Organizations spend an average of $2,500 per worker on employee experience each year.
Yet employee engagement rates are dropping with only 34% of full- and part-time employees feeling engaged at work. 16% even say they’re actively disengaged.
Despite investments in employee experience (EX), engaging and retaining talent is getting harder. The great resignation, shift to remote, and the current global economic downturn are fueling the problem further.
So what’s broken about our current approach to employee experience? Why isn’t it turning in results that improve the company’s bottom line?
To find out, we sat down with experts from Vimeo, Doist, and Semrush to understand what employee experience is and how businesses are looking to measure it. Here’s what we learned.
What is employee experience
The term employee experience refers to workers’ perception of an organization, which is particularly important during key stages of employment (think: recruitment, onboarding, retention, and similar) and in the day-to-day of their work.
Put another way, all touchpoints — from employees’ physical and virtual workplace to the people they interact with, the tools they use and the systems and policies you’ve in place — contribute to their experience with you. The key thing to remember here: employee experience is about your employees. Doist’s People Operations Generalist, Andrew Gobran, puts this well:
“When you remove all the bells and whistles, EX is about intentionally shaping the moments that matter along the employee journey based on the needs shared by the team. Some of those changes may cost nothing, but have a major impact, while others may require financial investment. What matters most is that employees feel heard and that they understand why or why not a change is made.”
How to think about employee experience during a downturn
With global financial instability, it may be tempting to evaluate investments to employee experience. However, reducing budgets in the short term may add to the costs in the future given that a good employee experience can positively impact areas like:
Employee retention
Investing in a great employee experience can help you retain your best talent. In turn, this saves businesses thousands of dollars in recruiting and onboarding new staff. In fact, it costs organizations an average $4,700 per hire with some experts estimating the total cost to hire new employees being 3-4 times the vacant position’s salary.
Employee productivity
Employees working in an environment where they feel safe and supported tend to be more productive. Gallup reports a strong connection between engaged employees and increased productivity.
Customer experience and revenue growth
Happy and engaged employees can have a positive impact on customers and your bottom line. In fact, 85% of organizations say improved EX and subsequently employee engagement contribute to a better customer experience, higher customer satisfaction, and increase in revenue.
If you’re ready to invest in employee experience without breaking the bank, here’s what the experts recommend focusing on.
7 tips to improve EX at your organization
1. Start small and iterate
Building an employee experience program can start with small improvements and iterations to things like your employee onboarding program, internal events, employee resource groups, career growth processes, and learning or mentorship opportunities.
“Even if you have the financial means to invest in expensive EX enhancements, there’s value in starting small in order to move quickly and then build on that experience over time,” Andrew advises.
“This allows you to provide value quickly, while using feedback to continue shaping the employee experience.”
To start, gather quantitative and qualitative data to access the start of the key moments in employees’ current journey with your organization. “The state of those moments can have a significant impact, both positive and negative, on the employee experience,” notes Andrew.
2. Adopt top-down communication
Almost half of UK employees and over a third of US employees believe leaders are driven by their own gains.
The solution? Ditch broadcasting. Instead, try using live video to regularly communicate what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how it’ll benefit employees and the company at large. This includes sharing your company goals, new initiatives you’re taking, and companies you’re partnering with in the channels your employees are most likely to find your message. You can also minimize email communications by sending shorter video recordings that keep you team up to date.
Bonus points for involving employees in decisions directly impacting them. For instance, you can source employee ideas and opinions when creating work-life balance initiatives.
Rite Aid, for example, uses Vimeo to run live town halls, employee trainings, fireside chats, and CEO announcements. In fact, live town halls have opened doors to more attendees with their in-person attendees limited to 500 and live video bringing in nearly 3,000 attendees.
3. Encourage two-way dialogue between teams and their managers
Continuous two-way communication is crucial for building trust between employees and improving team alignment, collaboration, and productivity. Not to mention, it saves from one-directional thinking, team silos, and misunderstandings.
Promoting two-way dialogue can be challenging though — especially in a remote setting. Thankfully, short, screen-recorded videos help.
The teams at Vimeo, for example, record videos to brief out projects, onboard new hires, and document processes. All videos live in an organized library for easy accessibility which gives us admin control over who has access to which videos.
Another way to promote two-way conversations is to train employees on clearly communicating their feedback. The team at Semrush uses this approach to foster constructive communication. “We host training sessions on feedback frameworks to encourage open and constructive communication among team members and managers,” Daniia Gabbasova, HR Business Partner at Semrush, said.
HR leaders can consider providing effective communication workshops and use video to encourage two-way communication among team members, employees and their managers, and across teams.
4. Support employees in doing more meaningful work
Research conducted by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, authors of The Progress Principle, shows facilitating progress is a cost-effective way to motivate employees and improve their performance.
The authors write:
“You don’t need to parse people’s psyches or tinker with their incentives, because helping them succeed at making a difference virtually guarantees good inner work life and strong performance. It’s more cost-effective than relying on massive incentives too.”
So what are some effective ways to facilitate progress? Enable focused work and provide resources that assist employees in their work.
In fact, tech plays a crucial role in improving employee experience in a remote/hybrid work environment. Employees satisfied with the tech their company provides are 158% more engaged at work. 85% are also likely to stay in their jobs for longer than three years according to the same survey.
To find out if your employees have the tools and technology they need to be productive, conduct a pulse survey to source feedback on the tools employees are using. Use the data to identify more tools you can offer (or optimize current ones) to improve their productivity.
5. Focus on employee wellness
Gallup reports employees who are engaged but aren’t thriving are 61% more likely to experience burnout and 48% more likely to report daily stress than employees who are both engaged and thrive at work and in their personal lives.
In fact, with burnout and stress on the rise, employee wellness is becoming important now more than ever.
The solution? Co-create wellness initiatives with employees.
Hootsuite, for instance, introduced a company-wide Wellness Week in 2021 for employees to unplugs from work together. On the other hand, Evernote offers employees $1,000 vacation stipend as part of their Flexible Time Off program among other wellness initiatives.
Similarly, the Semrush team encourages employee wellness with well-being workshops. “We organize well-being workshops that inspire and empower employees to take control of their health. During these sessions, each team can create its own ‘Golden Rules’ to follow, defining work relationships, communication style, work-life balance, and working conditions,” Daniia Gabbasova said.
The results from the well-being workshops have been phenomenal. “We got an opportunity for employees to engage in non-work related, open conversations, forging strong connections and unity among the teams,” Daniia Gabbasova said.
6. Introduce video-powered just-in-time learning
Just-in-time learning empowers employees to learn whatever they want to learn, whenever they want to.
So instead of blocking employees’ time to attend masterclasses and training sessions on topics organizations think are important to their employees for doing their jobs better, a just-in-time training program promotes role-specific micro-learning at employees’ own time.
Not only does this make just-in-time learning suitable for asynchronous learning, but it also saves your organization’s time while helping employees better retain and apply what they learn.
Elizabeth Hodos, Senior Sales Enablement professional, recommends pairing short-form video with live video for launching your just-in-time learning program.
That is: share short lessons using bite-size videos (arranged in an accessible and easy-to-navigate video library) and gather employees to practice what they learned together in a live session.
Much like Vimeo, Starbucks also uses video to train its 349,000 employees around the globe. The result? A 90% completion rate — indicating video is an engaging learning tool.
As you build out a training program, experiment with bite sized videos to create a scalable, just-in-time training program that targets specific departments, teams, and roles within your organization.
7. Co-create employee experience initiatives with employees.
Instead of assuming, source employee feedback through surveys and one-on-one employee conversations.
In fact, gathering feedback helped the Doist team identify their onboarding needed to be more transparent to make new hires feel comfortable and assured their jobs were secure.
Andrew explains, “For a long time, we held the stance that ‘no news is good news’ and feedback during [the onboarding] period was provided on an ad hoc basis if there was a critical concern. This, of course, left new hires unsure of how they were doing and whether they would still have a job at the end of their trial period.
“By formalizing a structure and routine for new hires to exchange feedback with their mentor and manager, we were able to mitigate those concerns so bidirectional feedback could flow more effectively and consistently.”
How organizations are thinking about tracking employee experience ROI
Measuring the ROI of your employee experience starts with measuring the performance of your EX initiatives.
To help, this section details four proven ways to source employee feedback at each step of planning and reviewing your EX program. From there, measure ROI by tracking metrics you expect to improve with a better employee experience.
1. Leverage qualitative feedback
When the Doist team polished their employee onboarding experience, they used qualitative feedback to determine their initiative’s success.
Andrew shares, “[…] qualitative feedback shared by our new hires as they went through their onboarding period allowed us to measure whether or not the structuring of the onboarding experience was successful or not.
“Fortunately, the feedback indicated that employees felt supported throughout their onboarding, had more clarity on what was going well, and where they felt they had room for improvement, so they no longer felt anxious about how their onboarding was going to end.”
There are tons of employee surveys you can leverage yourself to learn workers’ experience at key moments with your organization. Here’s a rundown of the most useful ones:
- Employee sentiment pulse survey
- Employee engagement survey
- Onboarding and exit surveys
- Employee wellness survey
- Candidate feedback survey
2. Gather qualitative data
Both one-on-one employee interviews and focus groups are helpful for gathering qualitative EX data.
Host employee interviews to gather perspectives for improvement
Semi-structured conversations with employees are particularly effective for identifying gaps in your employee experience and sourcing ideas for improvement.
These also help you dive deeper into understanding leadership and employees’ interpretations of prevailing EX measures.
Use focus groups to gather feedback on EX initiatives you make
Focus groups provide rich data for learning how employees feel about specific EX initiatives you’ve launched.
For these to be a success though, select a group of 6-12 participants that represent the employee population you want to source feedback from.
It also helps to not have the direct manager in these conversations so employees are comfortable in sharing their thoughts.
3. Review operational data
Analyze privacy-protected operational data to make informed decisions for improving employee experience.
Reviewing the time employees spend in meetings, for example, is useful for keeping burnout in check.
For example, HBR reported the HR team at Microsoft noticed a decrease in work-life balance and strived to make improvements. At the beginning of 2020, the HR team saw an increase in the use of their collaboration tool, Teams.
The natural hypothesis they made? People were collaborating more. After reviewing employees’ collaboration activity data, the HR team learned that the increased use of Teams correlated with reduced work-life balance satisfaction.
Likewise, teams can integrate more video-first workflows like recording meetings, sending asynchronous status updates or reports, and centralizing institutional knowledge in a single, searchable hub with Vimeo Central. This can help reduce collaboration fatigue, encouraging deep work, and reduce the number of meetings — overall promoting more async work.
4. Track employee performance metrics
Another important way to use internal data to measure employee experience and its ROI is to track performance metrics including:
- Employee turnover: Reduced turnover as compared to your industry standard signals your EX initiatives are encouraging employees to stick around.
- Employee referrals: An improvement in this metric indicates workers appreciate their experience with your organization enough to refer others for open positions.
- Employee new promoter score (eNPS): Improvement in your employees’ satisfaction levels narrates your EX program’s effectiveness. In turn, as employee satisfaction improves, you’ll notice an improvement in associated metrics like employee productivity, retention rate, and customer satisfaction.
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT). Engaged employees are better committed to improving your customers’ experience. So don’t be surprised if you notice an uptick in the CSAT score post taking steps to improve their EX.
Boost employee experiences with video
Remember, people are naturally attracted to safe and supportive workplaces. So instead of throwing in more material incentives to improve EX, focus on:
- Creating a culture of active learning and meaningful work
- Supporting employees in their personal and professional growth
- Involving workers by taking a top-down approach and sourcing their ideas and feedback
If you’re ready to start encouraging more productive work, provide more transparency, and support async communication and collaboration, video may be the right tool for you.
Originally written by Sam Franzel on June 24, 2021 and updated by Masooma Memon on July 11, 2023.
