Today’s employees spend more time interacting with work affairs, peers, and managers than with friends and family. Thus, the workplace is an integral component of their lifestyle. Logically, a consistently unhappy employee will sink into a quagmire of reduced productivity, dysfunctional relationships, and sub-standard results.

Undoubtedly, in the last ten years, and especially entering the 2020s, there’s been a significant shift in thinking. Everyone knows that talent scarcity is a severe organizational challenge.

As a result, job seekers enter the marketplace knowing their ticket to a happy life rests with employers ready to attract the best human resources possible. Why? Companies that go the extra mile to create the right environment can foster employee engagement, satisfaction, and productivity. In short, they’re at the cutting-edge of employee experience design.

In this article, we’ll discuss four essential elements of employee experience design and understand the basics and core concepts of employee design strategy.

What is employee experience (EX)?

EX decides whether your value proposition has “loyalty power” or will end up as a turnstile of employees entering and exiting just as fast. Enriched EX drives employees to achieve more and engage with the company in its growth and progression. It means committing to the company’s mission and vision while functioning as a corporate ambassador. In both instances, strong employee experience supports the development of satisfied and loyal employees.

The key to a successful EX is meeting or exceeding employee expectations at every touchpoint on their employee journey. Why? Because touchpoints integrate to deliver a complete employee experience. This journey starts at recruitment, then to onboarding, project participation, advancement up the hierarchical ladder, training, and job reviews – indeed, the employee journey includes every vital touchpoint until retirement (or termination). A smooth transition from touchpoint to touchpoint is crucial to a vibrant employee experience.

Conversely, unsuccessful employee experiences are often a result of toxic or dysfunctional touchpoints. These may be:

• Disappointed expectations
• Inadequate training or support for the tasks in the job description
• Frustrating manager interactions
• Uncooperative peers
• Disagreement with milestones/KPIs
• Poor feedback mechanisms in place
• An unempathetic company culture

These are just a few examples of issues that disrupt a smooth employee journey, and it takes only one aggravating or anger-provoking workplace interaction to derail a positive employee experience.

Various studies have highlighted how positive employee experience impacts productivity, engagement, and performance with encouraging results. An MIT CISR study showed employee experience-centric organizations achieve 2X more innovation and customer satisfaction than those that are not and are at least 25% more profitable.

So, designing organizational strategies and structures that place employee experience at the root of a vibrant workplace (remote or in-office) is the substance of this article. Why? For one, it provides insight into the employee experience design school of thought, or put another way, employee experience design thinking. For another, it focuses on the design elements that set the stage for a balanced, robust, and resilient employee experience to emerge. These must meet corporate goals and employee lifestyle parameters for a win-win outcome.

Does this resonate? If so, read on.

What is Employee Experience Design?

In the middle of the conversation about designing a holistic employee experience, you’ll encounter budgets, deadlines, and ROI demands from the board. The major concern about shifting priorities is the fear that any distraction may put the brakes on growth and bottom-line performance. In short, it’s a complex situation that all too often kicks all employee engagement and best intentions to the curb.

In order to move forward, an innovative strategic approach is required to design a solution in the form of a resilient design framework. Of course, this framework must project employees into the center of organizational planning and decision-making processes.

The fundamental concept is to balance employee well-being with making them genuine, measurable contributors to ROI and crucial profitability metrics. Emphasizing one to the detriment of the other is a counteractive action plan; both priorities must go hand-in-hand.

Below, we’ll review four employee experience design elements that offer a practical approach to formulating an employee-inclusive strategy, creating impactful employee experiences, and driving performance.

Employee Experience Design Element #1: Feedback

Most stakeholders didn’t see the Great Resignation of 2021 and 2022 coming. Another thing that shocks the system is that 30% of recruits terminate in the first 90 days, creating a massive cost item in the overhead. How do we know that? Although a Gallup report on the cost of replacing exiting employees (up to twice the annual salary) dates back to 2019, it’s unlikely things have gotten any better. Indeed, with recent high inflation, it has probably worsened.

Anyone immersed in building an employee experience design will confirm that the principal culprit behind shock terminations was lack of feedback. It’s vital for management to feel the temperature in the company and to understand if emotional upheavals are about to burst forth after steaming just below the surface.

An integral aspect of designing a holistic employee experience infrastructure in the business is to develop, distribute, interpret, and act on employee surveys. Unless one can sense or pick up discontent in the employee ranks, it’s likely to blow up at some point, creating an HR crisis.

Therefore, designing a feedback program should meet high standards by taking the following into account:

• Qualitative Feedback – Designed to uncover respondents’ emotions, perceptions, and thoughts at regular junctures (at least twice annually).
• Quantitative Feedback – Based on metrics measuring performance over time versus expected yardsticks – any fact-based and measurable data.
• Retain Anonymity – To encourage frank, honest responses without threat of reprisal – especially in controversial arenas (e.g., giving feedback on managers’ aptitudes and cooperativeness of peers)
• Make surveys short and incisive – Professionally configured two or three-question surveys are highly effective.
• Act on recommendations – Don’t run surveys if the feedback goes nowhere. You must show respondents you value their ideas. Openly recognize valuable contributions in cases where the survey permits ID connection.
• Implement at every point of the employee lifecycle, starting with the onboarding phases (a move that can significantly reduce early resignations).

The above field provides employee experience design thinking at its best. It all converges on opening constructive engagement with your staff and creating extraordinary transparency. When feelings and emotions start as niggles but have no release, they fester internally, often with an irrational reaction at a touchpoint that disrupts the team and the business. If you don’t know what’s bothering someone, you can’t remedy it.

In short – an organized, structured digital survey program connected to an omnichannel network for respondent convenience is an indispensable employee experience design pillar of strength.

Employee Experience Design Element #2: Training

A groundbreaking report and employee survey by Lorman Education Services – a reputable teaching authority in the work education arena – reflected eye-popping employee response statistics as follows:

• 59% claim their employers provided zero workplace training, relying on their self-taught skills (meaning they must invest in their own personal upskilling).
• Around 74% are willing to retain employment via re-training or learning new skills.
• A paltry 29% feel their outlined career advancement opportunities are acceptable.
• 74% feel that reaching their full potential at work isn’t going to happen based on the lack of development opportunities.
• 76% declare that their employer’s stature would escalate significantly if staff skills training were on the agenda.
• 61% look at career development opportunities when considering job opportunities.

The points above underline that training is crucial to employee experience design success. Recruiting for new positions, promoting from within, shifting to changed job descriptions created by AI disruption, keeping up to speed as a project member, and so on are all integral employee experience situations where training kicks in.

Any company that bypasses a formal training and education agenda has an incomplete employee experience design. It also indicates the stakeholders aren’t conscious of EX as a profitability driver. Here are some tips regarding training:

• Use social media, videos, podcasts, and online tests with seamless user interfaces to offer it in virtual formats. Clumsy or complicated education access is a turn-off, discouraging employees from enrolling.
• Not every course is voluntary. If the training is mandatory, say so, offering flexible support.
• Recognize training completions to show that skill upgrading doesn’t go unnoticed.
• Brand your training so it loses generic overtones, and customize it as much as possible. Employees respond to “exclusivity” that looks made for their personal needs.
• As part of your employee experience design loop, have a competent HR person review the education material for relevance and accuracy. Jettison outdated courses; they’re a waste of everyone’s time.

Employee Experience Design Element #3: KPIs

Employee reviews (which you should conduct at least twice annually and when onboarding more regularly) without KPIs in the conversation is like trying to sunbathe on a cloudy day – the results will be “iffy” at best.

KPIs kick ambiguity to the curb and remove unnecessary reviewer subjectivity. They offer a transparent, unbiased platform for employee performance assessment, making more sense of individual achievements as contributors to the business’s strategic success.

For example, a salesperson’s 25% improvement in customer retention or 20% uptick in new client brand usage can logically connect to a company’s revenue growth and improved bonuses.

So, for KPIs to work effectively, there are rules to follow:

1. In the spirit of openness and transparency, obtain agreement with the employee that the selected KPIs are pertinent to their work.
2. Set KPI expectations as part of the review process.
3. Invite employees to contribute KPI suggestions.
4. Ensure the KPI readings are accurate and address any misgivings they’re not with data analytic backup.
5. As part of the employee experience design loop, revise KPIs constantly in line with individuals advancing in the business or changing circumstances. For example, a recruit’s outlined KPIs in the onboarding phase shift to a new level as they exit into a fully-fledged team member role. Expectations change, represented by changed KPIs.

In short, including relevant metrics and KPIs in your EX design will keep the EJ on track and uplift the employee experience for new hires, frontline workers, managers, and executives alike.

Employee Experience Design Element #4: Company Culture

This may be last on the list, but it’s by no means least. Indeed, everything described above slots into a vibrant, inclusive, fast-paced company culture that employees want to be part of.

Put another way, implementing the above initiatives but not following through, failing to close all gaps, letting daily crises interfere with employee engagement and retention processes, and claiming transparency but not genuinely applying it creates:

• Distrust
• Employee dissatisfaction
• Employee churn

In summary, you must walk the walk, not just talk about an employee design strategy.

This means hiring people whose thinking aligns with your goals, who care about training and advancement, who are prepared to share rewards, and who are in sync with two-way correction and feedback.

It involves management styles that are culturally on the same wavelength and recruiting people who want those supervisory styles. In other words, it’s all about designing a holistic employee experience – not in bits and pieces – but throughout the company.

Conclusion

So there you have it: a kickstart methodology that will get your business on the right foot and travel through challenges by taking them in their stride. Having the right operational and perception data can power improvements to each touchpoint in the employee journey, which in turn powers a better employee experience for everyone and better business outcomes, too.

Sogolytics is at the cutting edge of employee experience design, from designing a holistic employee experience to guiding the “employee experience design loop” process. They’re in the thick of clients planning to create staff satisfaction and engagement while maintaining profitability and ROI metrics. Contact them to get in-depth insights into the four employee experience design elements covered above and much more.