5 Steps to Improve Your Employee Experience
Employee experience is a critical aspect of any organization. It encompasses all the interactions an employee has with their employer, including the work environment, company culture, management, learning and development, and more. In today’s tight talent market, this is something that every business leader should be thinking about.
A positive and highly personalized employee experience can lead to benefits that stretch across the entire business – not just in the talent function – such as increased productivity, greater employee engagement, and improved retention rates.
Here are five steps to improve your employee experience:
1. Get a better handle on your data
One of the most significant and common challenges in managing the employee experience is the lack of proper data management, particularly around skills. Most organizations have loads of skills data sitting in their ATS and CRM, but do those systems communicate with one another? And are they using the same language when it comes to skills?
Unifying skills data across HR systems can help businesses better understand their employees’ current skills and competencies, and to understand employee desires and aspirations, which can lead to better career development opportunities, training, and performance management. With the right dynamic data (and the help of AI), business leaders can also infer skills that employees could easily learn, based on the skills they already have, creating even more opportunities for learning and development and internal mobility.
By ensuring that skills data is dynamic and consistent across HR systems, organizations can create more seamless and personalized employee experiences, while reducing the time and effort your HR and Talent teams need to spend on manually updating employee and skills data.
2. Embrace generative AI
While many people are wary of the implications Generative AI could have on the workplace, and the world of HR specifically, there are a lot of exciting opportunities that come with it.
Generative AI tools like TalentGPT (the world’s first generative AI for HR) can help organizations improve their employee experiences by automating time-consuming and repetitive tasks, such as scheduling, data entry, and reporting.
This can free up HR and Talent professionals to focus on more meaningful work and strategic initiatives, such as employee engagement and career development programs. Generative AI can also help organizations identify patterns and trends in employee data, which can inform better decision-making for business leaders and hiring managers, around who to promote, mentor or develop.
3. Allow employees to take ownership of their career paths
Employees who feel that they have control over their career paths are often more engaged, productive and motivated. Organizations can improve their employee experience by providing employees with the resources they need to take ownership of their career development.
This can include learning and development plans, training opportunities, and mentorship programs. But, with AI, you can take this a step further, and enable these types of employee experiences at scale. An AI-powered Talent Marketplace can create personalized development recommendations for each individual employee, as well as personalized career paths. This allows employees to view the different paths they could potentially take, and view the training they would need to develop the skills each path would require.
When employees are in the driver’s seat of their career paths, they are much more likely to remain engaged in their roles. This also benefits the employer, as they can see increased retention rates, and cost savings from hiring and promoting from within.
4. Free up the HR team so they can focus on more meaningful work
While technology can help organizations improve their employee experience, it’s essential to remember that HR is ultimately about people. With the addition of new technologies like generative AI, it’s especially important that businesses think about how they can improve their employee experience by creating a more human-centered approach to HR.
In fact, (although it sounds counterintuitive) by adding automation to your talent and HR processes, you can actually increase the ‘human’ aspect of HR. This is because HR and Talent professionals have more time and availability to devote to building personal connections with employees, and providing the best overall experience from the time of onboarding, all the way through the employee’s tenure with the company.
Ultimately, HR cannot function properly without humans, so don’t be afraid to embrace technologies that will help your HR team perform their jobs better than ever before – allowing them to create the best possible employee experiences.
5. Ensure your processes are equitable
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) are critical aspects of any good employee experience. And the truth is, today’s employees (particularly millennials and Gen Z) expect nothing less. The employee experience has many aspects that have the potential to hold bias (either conscious or unconscious), such as training or development opportunities, mentoring programs, pay raises, and promotions.
Organizations can improve the employee experience by ensuring that each of these processes are fair and equitable in nature. Employees expect businesses to be transparent about important issues like the gender pay gap, how performance is evaluated, and how the company came to a decision on an internal move.
When DE&I is truly embedded in the company culture, employees can feel that their employer genuinely cares about them as individuals. It’s critical that each and every employee has equal access to learning and career development opportunities over the course of their time with the organization.
And, when skills are the primary currency in the workplace, the HR and Talent functions become much more equitable, because people are evaluated based on their current skills and ability to learn new ones, instead of other factors that can hold bias.
Vastly improving your employee experience won’t happen overnight, but when done right, it can lead to increased productivity, employee engagement, and retention rates. By making the employee experience a strategic focus, you can create a more positive work environment for your current (and future) employees – and unlock their creativity for better business results.