Why Every Organization Needs an Employee Experience Platform

As younger professionals entered the workforce in the past decade, they brought about a significant shift in workers’ needs, preferences, and discernment. More job candidates are now considering employee experiences at work when they choose between potential employers. These experiences begin from the moment a prospective employee considers an organization and last until the end of their relationship with it. Businesses must understand what employees are looking for and modernize the way they manage employee experiences to ensure they meet expectations.

Why Modern Workers Demand a Better Employee Experience

Younger workers are more willing to move to a different company if they feel they can find a better experience somewhere else. Factors such as pay, working conditions, corporate culture, and more can affect how often an employee searches for a new position. On average, Generation Z employees only stay in a role for about two years — much less than their Millennial or Baby Boomer counterparts. Members of the modern workforce need compelling reasons to remain at a single organization for a long time. 

How Companies Can Improve Their Employee Experience

Create Open Lines of Communication Between Employees and Management

If a business wants to improve employee experiences, it must start by understanding what its employees want. Effective communication is key — managers must listen to their employees and seek to understand their needs before implementing benefits, structures, or programs that managers assume are most appropriate. Even after key business processes, benefits, and more are decided on, employers should review them with their employees periodically, keeping those lines of communication open. 

Set Expectations and Fulfill Promises Early

One major reason relationships between employees and management break down is a failure to set clear expectations from the beginning. If employers don’t communicate what they can provide for the employee in return for what they expect from them, relationships can sour very quickly. Expectation setting should be an important part of the onboarding process for every new employee. It’s equally as important after a new worker joins the organization to follow through — companies must also fulfill the promises they made during onboarding. 

Provide Employees With the Tools They Need to Succeed at Work

As more software and hardware solutions enter the market, businesses can find more efficient ways of getting things done. However, it is important to choose the right solution based on what a workforce needs and how a change would affect current workflows. A recent study revealed that 64% of employees say that their collaboration tools don’t integrate well with their organization’s processes. This is cumbersome and inefficient and leads to low productivity at work. A fully integrated solution can help businesses become more productive, save costs, and improve employee satisfaction. 

The Benefits of Using an Effective Employee Experience Platform

1. Attract and Retain Top Talent More Effectively

The talent crunch has affected numerous industries and turnover is becoming an increasingly costly problem for a reported 81% of businesses. As more companies shift their focus to employee retention, they must pay more attention to how they can improve employee experiences while the employee is still willing to stay in their position. An employee experience platform can help managers measure how each benefit, process, and program is helping them retain employees and they can shift strategies if a program proves to be less effective at keeping workers happy. 

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2. Build Long-Term Loyalty Even After an Employee Leaves the Organization

Research from LinkedIn shows that three-quarters of job seekers consider an employer’s brand and research them before applying for a position. Employers that fail to build strong long-term relationships with their current and former employees can find it difficult to convince workers to consider them an employer of choice. An employee experience platform can help businesses gauge how workers feel about them and act to position themselves more effectively. 

3. Empower Managers to Build Better Relationships With Their Team

Managers often have to work with people who have completely different needs, career objectives, and communication styles. A rigid corporate structure can make it difficult for them to ensure that each employee feels satisfied and fulfilled at work. When companies offer multiple benefits or pay structures to employees to meet diverse needs, it can be challenging to communicate the options available to each employee. A unified employee experience platform can help managers share this information while consolidating employee information in a single place. 

4. Foster an Open and Collaborative Culture Across the Organization

When information isn’t shared effectively across the organization, employees are often left in the dark about their employer’s management practices and how these affect them. Companies that have been rated highly for their open and effective management styles retain employees significantly more often than companies considered to have a more closed-off style. An employee experience platform helps organizations democratize data that is relevant to each business department and shows employees how their work benefits them and the organization. 

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5. Standardize Onboarding Processes Across Information Silos

As more companies embrace specialized tools to help with onboarding, business processes, pay, benefits management, and more, information silos can become entrenched. This makes it challenging for business leaders to standardize processes and build a holistic overview of how their company operates. An employee experience platform can help deliver this overview with its extensive integrations and consolidation of information in an easy-to-understand graphical dashboard. 

Companies have been managing employee experiences for a long time. However, these processes often differed greatly across various business departments, were extremely cumbersome, and were often managed inconsistently. An effective employee experience platform can help businesses completely transform the way they deliver experiences throughout an employee’s relationship with their employer. 

Employers can reduce their costs significantly by automating valuable, highly repetitive processes and streamlining processes that require human intervention. Employees can expect easier approval of benefits and pay, more access to their work data, and more accessible training programs. An employee experience platform benefits every party that uses it.