Today's challenges bring about a renewed interest in employee experience. Now is the time to encourage energy and resources toward its development.

We all know the workforce is changing and it's changing at an accelerated pace. The McKinsey Global Institute's 2021 report The Future of Work After COVID-19 tells us: "The pandemic accelerated existing trends in remote work, e-commerce, and automation, with up to 25% more workers than previously estimated potentially needing to switch occupations."

Furthermore, the global analytics and advice firm Gallup reports that "after trending up in recent years, employee engagement in the U.S. saw its first annual decline in a decade — dropping from 36% engaged employees in 2020 to 34% in 2021. This pattern has continued into early 2022, as 32% of full- and part-time employees working for organizations are now engaged, while 17% are actively disengaged, an increase of one percentage point from last year."

Add this to the ongoing "Great Resignation" and "Great Retirement" and HR professionals have their work cut out for them.

The good news for HR teams? Today's challenges bring about a renewed interest in employee experience. Now is the time to encourage energy and resources toward its development. You won't regret taking action to enhance your people culture and improve the employee experience at your company.

Continue reading to learn more about what we mean by employee experience. You'll also learn four strategies for improving it.

Employee Experience Explained

A Gallup article discussing the difference between employee experience and employee engagement explains how "employee experience constitutes the entire journey an employee takes with your organization. This includes everything from pre-hire to post-exit interactions and everything in between." The article lists seven critical stages of the employee experience as attract, hire, onboard, engage, perform, develop, and depart.

Culture Amp defines employee experience as an encapsulation of "what people encounter and observe over the course of their tenure at an organization." They compare it to the customer experience, something companies everywhere are familiar with and invest in.

So, whether you are recruiting talent, developing talent, or saying goodbye to talent, you're dealing with the employee experience.

4 Tools for Improving Employee Experience

1: Employee Experience Survey

If you are looking to better understand the employee experience at your workplace, a survey is a great place to start. A thoughtful employee experience survey will help you know what is working at your organization and what isn't. You can gather anonymous information that will help you better plan where HR resources need to go. This will allow you to improve employee recruitment, retention, and engagement more strategically.

Before conducting a survey, be sure to review the following linked resource and checklist.

Employee Experience Survey Checklist

• Purpose
• Communication
• Survey Design
• Timeline
• Action and follow-up plan

To get a healthy level of employee buy-in you need to have a set strategy for utilizing the results of your survey, and a solid communication plan in place.

2: Team Building

Team building is essential for employee retention when 50% of employees have stayed at a company because they felt like part of a team. Good thing there are plenty of team-building initiatives for you to pursue. Some examples include more casual team building activities like awards, movie showings, and field days to more formal activities like our True Team Building Workshop where we explore the nuances of effective team building.

3: Edutainment

If you're not using edutainment in the workplace already, you want to be. A well-established teaching and training methodology for in-person learning, edutainment is now being seen through a new lens as it applies to virtual education and work.

Edutainment is, as you might expect from the term, a combination of education and entertainment. While teaching your employees necessary information, it also inserts fun into every day, provides new ways to connect, and encourages genuine relationships throughout your organization.

One example is the True Colors Live Show, a comedic performance that opens the door to understanding different personalities and behaviors on your team. The performance can be delivered in person or online.

4: Stay Interview

Another strategy for improving employee retention and engagement is conducting stay interviews. Stay interviews go over an employee's experience at their place of employment and can help employees improve their self-awareness. They also help employers better understand the different workplace personality styles of their teams and gain an even deeper understanding of their employees. Armed with this knowledge, both parties can take actionable steps toward an improved employee experience.

Need to improve the employee experience at your organization?

Consider using the four tools listed above and click the below button for our condensed version of the True Colors Employee Survey. We crafted it to help organizations like yours learn more about their current working environments and how to enhance them.