The term employee experience rose to popularity in 2017 yet organizations are still figuring their way out when it comes to building a differentiated employee experience. As per Deloitte's 2019 Global Human Capital Trends Report, almost 84% of executives rated employee experience very important, however, only 43% thought organizations were ready to address the employee experience challenge. 

Compounding this further is the fact, that in a digital world wherein employees can manage much of their lives on a couple of smartphone apps, employees expect a productive, meaningful, engaging, enjoyable work experience to be as accessible. So right from the first stage of attracting an employee to hiring and onboarding, then from engaging him to managing his performance to developing him to rewarding him, and finally even when he is leaving an organization, an employee is looking forward to a smooth, well thought of, integrated, engaging, productive and positive experience. This expectation majorly determines whether he will choose to work with or not work with your organization.

The Employee Experience Advantage

And this choice determines the future of your organization. As per research by Jacob Morgan, author of The Employee Experience Advantage, organizations that invested most heavily in employee experience were included 11.5 times as often in Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work, listed 4.4 times as often in LinkedIn’s list of North America’s Most In-Demand Employers, 28 times more often listed among Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, and made it 2.1 times as often on the Forbes list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies.

And it is not about merely about being attractive to talent.

MIT research shows that enterprises with a top-quartile employee experience achieve twice the innovation, double the customer satisfaction, and 25% higher profits than organizations with a bottom quartile employee experience. Again reiterating the fact, that unless organizations rethink their employee experience, it is unlikely they can amp up business performance.

More so, with the relentless pace of change of business and shifting business models, companies need to take a hard look at their employee experience approaches, frameworks, and strategies and question in earnest-is their employee experience strategy future-ready to retain future talent? Is it in a position to offer them any competitive advantage in the future? Does it build on the foundation of culture and engagement to focus on the employee experience holistically, and is not silo-ed into compartments of hiring, engagement, culture, rewards, learning and career development?

 Just as employees look at everything that happens at work as an integrated experience and demand a holistic, end-to-end—recruitment-to-retirement—experience from their employers, employers also need to radically shift their focus from mere engagement to the entire spectrum of the employee journey.

The era of EX

As the world of work undergoes disruption, embraces digital and faces a fierce war for talent and skills, creating an employee experience (EX) that differentiates employers and actually retains talent is going to be critical in all aspects. Creating an ideal employee experience to match the needs of changing workforce dynamics at work — still seems to be undervalued and has a long way to go. Creating an employee experience that is in tune with the expectations of the workforce and workplace both, needs to be a business priority for not only HR leaders today, but also the CEOs. 

Take for instance the Covid-19 crisis. It has brought to the fore the importance of taking care of the employee experience in times of crisis especially when both the business, employees, economy, and the world as a whole is facing so much disruption and challenges. Companies who are able to enable their talent to survive this will emerge more resilient post this crisis. And this can happen only if they are taking care of the employee experience during this time of crisis. 

2020 will be the year of the experience economy where employees will be significantly impacting the business bottom line with their intrinsic willingness to serve the company and its customers. In 2020, we can safely say, we are entering into an era where employee experience will be bigger than before and the year will see a shift of focus to employee experience platforms (EXP). The rule is simple: Better employee experience means better customer experience.