Measuring employee experience is essential for brands that want to have a happy, thriving staff.
By gathering employee data through surveys, businesses can assess improvement areas and track staff trends over time. Using this data, employers can also create new initiatives that focus on employee improvement areas to ensure a healthy work environment.
When businesses measure employee experience, they are also likely to see an increase in staff loyalty and productivity, creating an innovative and healthy workplace.
What is Employee Experience (EX)?
Employee experience refers to a staff member's interactions with their employer throughout the entirety of their role.
The goal is to understand what drives employees to continue working at a company (and what can be improved). Employee experience is directly related to how staff view their roles and the value that they place on their everyday actions within a workplace.
Measuring EX touches on common staff experiences such as:
- Work environment
- Culture
- Support options
- Leadership interactions
- Work-life balance
- Growth opportunities/tools provided for optimal job performance
Every business should prioritize their employee's experience, as it plays a key role in higher satisfaction, engagement, and productivity rates.
Why is Measuring Employee Experience Important?
Measuring employee experience is key for many reasons. By doing this, employers are able to understand their employees better, allowing them to create a better work environment.
Below, we’ve included a few common reasons measuring EX is critical for organizations everywhere.
1. Enhances Employee Engagement and Productivity
By measuring employee experience, businesses will receive insights into staff engagement and productivity levels.
Providing insights into what motivates staff, measuring employee experience gathers feedback to help employers improve. In turn, this allows them to create tailored strategies to correct any existing issues employees face.
Correcting these workplace issues can lead to increased engagement levels, which naturally creates an increase in employee productivity. Research has proven that improved productivity rates are directly linked to employers connecting with their employees, up to 25%.
This leads to a healthier workplace culture, an attribute staff place immense value on. In fact, up to 88% of job seekers view a positive culture as critical to a company's success.
2. Improves Talent Retention and Attraction
A good employee experience strategy also leads to an increase in employee retention rates.
When employees work at a company that prioritizes a positive culture, they feel valued and understood. This will likely make employees want to stay at their jobs for a longer amount of time.
Employees who feel valued and want to remain at their organization often have higher happiness levels while on the job, too.
As a result, happier employees are also more likely to recommend their workplace to others (attracting job seekers looking for a supportive employer to work for).
An added benefit of these positive changes is that they also allow employers to gain a significant edge against competitors in their field, and establish them as a sought-after place to work.
3. Drives Business Success and Innovation
Happy and engaged employees are more likely to contribute to the company's success through innovative ideas, better customer service, and higher-quality work.
Measuring employee experience provides insights into how employees perceive their roles, the organization, and its leadership.
This feedback is essential for making strategic decisions that align with employee needs and organizational goals, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation that drives business success.
How to Measure EX with Surveys
Measuring employee experience with online surveys is ideal, as they offer direct feedback from employees. This also allows businesses to pinpoint specific areas that need to be improved based on the feedback.
Below are common types of employee surveys best fit for measuring EX.
Employee Engagement Surveys
Collecting feedback from staff about their experiences, employee engagement surveys also measure satisfaction levels and motivations within a workplace.
To gather the highest quality responses on these topics, employee engagement surveys include a variety of question styles such as rating scales and open-ended questions to encourage well-rounded feedback.
When responding to these, employees are more likely to provide honest, unfiltered feedback due to the survey's anonymity.
After the survey data is collected, it's analyzed to identify common themes regarding improvement areas. From there, employers can use these insights to create targeted action plans to boost staff engagement levels.
In addition, it's a good idea for employers to conduct these surveys regularly to ensure they stay on track of employee trends. Staying on top of these trends and changes will help guide employers to make the necessary improvements to their employee outreach strategies.
Pulse Surveys
Employee pulse surveys are short questionnaires sent off to gather important feedback from staff about their workplace.
This method differs from other employee surveys in that they can be sent out more frequently, such as on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. Pulse surveys are also significantly shorter than standard surveys, allowing staff to complete them quickly.
These surveys are often focused on one main concept and include short, specific questions.
Pulse surveys cover the common themes that any other employee survey would, from satisfaction levels to company culture.
Ideally, pulse surveys are used for benchmarking data from larger, annual employee surveys.
Onboarding and Exit Surveys
When employers conduct both onboarding and exit surveys, they're able to assess important aspects of existing roles and how they can improve.
Typically run after the employee joins the team, onboarding surveys aim to gather data from these new hires. Common themes include the clarity of job roles/functions, training effectiveness, first impressions of company culture, and so on.
These surveys are helpful for employers, as they provide feedback on how they can create a more seamless hiring process.
Whereas, conducting exit surveys are given to the employee to take during their final days in a role. Often, these surveys cover common topics like why the employee is leaving, job satisfaction, and other related details.
Reviewing this data is especially helpful for employers, as it helps to identify key gaps in the onboarding process. Additionally, these surveys can help to improve retention plans and improve culture initiatives.
How to Improve the Employee Experience
The first step of employee research is to gather feedback. The second, and perhaps most important step of employee research, is to act on the feedback.
Below are 5 ways to enhance employee feedback…
Manager Feedback to Employees
First off, managers should be empowered to give feedback to employees day-to-day. Communication plays a large role in employee satisfaction levels, so it's important this is emphasized daily.
One way to enhance communication is to ensure managers feel empowered to give feedback to every employee each day. This helps employees and their managers stay in tune with the needs of the organization.
Employee Feedback to Managers
Second, empower employees to give feedback to management or leadership day-to-day.
Remember, communication between employees and management works in two ways. Employees should feel empowered to provide feedback to managers. This helps ensure everyone is on the same page every day.
Continuous Measurement
Third, employee feedback and data should be gathered on a regular basis.
Employee research is not something that should be conducted every five years. Ideally, it should be measured at least once a year or more often if the size of the workforce is large or turnover for the organization is high.
Using Benchmarks
Fourth, benchmarks should be used to compare results within the organization over time, along with the industry as a whole.
Since employee research is conducted regularly, organizations can begin to understand how key metrics (satisfaction, etc.) change over time.
Additionally, market research companies can access employee research results for specific industries. This data is used to benchmark the sponsoring organization to its industry.
Recommended Reading: How to Use Employee Survey Benchmarks
Share Insights
Fifth, insights from the employee feedback should be shared throughout the entire organization.
It’s best to share these key insights gained from employee research with all staff. This move helps everyone working at the organization know their feedback is highly valued and action is being taken on the results.
Contact Our Employee Survey Company
Drive Research is a full-service market research company dedicated to delivering quality insights to brands no matter the industry.
Partnering with organizations across the US and overseas, our team is ready to gather actionable insights to propel your business forward.
Have questions about a project, or do you need a quote or a proposal? Get in touch with us below for more information about our market research services.
- Message us on our website
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- Call us at888-725-DATA
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Emily Taylor
As Director of Operations, Emily does more than wrangle data. Her work includes executing company OKRs, company-wide project management, training/onboarding, team culture initiatives, and more!
Learn more about Emily,here.
