Business leaders cannot get by without their employees being by their side these days. Successful leaders need people, and people will only remain loyal to leaders if they are being treated in the best possible way. You cannot just offer the basics such as paid time off or health insurance, especially in a country where paid time off only equates to two weeks per year. The employee experience is everything and anytime you don’t, treat your employees with respect and with love. You’re going to pay for it later.
It’s not that you have to beg people to be loyal to you, but you have to treat people correctly, and that means understanding what the employee experience means. Companies that have high plus employee engagement will pull in 2 1/2 times more revenue than a business that doesn’t have high engagement levels. Look at your turnover. How many people have left your business this year alone? How many people are talking about your business and not in a positive way? The whole point of employee journey learning is to understand their journey from their perspective. If you’re not willing to do that, you’re going to fail pretty fast! Your employees are your bread and butter and you will not have a business without them and their expertise and their hard work. So if you want to improve your employees’ experience with your company, take a look at these nine ways to do it.
- Start Employee Journey Mapping. If you want to be able to visualize the stages that an employee goes through in their time with your business, then you need something visual to do that, which is what an Employee Journey Map is for. It’s here that you can identify all of those important pain points and critical moments where action is needed. If your employees are unhappy, they are going to quiet quit and they are going to leave your business without talking to you about it because they don’t feel that you’re approachable enough to do it. The employee life cycle is so important to understand because even if you do an engagement survey or a yearly employment meeting, every employee is at a different stage in their journey.
- Work on your internal communication. You want people to come to you and tell you, and there’s a problem, but they’re not going to do that unless they feel like they’re in the right environment for it. Nobody wants to talk to their boss about things that are bothering them because, A, they don’t want to be fired, and B, they don’t want to air out any issues if they know that you’re not going to be approachable about it. If you want people to have an increased sense of purpose, then you need to make sure that internal communication is top notch.
- Make sure that your onboarding experience is perfect. Did you know that most companies don’t have a new employee orientation programme? It’s usually a case of showing them around the office, showing them where the coffee machine is, showing them where their desk is, and telling them to get on. This doesn’t give employees a good start to a company if they don’t feel like you’re invested from the beginning. When you have an onboarding experience that is positive, you’re going to ensure that your business is running away, that is tailored to the employees and they feel empowered from the get go.
- Do more to get people to stay.If you have an interview to get somebody on board and then an exit interview to find out where things went wrong, there’s a problem. These two interviews may be useful, but you also need to implement a new system of stay interviews. This is where you will catch up with your employees and find out how they are doing and how your business is doing through their eyes, and encourage them to stay by listening to their feedback.
- Put your money where your mouth is in terms of employee Wellness. If you actually care about your employees and you want to ensure that there are fewer sick days then you need to put some money into employee wellness programs that encourage emotional, mental and spiritual wellness. This allows employees to feel better about the place that they work for and like you actually care.
- Looking for feedback. Employee benefits surveys can help here because some employees would take extra benefits over taking a raise. If your company is short on money, you can’t keep raising salaries. You can look at other ways that you can improve their experience, but the first thing you need to do is ask them what they want. Some people might want to work from home. Some people may want better health insurance or parental leave. There are so many different options out there, so make sure you are asking your team what they need the most.
- Act on the feedback that you get. Business leaders need to have a tough skin because it’s not always easy to hear that people are not happy with the way that you work things. However if you implement employee engagement and you ask for feedback you need to act on that feedback. If you’re not doing anything with it, then people are just not going to share it with you when they have something to say.
- Start investing in career development. Career development doesn’t mean that people will be leaving your business to go elsewhere. In fact, it may be a case of developing people to benefit your business in general.By putting these programs in place, you can train up the next set of leaders in your business and get them working the way that you would like them to work.
- Discuss your business planning. What do you want for your business and how do you see it going in the future? Talking to your team about this is going to help them to feel motivated and like you actually care about where your business is going. When people are complimenting your business, employees won’t really hear about that. So, make sure that you are feeding that back and you are telling people what your next steps are so that they can get excited about being part of that growth.