The ability to work from anywhere means that the role of the physical office and the features of the 9-to-5 workday have been redefined. This reality meets the market as a war for top talent acquisition is as challenging as it has ever been. It is critical that businesses examine how their current workplace experience may affect employee performance and either impede or bolster efforts to attract new talent. Taking a wide view of the workplace experience, implementing features that improve employee satisfaction and customer experience alike, can help create a comprehensive workplace strategy.
How EX and CX Influence Workplace Experience Quality
The features that define a quality workplace extend beyond the physical work environment.The core of a strong workplace experience requires an examination of bothemployee experience and customer experience.
Customer experience (CX) refers to the sum total of how a customer perceives your brand and organization. Unlike customer service or customer relationship management, customer experience does not map neatly to a single area of your business. In both physical and virtual encounters, ensuring your customers receive a quality experience is important for building up a customer base, customer loyalty, and to increase the likelihood of them returning or recommending your business to others.
Similarly, the sum of all experiences an employee has with their employer over the duration of their relationship defines employee experience (EX). From when a candidate searches for a job, through the hiring process and navigation through the onboarding process, to promotions, career development, and their eventual departure from the organization – workplace experience (WX) includes everything from major milestones and personal relationships to technology use and the physical work environment.
Great employee experience can result in reduction in absenteeism, heightened engagement, and an overall improvement in quality that encourages loyalty and reduces departure. What has become clear is that happier employees lead to happier customers and better business outcomes.
How can digital adoption and pro-active service models influence the workplace? Read more!
4 Benefits of a Top-Tier Workplace Experience
While the creation of a top-tier workplace demands that business leaders address both CX and EX concerns, the first step is often to address how employees feel about their workplace experience. Organizations are adapting their approach to all dimensions of their workplace experience. From technology and program requirements to the physical environment of the office, and even health and wellness, addressing employee experience needs.
Here are some of the key benefits from implementing top-tier workplace experiences:
- Higher Engagement: The value employees add to a company extend beyond the services required of them to collect their paycheck. They are face of your company’s values. How an organization provides employees the best chances for development opportunities and profession growth is a key factory that serves to improve workplace wellbeing. When employees feel that a company recognizes the value of their contributions, they are more likely to put forth higher effort and will be more engaged. These feelings directly affect employee retention, performance and development.
- Increased Productivity: As employees become more invested in a company, they are likely to find more efficient ways of performing their job duties. Similarly, providing the technological support for anywhere work and trusting employees to manage their own productivity creates a sense of autonomy and responsibility.
- Reduced Absenteeism: A person who is feeling as though he is not valued at work may not feel as though going to work every day is a priority. Once employees feel as though they are part of a team that is working together to achieve goals they will want to come to work. Further Defining the moments that matter in the employee’s lifecycle, and creating meaningful benefits and rewards to commemorate those benchmarks, can play a role in defining how an employee feels about an employer’s purpose, brand and culture.
- Reduced Employee Turnover: There are many reasons for an employee leave whether for family reasons, to return to school, or due to retirement. However, engaged employees are less likely to change their employment and will make efforts to communicate their needs or frustrations when they believe their concerns will be heard.
Addressing the needs top-tier employee experiences then serves to attract top talent drives high performance through meaningful manager-employee relationships. Positive employee experience can lead employees to choose to spend their career with your organization. This potentially creates valuable brand ambassadors long after employees have left your organization.
How can the right Digital Workplace Strategy help attract top talent? Learn more here!
Designing an Workplace Experience Strategy
Effectively influencing workplace experience can mean making changes in company culture, policy, technology, and many other things. Where should an organization begin when developing a new employee experience approach? Discerning what changes will create real value for an organization is challenging. The first step is creating a comprehensive workplace design strategy that sets goals in both the short and long term to align customer and employee experience with purpose, brand and company culture.
A designed experience leads to a coherent and immersive workplace with the purpose of making people’s lives easier and more enjoyable. It examines every aspect, exchange and encounter in the working day and uses data insights to optimize and personalize these moments. Design-driven focus creates a connection between the needs of the workforce and the anatomy of the business, ensuring every decision is made with the employee experience in mind.
A blog by Lighthouse writer, Ben Eubanks documents a legal firm that was struggling to keep its 25-40 year old male employees, primarily because of the long working hours. After reviewing their system, “the company created a paternity leave policy that allowed employees to take up to a year off with a new baby, protecting their job and giving them a place to return once they were ready.” This not only helped in retaining current employees but served to attract new talent who took interest in the policy.
This is only one example of how taking a broad view of workplace experience design can improve business outcomes. Progressive organizations should take efforts to capture employee demands and create new policies and environments that match the company culture and values that you want to achieve. From health and wellbeing to technology and device support, each touchpoint should be designed to strengthen passion and loyalty, which in turn drives higher engagement.
Another solution is to create a position of a workplace experience manager. This position is somewhat of a hybrid role between an HR manager and a facilities manager. In past years, WX managers were primary responsible for discovering how to meet employee needs and the creation of a warm and inclusive physical office environment. However, as technology pushes work models outside the physical office, WX managers should have a strong understanding of workplace technology and how it impacts the employee experience. They need to be able to work with IT to choose solutions that lead to good business outcomes.
Want to learn how Stefanini’s workplace solutions can benefit your business? Click here!
Create a Workplace Experience Strategy with Stefanini
Creating a robust workplace experience remains a large scale challenge that requires the careful examination of a company’s existing employee workflows and processes to create a transformation strategy.
Stefanini is ready to bring the latest and best digital tools needed to boost your digital capabilities.
Our team of experts will examine your organization and use their knowledge to find the technology that meets your unique workplace concerns. Ready to get started?
Ready to re-design your workplace experience? Contact us today!
