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Often the use of employee experience programs allows for valuable feedback to be gathered in order to take advantage of the company’s opportunities and growth potential.
Why is the implementation of employee experience programs becoming important?
Forty years ago, 80% of the market value of companies came from tangible assets, i.e. tangible things like machinery, buildings and plant. Therefore, intangible assets such as employee well-being, emotions or feelings were not a priority when it came to measuring value creation.
Today, 85% of market value is driven by intangibles created by people (often in conjunction with technology). According to a study by consulting firm Accenture summarized in the following post employees now expect their company to go beyond transactional relationships.
Employees now want companies to meet their core human needs. With so much at stake, now is the best time to ask yourself what matters most to your employees, which is why employee experience measurement is especially important.
What makes a good employee experience program?
Once you have decided to approach the implementation of employee experience (EX) programs it is important to identify what matters to employees as:
- Their responses are solicited.
- Listening to their feedback.
Creating an employee experience program is a task that requires time, effort and resources to ensure long-term success. Employee experience management software such as Allswers can help.
We business managers often ask ourselves:
“What questions should we ask in our employee surveys?”
Which leads us into a discussion about what organizations want to know and what they need to do to improve.
We must take into account in our analysis different aspects such as:
- The context in which each employee’s individual purpose at work operates.
- The specific challenges (aspect raised in the McKinsey study).
Individual purpose.
Individual purpose, according to the consulting firm McKinsey, can be thought of as an enduring, overarching sense of what matters in a person’s life; people experience purpose when they are striving to achieve something meaningful to them.
There are clear patterns, or archetypes of purpose, that help employers sort out what people find meaningful, but ultimately someone’s purpose can be as varied as the people themselves.
Seventy percent of employees surveyed by consulting firm McKinsey in its study say their purpose is largely defined by work.
Senior executives in the sample raised that average, but even so, two-thirds of non-executive employees said that work is one of the factors that defines their purpose in life.
Individual purpose in jobs.
However, when asked by McKinsey whether people live their purpose in their daily work, the gap between executives and others soared.
- Eighty-five percent of executives and senior managers said they live their purpose at work.
- Only 15% of front-line employees agreed.
Therefore, there is a lack of identification among front-line workers between their purpose at work and the purpose of the organization.
The solution to this problem is to implement robust employee experience (EX) programs. This is intended to find out what matters most to the company’s employees and, in this way, match the organization’s purpose with the employees’ purpose.
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to success, organizations in all industries should follow one simple rule of thumb: ask and listen. EX programs are designed to tap into employee sentiment; listening to our employees is just as important as asking their opinion.
