It is important that the experience your employees have working in your company accurately reflects your organization’s distinct brand values. The attitude they have when interacting with customers and clients will be heavily influenced by the way they have been treated by managers and leadership individuals.
Employees will also emulate the way their colleagues behave, so ensuring that the employee life cycle is consistent for all your employees is important in building a business with strong organizational alignment and employee engagement.
The basic concept is, if you want to promote a customer-centric culture to your actual customers, your employees should feel like they have been treated with similar levels of respect and care during their hiring and onboarding process, as well as in their daily activities.
What is an Employee Experience Strategy?
As with any important aspect of your business, having a clear strategy in place is the best way to ensure you achieve your intended results. Consistently delivering an employee experience that does your brand justice begins with a clear understanding of your organization’s brand identity, purpose and the culture you want to create.
Expecting that your customers will receive a powerful and unique experience whenever they interact with your brand is unrealistic if you’re not putting enough effort into delivering a unique and powerful employee experience that encourages your teams to embody your values and be your greatest advocates.
Key Stages of the Employee Life Cycle
The employee life cycle includes the major stages that employers need to address in their employee experience strategy. It outlines important milestones that your employees go through as they make their way through your organization.
Understanding what these significant employee-employer interactions are can help you to shape your employee experience strategy and build an approach that works for your organization.
Initial contact and attraction – The point in which your employees first encountered your brand, whether it was through word-of-mouth or a job ad.
Hiring and onboarding – The approach taken during the interview process as well as the initial months of onboarding.
Daily activities and engagement – What kind of experience do employees generally have day to day? How do they feel at their desks or when working on projects? Do they lack any specific resource or amenity?
Performance measurement – The methods used to track the progress of your employees and recognize their achievement or areas to develop. Fair and values orientated performance reviews can maintain accountability while improving employee engagement.
Departure – What was the major reason your previous employees left your company? Is there something that competitors offer that you don’t and is there a way for you to retain valuable employees who are thinking of leaving?
Understanding the Role of Leadership
As experience strategy consultants, we can tell you that it is vital for employees to experience the benefits of the brand and values first-hand so that they are better equipped and motivated to reinforce and interpret them with customers.
This is also crucial for cultivating a distinctive culture in the company, which in turn helps to attract and retain the employees you need, whether that’s because of their own values and principles, or because they have the skills and expertise your business needs to stay competitive and thrive…. ideally, both.
One of the most important factors in all of this is the role that leadership plays in the experience of your employees. While traditional approaches stress the need to segment your employees into clusters based on their wants and needs, employees don’t all want the same development opportunities, rewards and involvement and its important that leadership also plays a fundamental part in the way you imagine the employee life cycle.
The relationship employees have with their immediate line manager is one of the strongest of all drivers of employee engagement. Whether it’s through informal or formal processes, it is important that interaction between management and leadership roles with those below them are designed to emulate the values of your brand and foster a positive culture.
Need Help with Your Employee Experience Strategy?
The employee experience journey should be well-thought-out and activated within each stage of an employee’s life cycle. Negative experiences in the process can create problems throughout the system and a reputation for poor treatment of your employees can quickly spread in tight and competitive job markets.
If you’re looking to address the issues mentioned in this article and would like to speak with an experience strategy consultant, get in touch with us at SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL. These factors and more contribute to the success of your organization and how well you are able to meet the demands of your market and customer base.