How to Improve Employee Experience in 2024

Khadijah Plummer

Employee Engagement

In today’s digital age, we know that expectations are high and customers are fickle, and if their experience isn’t seamless they’ll soon move on. This is why so many businesses have understood the importance of creating valuable customer experiences, spending time, and allocating extensive resources to them.

Before we dive into why companies must invest in employee experience (EX), it’s important to understand what this concept entails.

If you’re building out or revamping your employee experience strategy, or want to have a better understanding of the impact a good employee experience can have on your bottom line, keep reading.

7 ways to get honest feedback from employee surveys

Will your workforce tell the truth? Foster trust and openness with your employees using these tips.

What is Employee Experience?

According to Jostle, employee experience refers to anything and everything an employee is exposed to over the course of their employment at a company: from the interview process, onboarding, development, everyday processes and workflow, the tools they use, the conversations they have, all the way to offboarding.

Top-performing organizations have started to dedicate significant resources to measuring and improving how engaged and happy their employees feel.

According to the author and speaker Jacob Morgan, there are three components that make up employee experience: culture, technological environment, and physical environment.

  • The cultural: how employees feel when they’re inside an organization, which is impacted by “…the organizational structure, leadership style, compensation, and benefits, etc.”
  • The physical: pertains to the workspace and “…anything that can be seen, heard, touched, and tasted like desks, chairs, art, and meals.”
  • The technological: the overall experience of “…the tools an employee needs to do their jobs, including the user interface, mobile devices, and desktop computers.”

Employee experience, even once it’s been improved upon, is not fixed. The employee experience, and the strategy behind it, must leave room for adaptation to organizational factors both within and without your control.

It’s best to approach employee experience with a growth mindset. Outline journey maps and plans, but constantly be questioning and tweaking them to find out what works best for your employees and organization. 

Why Does Employee Experience Matter?

A talent war rages in many sectors making it harder for employers to find and retain skilled staff.

In this competitive environment, an unrivaled employee experience can give you the edge you need to attract the best talent and—more importantly—keep them engaged with and loyal to your company.

If the experience of employees is known to be second-rate, that organization is quickly scratched off the list. The best in the talent pool can afford to be choosy, so make sure that your company stands out for the right reasons.

Not only do your employees inform your company culture and your organizational values, but companies that are known to have a great employee experience also tend to deliver stellar customer experiences. 

When employees feel like they are valued and their contributions are essential to an organization’s success, it will have an impact on overall productivity.

Turn emails into engaging conversations

How Employee Experience Contributes to Customer Experience

As reported by Harvard Business Review, “companies that excel at customer experience have one-and-and-half times as many engaged employees as customer experience laggards do.” More engaged employees can also mean more revenue. .

If you’re already treating your employees like you do your customers, you’re probably already performing well in regards to customer experience. All your HR and Internal Communications teams have to do now is to borrow some strategies from Customer Success and Marketing and apply them inwardly. 

You’ll need to be meticulous with your metrics, use a multi-touch approach, and segment employees into specific audience groups. Here’s how: 

Measure employee engagement

Tracking and analyzing your internal communications at a granular level will allow you to see what resonates best with your employees. You can then create content they love consuming—content that will engage them and enhance the employee experience.

An eNPS survey works well for taking a more targeted approach to understanding the employee experience. They focus on whether or not employees would recommend the organization to others, and are usually conducted on a quarterly basis. This is a way to consistently monitor the experience of employees over time. 

Image of employee net promoter score (eNPS) scale used for measuring employee engagement.

If you need to gather specific feedback but are unsure what questions to ask, consider using ContactMonkey’s OpenAI ChatGPT integration to generate novel questions for your surveys. Simply describe what you’d like to learn in a prompt, select the generated questions that fit your purview, and edit the output according to your audience.

Start segmenting employees

When dealing with external customers, a common practice is to segment them into different business verticals; you can do the same with your employees by segmenting them by department, location, or even engagement rates.

Segmentation will allow you to produce content that’s 100% relevant to them, leading to higher engagement rates.

With ContactMonkey, you can easily send emails to your segmented internal email lists and gather in-depth information on them:

Screenshot of segmented email stats within ContactMonkey's campaign overview dashboard.

Using an employee feedback tool can be a great way to assess the needs of employees and the organization as a whole. By going directly to the source for information, you’ll have the tools you need to improve the employee experience going forward.

How to Audit Your Current Employee Experience Strategy

In order to create a stellar employee experience strategy as an internal communicator, you’ll need to collect information through surveys, interviews, casual and formal conversations, social gatherings, formal and informal feedback sessions, and 1:1 meetings.

Look for common threads on a case-by-case basis to identify potential issues with the employee experience at your organization. The goal is to make the quality of life improvements that address the feedback you’ve received.

Be as transparent as possible about what you intend to do with the information they provide. Keep your employees informed throughout the process: from the initial data collection to the announcement of findings to the actual implementation of new policies and procedures.

Here are three other employee experience tips to keep in mind: 

  • Explain why employee journey mapping is necessary and how it will help the organization improve the employee experience
  • Reward and celebrate employees for sharing their employee experience and perceptions of the organization
  • Encourage complete honesty without repercussions

Be prepared to receive negative feedback that you may not like or agree with. Improving employee experience is all about strengthening the bonds that hold your organization together. 

Enhancing the Employee Experience with Flexible Work

In 2022, remote work is one of the biggest employee engagement trends. Technology has made it easier than ever for organizations that rely on knowledge workers to reduce time in the office. 

Highly engaged workplaces claim about 41% lower absenteeism, 40% fewer quality defects in products, and 21% higher profitability. Employee engagement numbers increase when time spent working is divided between home and office space with fellow employees. 

If you’re trying to get a handle on how engaged your employees are, or how they view their present employee experience, go directly to the source. Ask them for candid feedback through a quick pulse survey, or if you’re a larger organization, dive deeper with an Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) survey. 

Three steps you can take to create engaging internal communications for remote workers are: 

  1. Feature remote workers in your employee communications 
  2. Introduce team collaboration tools (like Trello and Slack) 
  3. Offer training and development opportunities

Do everything you can to ensure employees are informed and feel like a part of the company. And when your employees are ready to come back into the office, you can use the feedback you’ve gathered via surveys to craft effective back to work communications.

How to Boost Employee Experience with Email

When executed well, internal emails can be one of the best tools for creating a stellar employee experience. To succeed with this, use a tool that makes it fast and easy to create amazing employee emails—like ContactMonkey.

Follow these seven steps for boosting employee experiences with newsletters: 

  1. Start with an eye-catching subject line with personalized text.  
  2. Make the employee email or newsletter content relatable.  
  3. Ensure that the content you present is aesthetically pleasing
  4. Link to relevant, shareable content that your employees will care about. 
  5. Encourage employee feedback and two-way internal communications.  
  6. Collect and share the data to inform your employee newsletter ideas
  7. Have fun crafting what you’re going to send out to the team. 

When you’re crafting your employee communications, think about what you’d be looking for in your employee experience.

If you wouldn’t read something lengthy, include snippets about larger pieces of information. The more relevant you can make the employee newsletter to—well—your fellow employees, the better! 

You can also target relevant employees and reduce the amount of unnecessary emails your employees receive by using custom email lists. By using ContactMonkey’s List Management feature, you can quickly create custom email lists—without IT—to improve email engagement.

Email lists created with ContactMonkey integrate with your Human Resource Information System (HRIS) like Workday and ADP, as well as Azure Active Directory, so they’ll automatically update as employees join and leave your organization.

How to Improve Employee Experience By Asking For Feedback

Adding emoji reactions, pulse surveys, and comment options in your company newsletter can have a positive impact on employee experience. By showing your employees that you care about their thoughts and feelings is a great way to make them feel involved in the day-to-day.  

Emoji reactions

Give your employees the ability to love, like, and laugh at any content you send them via email. With emoji reactions in ContactMonkey, internal communicators have the power to gather meaningful, quantitative data in a seamless way. 

Turn emails into engaging conversations

Gauge employee satisfaction with embedded pulse surveys in your emails.

Explore engagement features

Pulse surveys

With employee pulse surveys you’ll receive real-time data on your internal email communications in seconds. Asking employees for feedback without being formal or disengaging will add to the employee experience because it won’t feel like an interruption. 

Once you receive responses from employees, you’ll be able to view them on your ContactMonkey dashboard. With the data collected, you’ll be able to start prioritizing and implementing the changes, like changes to company culture, employees are seeking. 

Screenshot of survey options within ContactMonkey's email template builder.

Employee comments

Gather employee comments directly from communications by simply enabling the “Comments” feature in your email template builder. If you choose to do so, inform employees that this option is available to them and that their comments are anonymous. 

Screenshot of anonymous comment box created with ContactMonkey's email template builder.

Questions you ask will be fully responsive, and you can apply a scale to them in either two or five-point increments. If employees want to leave a written response, they have the option to do so alongside their survey response

See how your employee newsletters can drive more engagement

Send magnetic employee emails on Outlook and Gmail with ContactMonkey.

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Boosting Employee Experience

Are you ready to incorporate engaging internal emails into your employee experience? With ContactMonkey you can easily create, send, and track internal communications to gauge how your employees are feeling.

Keeping tabs on your employees’ engagement is a crucial part of a data-based approach to internal communications. The more you know about your workforce, the better you can meet their unique expectations and needs. An internal communication software helps centralize this task so that you can minimize your time collecting data and maximize your time acting on it.

Want to understand how your employees feel about your business? Book a free ContactMonkey demo to see how you can improve employee engagement using your employee emails.

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