The essentials of effective EX programs

What sets best-in-class employee experience programs that deliver results apart from the rest? Here are the fundamental steps organizations must take to not only capture the voice of the employee, but act on it by implementing changes that drive satisfaction.

Listen to employees: continuously, in real time, across channels, and by capturing direct and indirect forms of feedback, such as survey responses, comments on social media, employee crowdsourcing suggestions, and other employee behaviors and signals, such as PTO usage, the volume of IT and HR tickets, meeting attendance patterns, and more.
Analyze employee insights at scale and in the moment: using artificial intelligence (AI) to make sense of massive data sets to identify your organization's top employee experience themes and overall employee sentiment. A strong EX platform will be able to help organizations immediately identify areas of positive, negative, and neutral sentiment, whether that's specific company policies or tools employees use on a daily basis. EX technology also helps organizations understand what's driving strong engagement and pinpoint opportunities to improve experiences.
Involve the right stakeholders: across different areas including HR, managers, operations, facilities, IT, and other employee-facing teams and empowering these individuals to affect meaningful changes designed to improve the employee experience at the individual employee level and across the organization. For instance, if when conducting employee listening initiatives, employers discover that new hires feel like they're not getting enough support during the onboarding process, it's crucial to route those learnings back to the individuals who can have an immediate impact on improving that aspect of EX.
Take action based on employee feedback: and be transparent in communicating next steps in a timely manner, when there's time to have an impact, and turn things around, not months or years after the fact. For instance, leaders could use recurring all-hands meetings to share the top topics employees have discussed via surveys and other channels, and talk about how the company plans to address these concerns going forward. And not every solution has to or should come from executives. Companies can empower employees to be problem solvers by using crowdsourcing platforms to collect workers' best ideas for how to address employee engagement challenges.

Taking things a step further, the Medallia Institute and Josh Bersin, global industry analyst and CEO of the Josh Bersin Company, researched employee experience programs across more than 600 organizations to understand the link between strong employee experience practices and positive people outcomes like employee satisfaction and engagement, and found key elements that separate employee experience leaders from employee experience laggards.

Special Reports /

Utilizing employee experience programs to retain talent

Related Stories

Recommended For You