations with lagging customer feedback, which is how a concept called “voice of the customer" (VoC) came to be.
Gartner defines VoC as the capture, storage, and analysis of direct, indirect, and inferred customer feedback.
“Voice of the employee" (VoE) operates the same way, except internally. According to Gartner, the VoE concept requires companies to collect and analyze four different types of employee feedback to inform their employee experience strategy (full research available to Gartner clients).
The 4 types of employee feedback needed for VoE
Employee engagement
If you're not already measuring employee engagement with a formal survey, you need to be: Last year marked the first time—ever—that a majority of companies (53%) were doing so. Luckily, there are a variety of great tools out there for SMBs to get started.
Direct feedback
Whether it's through a monthly pulse survey or managers taking diligent notes in their one-on-ones, you need a mechanism to collect and record direct feedback from workers given throughout the week, month, and year.
Indirect feedback
Think of all the channels by which your employees are baring their feelings about work. Internally, it's channels such as email or Slack. Externally, there's social media and Glassdoor. Monitoring worker sentiment and detecting changes in morale through these indirect feedback channels is crucial. Consider investing in a social listening tool to start.
Inferred feedback
Inferred feedback comes from employee actions, rather than words. That means you should be monitoring engagement with your business applications, analyzing trends in your help desk tickets, and even tracking worker movements in your office using wearables.
Larger enterprises are already well on their way to adopting VoE—Gartner predicts that 35% of organizations with more than 5,000 employees will leverage VoE by 2022 (full research available to Gartner clients). Your SMB can start right now by augmenting annual surveys with real-time feedback to better inform your employee engagement strategy.
2. Create employee personas to better segment your target audience
You know in your heart of hearts that every one of your workers is unique, but do you treat them as such? Unlikely.
From onboarding to performance reviews and promotions, every employee in your organization probably goes through a “one-size-fits-all" process for key events. That's pretty common. Unfortunately, this approach won't work if you want to design truly personalized employee experiences.
That's where personas come in.
Many times we design applications, for example, where all functions for all users and all kinds of work are presented the same way to all users. This is why personas are useful.
Originally created for customer experience, a persona is a snapshot of the behaviors, motivations, emotions, interests, and values of a group of similarly minded people, based on data. Businesses use personas to understand how different groups of customers interact with their organization.
Using all of the data you've collected through various feedback channels, you can segment your workforce into distinct personas to better understand how to tailor your EX to each employee.
An example of an employee persona (Source)
Gartner outlines seven questions that HR leaders should ask about their workers to create well-crafted personas that go beyond title or role (full research available to Gartner clients):
How do they view their work? (e.g., “work to live" versus “live to work")
What's the nature of their specific work environment? (e.g., front-line workers versus those that work from home)
What type of work do they do? (e.g., routine versus varied, collaborative versus working solo)
What's their attitude toward technology and their level of digital dexterity?
What's their attitude toward organizational change?
What's their level of organizational influence? (e.g., top executives versus interns)
What are their motivations for action, outreach, and personal growth?
Take some time to answer these questions about your employees. When you're done, you should have at least three to five unique employee personas.
For example, you may have a “maverick" persona who is very tech-savvy and will find their own solutions if your organization doesn't offer them, as well as a “skeptic" persona who asks a lot of questions and is incredibly resistant to change.
Using and developing a clear association between personas and each of your employees can help you design employee experiences that better anticipate how each segment of your organization will react and behave.
3. Map out an employee journey to prioritize areas for improvement
HR practitioners should be incredibly familiar with the concept of the employee life cycle: the stages that workers go through from the time they're sourced, recruited, and hired to the day they leave the organization.
But what are the exact steps that workers go through during each of these stages? How do they feel about those steps? Do these stages intersect and overlap with one another in a cohesive way? The answers to these questions are far less certain.
Employee journey mapping—borrowed from the world of customer experience—can provide much needed clarity and help you identify areas where you should prioritize your employee experience efforts.
To start, identify the key stages in your organization that every employee hits on their journey. That might look something like this:
Sourcing and recruiting
Pre-boarding
Onboarding
Compensation and benefits
Ongoing learning and development
Engagement, communication, and community involvement
Rewards and recognition
Performance planning, feedback, and review
Advancement
Retirement, termination, or resignation
Then, for every key stage you've identified and for every employee persona you've created, you should determine: 1) the desired outcome and 2) the discrepancies between your current experience and an ideal one.
An example of an employee journey map (Source)
This journey mapping process can yield surprising insights. New hires might want more information about what they should expect before arriving on their first day. Your learning and engagement tools may be so frustrating to use that many workers will do everything they can to avoid using them.
Whatever you uncover, prioritize improving the pain points that take up the most employee time while delivering the least amount of employee value. Then, focus on making experiences effortless or even invisible, rather than delightful or “wow-worthy", to provide the best return.
An example of an employee experience improvement plan at Coca-Cola (Source; full research available to Gartner clients)
Treat employees like you would treat valuable customers
Organizations that invest heavily in their employee experience have a chance to double their revenues and increase their profits four-fold compared to the average business. Without a sound employee experience strategy though, many of these investments will be all for nought.
Thankfully, you don't have to start from scratch. Leveraging proven best practices from customer experience such as “voice of the employee" feedback gathering, employee personas, and employee journey mapping can help you better understand your workforce and understand where your employee experience initiatives will have the most impact.
“Basically every lesson from CX matters to EX," Bruce Robertson says. “Both are about human beings and their experience."
If you're eager for more best practices you can steal to improve the employee experience at your small business, look no further than the rest of our talent management blog.