Great business leaders have a knack for leveraging all plausible merits of different business tactics. What enables them to do so is their incredible vision to innovate and drive exceptional outcomes from usual scenarios.
It's commendable and inspiring how you always look at the brighter side of things and align them to the success of your business. But have you ever thought about laying great emphasis on the experiences you offer to your employees? Is facilitation of positive employee experiences a part of your core business strategy?
Experiences that we undergo have a long-lasting effect on our perspectives and actions.
It makes complete sense that as a business leader, you want the most productive actions from your employees. However, what about the experiences that they draw from your organization’s work environment?
"You cannot expect your employees to exceed the expectations of your customers if you do not exceed the employees’ expectations of management.” - Howard Schultz
The former CEO of Starbucks defines a golden rule of business success. The key to taking a business to the next level lies in delivering on employees’ expectations and providing cheerful experiences to them.
To further elucidate, in this blog, we look at the multifarious merits that caring for employee experiences has. So, let's dive deeper into this post to decipher how great employee experiences make a business more competent and successful.
Exceptional Upsides of Creating Positive Employee Experiences
1. Employee Experience is Salient to Employee Engagement
In the contemporary business world, business leaders lay a lot of emphasis on employee engagement.
In fact, the engagement levels of your employees have a direct correlation with the magnitude of profitability that your business is able to drive. Gallup finds that companies with high employee engagement exhibit 22% more profitability than others. It's essential that businesses prioritize measurable goals for employee engagement.
It's also crucial to understand the determining factors that ensure high employee engagement. Active employee engagement and positive employee experiences are complementary to each other. Your employees will endorse the highest engagement when their workplace experiences inspire greater motivation and allegiance in them.
What we also need to consider here is the high cost of disengagement. Gallup further reveals that a disengaged employee can cost a company around $2,200 per year.
Rather than endure such unnecessary losses, relish the greater profitability brought by exemplary employee engagement. For that, you need to ensure that you invest in employee experiences in worthwhile ways. It's an indirect investment with high returns on investment after all!
2. Positive Employee Experience Boosts Retention Rates
Besides engagement, another pivotal concern for businesses is to facilitate high retention.
No business likes to lose its top-notch talents because that will have a direct impact on the company’s efficiency. Moreover, there are exorbitant costs associated with high employee turnover that can bring massive offsets for a business. Given that, you need to have firm strategies in place to retain your employees. Your people are your real assets after all!
As cited by Forbes, the cost of rehiring can be as high as 33% of an outgoing employee’s annual salary. That is a hefty loss indeed and every business would want to avert such expenses. In other words, you have to be efficient in evolving productive strategies for boosting employee retention. Among these strategies, one of the most reassuring measures is to invest in employee experience.
When employees witness great experiences in the workplace, their allegiance towards the organization increases. These pleasant experiences may come to them in the dimensions of:
- Empathy
- Respectfulness
- Inclusiveness
- Acceptance for diversity
- Rewards
- Learning and Development
When companies deliver on these simple expectations that employees have, they'are able to foster high retention. After all, who would want to leave a workplace where employees relish cordial and excellent experiences?
On the other hand, if they're not comfortable in the workplace, they may quit. Therefore, it's valid to say that attractive employee experiences are fundamental to the objective of high retention.
3. Good Employee Experience Makes Company Culture More Productive
The culture of a workplace is a powerful determinant of employee morale, alignment of objectives, and success. Have you ever viewed your company’s culture as a competitive advantage that can set you apart? Well, as per Deloitte, 82% of corporate workers opine that company culture is synonymous with a competitive advantage.
To add, Forbes finds companies with strong cultural values and virtues witness a fourfold increase in revenues. Now, that is really interesting, isn’t it?
Employee experiences and company culture go hand in hand. When positive employee experiences thrive in the workplace, company cultures transform for the better and vice versa. A company where employees are engaged and inspired will by default have a vibrant culture yielding greater productivity. Moreover, the innovation and creativity gushing out of such workplace cultures will add more value to the success of the company.
4. Employee Experience is Vital for Attracting New Talents
What do you think the probability that an organization’s employees will refer their company to others if their own experiences have been terrible?
It's futile to even mull on the answer to this question. If you're keen to attract new talents who can add immense value to your organization, investing in the experiences of your present employees is vital.
When your current employees enjoy pleasant working experiences, they'll be delighted to recommend the organization to others. In this way, you'll have greater prospects of hiring the best talents and minds.
It's also important for you to know that millennials and Gen Y workers are quite particular about the kind of employee experiences organizations deliver. In fact, it's one of the most critical factors for them based on which they decide to apply to an organization.
TeamStage finds that 86% of those seeking jobs ignore companies that are infamous for bad employee experiences and negative work cultures. This sums up why investing in employee experiences is both a necessity and a brilliant idea to attract great talents.
5. Great Employee Experience Translates Into Worthwhile Customer Service
“What employees experience, customers will experience. The best marketing is happy, engaged employees” - Tom Peters
Nowadays customers put customer service above everything else. For them, the kind of experiences they receive from a business are far more imperative than price and product. Annex Cloud found that 34% of customers say they'll not buy from businesses that delivered bad experiences in the past.
As a business leader, you already know how crucial client retention is for your business. In fact, Semrush says the probability of your existing customers making new purchases is 70%. On the other hand, the probability of new customers buying from you is a mere 20%. This explains why businesses hold customer retention in such high regard.
Having said that, delivering negative customer experiences may be something your business cannot afford. To hold on to your valuable customers, you need to keep brainstorming outside-the-box ideas to sustain high client retention. But what do you think is the most basic prerequisite of satisfying consumer experiences?
The answer lies in the experience of your employees!
When your employees experience positive virtues in the workplace, they'll extend the same to your customers. On the other hand, if employees are frustrated, pessimistic, or disengaged, they'll have little to add to customer experiences. Besides, negative employee experiences may also lead to offsetting customer experiences.
To deliver experiences your customers would love coming back to, you need exuberant, zealous, dynamic, charismatic, and courteous employees. These attitudes in your employees will largely depend on their own experience within the organization.
One of the most fascinating merits of investing in employee experiences is that it can upscale customer retention.
6. Employee Experience Determines Trust in the Workplace
Is trust in the workplace an overrated phenomenon?
Well, it's certainly not given the massive value it adds to an organization! As per Harvard Business Review, high trust in the workplace enhances employees’ productivity by 50%. To add, when there is high trust in the workplace, employees manifest 106% more energy and enthusiasm in their work.
Do you still want to believe that workplace trust is an overrated idea?
Can trust be fostered without positive employee experiences? Trust is a direct outcome of experiences that people go through. When their experiences are positive, they begin to invest more trust in others around them. It works the same way in the workplace. For employees to exhibit greater trust in their colleagues and employers, employee experiences are sacrosanct.
For instance, employees will have little trust in a manager who subjects them to favoritism and indulges in office politics. On the other hand, employees will show overwhelming trust in a manager who facilitates their learning and is always willing to extend support. These relevant examples explain how everything boils down to past experiences in the ultimate sense.
Employee experiences lead to better relationships and trust in the workplace. It's yet another competitive edge that employee experiences render to an organization.
7. Investing in Employee Experience Reduces Health Care Costs
Unprecedented levels of stress, high vulnerability to burnout, and lack of support will of course not count as positive workplace experiences. They would rather only add to the health care costs that a company needs to bear. Moreover, such occurrences will also add to absenteeism rates and linked costs.
By generating positive employee experiences and helping them in managing their stress and emotions, companies can make considerable savings on healthcare costs.
The logic here is quite simple. When employees will be at the receiving end of positive employee experiences, they will be less prone to burnout and high stress. Subsequently, a company will have to endure lesser costs for healthcare.
Moreover, when you prevent burnout in employees via pleasant employee experiences, you also ensure that they give their best to the organization at all times. You cannot expect the same from employees who are exhausted and witness frequent burnout as the state of their wellness will impact their efficiency. Thus, besides reduced health care costs, there are quite a few latent benefits of investing in employee experiences as well.
Investing in Employee Experience
To conclude, investing in employee experience is synonymous with investing in the success of your business in multidimensional ways. From profitability benefits to cost-cutting advantages, the return on investments in employee experience is high.
In fact, you are missing out on quite a few verticals of competitive advantages by snubbing the need for pleasant employee experiences. Whether it's high employee engagement, workplace relationships, or reducing employee turnover, all answers cross their paths from employee experiences.
