Your job has become more important — and more challenging — than ever.
The pandemic threw your organization into chaos and created new ways of working. And now that life is stabilizing, you and your HR and communications teams must find a way to meet two new mandates.
- You must make your internal functions faster, more agile, more responsive, and more capable of adapting to any unexpected, disruptive changes that might suddenly appear.
- You must help your organization reshape your workforce into long-term remote and hybrid models, all while keeping your employees engaged within this “new normal”.
To meet both mandates, your HR and communications teams must learn to monitor and manage your employees’ experience within today’s new working realities. And we wrote this article to help you do just that.
To do so, we’ll explore:
- What employee experience actually is and why it matters.
- How to use people analytics to improve your employee experience.
- How platforms like Grytics make people analytics fast and easy.
Let’s dig in!
What Employee Experience is and Why It Matters
Now, we first have to clear up a common point of confusion.
“Employee experience” is not exactly the same thing as “employee engagement”, even though the two concepts are very closely related.
Employee experience is the sum total of every touchpoint that your employees have with your company. Everything your employees see, feel, and interact with as a member of your company contributes to their overall experience with your company.
When you give your employees the right experience, they will naturally become engaged and emotionally committed to your organization and its goals. This engagement, in turn, makes your employees happier, more productive, more profitable, and less likely to leave.
Which means creating great employee engagement starts with creating great employee experience. And more organizations are starting to catch onto this fact, and are focusing on improving their employee experience.
- Deloitte found that 80% of executives stated they believe employee experience is very important.
- HBR found that companies that focus on employee experience return 4x the average profit and 2x the average revenue.
- LinkedIn found that employee experience is one of the top 4 trends changing the way that companies hire and retain talent… but only 52% of companies report that they provide a positive employee experience.
In sum: Employee experience matters, and it can be tricky to get right.
It isn’t a one-off thing you optimize once and forget about. It’s a continuous process of monitoring and measuring how your employees feel about their experience, of identifying opportunities to improve their experience, and of then taking action to correct bad experiences and scale good experiences.
Now, let’s explore why conventional methods of managing employee experience have not worked, and what a better approach looks like.
What Not to Do: The Hard Way to Improve Employee Experience
Historically, organizations have tried to measure and manage their employees’ experience with annual surveys.
But as HBR notes, these surveys have always been too slow, too infrequent, and too cumbersome to deliver real benefit. As they explain, it’s just “unreasonably to wait for an entire year to evaluate whether morale has gone up or down” and that it makes more sense to “monitor this more regularly”.
Some organizations have figured this out, and begun to conduct smaller, more frequent, and more targeted “pulse surveys”. And yet, while pulse surveys have been an improvement and provided more timely and actionable data, they still are not totally sufficient to drive truly agile and relevant employee experience — especially now that things change so fast.
Employees have more touchpoints with their organizations than ever. Their needs are evolving faster than ever. HR and communications teams must intervene more than ever to keep their employees happy. And they need a continuous stream of data on their employees’ experience to do so.
Annual surveys can’t provide this data. Neither can pulse surveys.
But people analytics can.
People Analytics: The Solution to Better Employee Experience
Now, “people analytics” is a relatively new capability.
It refers to a suite of techniques that utilize real-time data to give you immediate, relevant, and actionable insights into your employees’ experience and how you might improve it.
When you utilize people analytics properly, you will be able to collect a comprehensive range of real-time data from each of your employees’ interactions with your company at each of your touchpoints.
You will then visualize that data in a simple, digestible, and actionable manner that makes it obvious where your employee experience is positive, where it is negative, which of your employees need the most attention, and what you can do to develop a great employee experience for everyone.
While people analytics is still pretty new, it’s taking off fast. More and more organizations are seeing people analytics as the solution to their employee experience and engagement challenges. According to Deloitte, 71% of organizations consider people analytics a high priority.
Unfortunately, Deloitte also found that only 8% of organizations feel they have usable data to drive a people analytics program, and many HR groups are concerned it’s too technically advanced for them to figure out on their own.
Thankfully, there’s an easy way to overcome these challenges and to bring people analytics to your organization — fast, simple, and easy.
How Platforms Like Grytics Make People Analytics Easy
With the move to remote and hybrid workforces, you moved most of your employee experiences onto collaboration solutions like Yammer, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Workplace from Meta.
These solutions are automatically generating a ton of real-time employee experience data for you. And a new class of platforms are collecting this data, analyzing it, and giving you an accurate picture of your employee experience.
Grytics is one such platform, and offers multiple features to drive a people analytics program, and to improve your employee experience, including:
With Grytics, people analytics — and better employee experience — becomes a fast, simple, easy task that anyone can perform.