Augmenting Employee Experience Through Policy & Practices

This article is a part of the All Things Talent Magazine (May 2018 Edition) – An Initiative By iimjobs.com | hirist.com

It’s a well-known fact that committed employees create loyal customers. However, delivering on this every time seamlessly tends to be a big challenge for most organizations, especially in the middle of an uncertain growth climate. This holds a lot of importance as companies that focus on providing an enriching employee experience create a pool of engaged employees who are client-centric, service oriented and contribute to the overall outcome. The words “engaged” and “employee experience” is very critical to the overall workforce in an organization. Needless to say, a good employee experience lays the foundation for an engaged workforce, resulting in higher productivity, positivity at the shop floor and overall well-being of the organization remains at an all-time high.

Instilling positive thinking in every employee, having every Line Manager to initiate a structured career discussion for his/her team, making each Business Head to own the Augmenting Employee Experience through Policy & Practices learning and development agenda and lastly, making sure that all of these partnerships coexist with the assigned HRBP, in order to create a culture of enriching employee experience, is a complicated and difficult task. This requires:

• challenging the status quo,
• creating high sponsorship of leaders,
• demonstrating culture to “rotate to new”, and
• an underlying assumption of positive employee experience that will drive the right behaviour and values amongst its workforce.

HR co-creating this experience with Business gives the importance it deserves.

The organization DNA should be built in a way that each and everything that is done for the employees or customers, stems from an innate desire to create an experience that is rich and long-lasting. Traditionally the approach has always been to conduct an annual employee satisfaction survey and then work for results, and resolution of the same will show results. A great amount of time and effort is put in as well in order to increase scores. The time has come to move away from annual surveys and dive deep into the fields on a real-time basis, extract the gaps and give the employees what they are looking for in the organization, which is the feeling of being heard. HR at locations needs to be savvy, use the common sense approach, and feel the temperature as well as advice Business Leaders.

Companies must also get geared to deliver customized experiences that are created in line with employees’, drives and desires increasing opportunities for contribution and retention. Some organisations start this process from the interview stage. We believe it’s important that we take feedback from candidates who participated in our selection process. Candidate experiences are critical to attracting and retaining talent. The feedbacks tend to serve as inputs in order to create better selection and onboarding processes. This will also produce an employer of choice. Both hired and regretted candidates will advocate the brand if their experience is good.

Employee experience thus becomes a critical component in an organisation’s growth story and the creation of a powerful brand. The experiences captured at each stage, which is in sync with the employee demographics, and the job role can throw up powerful employee analytics to harness culture goals that are aligned with business goals. A brand value that stems from employee experiences has far more impact and enables an organisation to achieve all the 4 P’s – Performance, Profit, Process and Plan.

Organisations should, therefore, put increasing focus on enhancing employee experience across talent segments, training of Line Managers in order to progress from good to great management as well as investing time and budget on harnessing positive employee experience. HR departments of organisations have to start creating vertical Talent Management and Employee Experience within their remit to give it adequate focus.

Heightened campaigns about Employee Experience in most organisations has led to replacing the proverbial thought on “engagement matters more than ever before” in most organisations “Employee Experience matters now, tomorrow and forever”. It’s an established truth that the right set of experience creates loyal employees who build a loyal customer fleet that evoke a sense of loyalty to its organisation, community and the environment it operates in.