When you hear the phrase “business success,” what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Most of the time, business owners and managers don’t immediately correlate business success with employee experience. It’s more natural to think of increased sales or productivity. But, if you think about it, these are all byproducts of employee experience.
A business is like a well-made watch, and the employees are like cogs and springs that keep it running. For the watch to function smoothly, the cogs need to be well-oiled. It’s the same for employees. If their involvement within the workplace is poor, the business isn’t going to be successful.
What’s employee experience?
To make things clear, employee experience is how workers feel, see, and encounter workmates and situations. Interactions with workmates, bosses, teams are also parts of the experience. In this age, the software and technology used for work are also significant influences.
Other elements include perks, fun, employee growth, employee life cycle, and employee value proposition. However, these are not predominant factors. How each factor affects the totality of employee experience can vary. When thinking about employee experience, it’s essential to look at the complete picture.
Overall, a person’s work experience can be shaped by work-life balance, workspace, culture, engagement, and even technology. As working remotely or at home is becoming a trend, it’s crucial to ensure employee experience in this new environment. Many organizations struggle to adapt to this change which can affect the productivity of employees. Management and HR might find that their current methods are lacking and require updating to match this new work setting.
This is why technology plays such an important role today. Applications, platforms, and software for businesses are catching on to the changes in industries. These can help companies manage, track, and collaborate with their employees by recording data on their computers as they work. Companies like Aternity help businesses map out performances in every aspect, including experience and engagement. Impressively, it can even record any errors that an employee might be experiencing.
However, the way employee experience affects business performance can be complex. Without an understanding of functions and relationships, it can be challenging to understand. To get a good grasp of this relationship, we’ve enumerated the ways below:
1. Better customer relations
The relationship between employee experience and customer relations is directly proportional. If you want to improve customer relations, then starting with employee experience is necessary.
When dealing with customers, employees need to be in a great mood, and it shouldn’t just be putting on a smiling face. Employees who feel great about their work don’t have to “fake it,” and more often than not, this is more stressful and tiring than just acting naturally. Besides, customers can tell flattery from sincerity. In short, if employee experience is inherently positive, customer experience can improve too.
2. Increased profit
Increased profit is only second to better customer relations. This is because a better customer experience is a necessary element to increasing sales. If customers are delighted with their business interactions, it can lead to customer loyalty, positive reviews, recommendations, and, eventually, more clients. This domino effect has to start somewhere, and that’s at positive employee experience.
3. Promotes business performance
Next up is employee engagement, which is generally how passionate and committed employees feels about their job or the business. Better employee experience will not only sustain this commitment and passion, but also encourage it to grow. Boosting employee morale can be challenging as you’ll have to pay attention to which aspects require correction. But, in the end, it’s an improvement that can last and give you substantial returns such as productivity, quality, and efficiency.
4. Improve work quality
We’ve mentioned that employee engagement can boost work quality. Many employees go through stages in their careers. Most of the time, many feel driven and inspired when they first get the job, get a promotion, or have an incentive. But, all these factors don’t have a lasting effect.
If employees feel burned out, disinterested, and unenthusiastic, work quality suffers. The leading cause of this is a lack of focus on employee experience. As mentioned before, employee experience is the totality of factors like interactions, environment, engagements, culture, etc. It’s not just about perks and career growth.
5. Affect attendance
Attendance is also directly affected by employee experience. As you know, employee experience affects employee engagement. If employee engagement is lacking, employees wouldn’t feel motivated to go to work. If absenteeism is a recurrent problem in your company, it might be worth looking into.
Some reasons for absenteeism are bullying, harassment, homelife, mental health problems, grief, illness, and low morale. Some of these are out of management’s control, but low morale and bullying or harassment in the workplace aren’t. If you leave this problem unsolved, absenteeism can become part of the culture and become a serious threat to business performance.
6. Helps business performance
Another aspect is the working environment which can refer to a variety of things. However, to put it simply, it’s the surroundings, tools, atmosphere, light, and even noise.
A conducive working environment can help improve an employee’s experience. Now that more people are working remotely at home, this can be trickier for a business to manage. Whatever is going on in these homes is out of the control of the company. So, to bridge this gap, work management platforms are used to track employee activity. The transparency of how employees are tracked is necessary. This way, there’s recognition for the work done by each one.
These platforms and surroundings all contribute to a working environment. So, picking the right platform for your company can altogether influence business performance.
Conclusion
Various businesses have their methods, cultures, and environments. All these factors and more add up to employee experience, and whether that experience is positive or not can determine how well your business performs. This is why it’s necessary to keep an eye on the ups and downs of employee engagement and performance to spot if anything is amiss.
