It’s tough to get the employee experience right when it comes to technology, people, and processes. So what can IT, HR, and other business leaders do to set their companies up for success?
That’s a question Metrigy delved into as part of its global Employee Experience & Workforce Engagement: 2022-23 research study conducted in the second quarter with 250 companies. First, they must determine their metrics for success and then measure against them.
Companies can measure the success of their employee experience undertakings in several ways. For purposes of our study, we looked at four metrics:
- Revenue growth – Has employee experience platform adoption facilitated collaboration for new product creation, services, or revenue streams, for example?
- Cost reduction – Has the technology’s use resulted in lower capital or operating costs?
- Employee satisfaction – Do employees feel more engaged, resulting in improved performance?
- Employee retention – Are employees feeling more invested in the company and less likely to leave?
To determine our success group, we asked companies tracking metrics to tell us percentage changes across the four noted above. We then determined the mean change for each, creating our success group with those companies that scored in the top half of at least half of the metrics. Twenty-nine companies qualified as successful, performing considerably better in revenue growth, operational cost reductions, employee satisfaction, and retention than companies not within the success group, as shown in the table below.
Having determined our success group, we could then run correlations to assess which technologies and practices contributed to their success and which didn’t. Here are 10 things successful companies do or have done, based on our study participants:
- Initiated an employee experience strategy relative to changing workplace dynamics brought on by the pandemic ¬– 37.9% of the success group vs. 23.8% of the non-success group (comparatively, refining an existing strategy did not correlate with success)
- Apply employee experience technologies based on user profile/persona – 37.9% of the success group vs. 27% of the non-success group
- Use a company-wide employee experience platform that offers a variety of mix-and-match modules, such as communications, engagement, learning, performance, and well-being – 69% of the success group vs. 63.7% of the non-success group
- Use best-of-breed applications, along with an employee experience platform – 39.9% of the success group vs. 28.8% of the non-success group
- Integrate employee experience into contact center platforms – 78.9% of the success group vs. 50.6% of the non-success group
- See the value of drawing employee behavior insights from collaboration applications – 55.2% of the success group vs. 46% of the non-success group
- Keep employees in the know via desktop news portals – 70.8% of the success group vs. 42% of the non-success group
- Take the pulse of employees, through quick polls, to gauge well-being – 81.3% of the success group vs. 44.1% of the non-success group
- Measure satisfaction in a variety of ways, including Employee Satisfaction Index (ESI), quick pulse polls, and annual surveys ¬– use of ESI most correlates to success, with 58.3% of the success group vs. 33.3% of the non-success group
- Have a formal adoption plan for employee experience technology – 95.9% of the success group vs. 65.7% of the non-success group
The success correlations don’t stop here, but these should provide plenty of thought for IT, HR, and other business leaders looking for ways to boost the success of an employee experience initiative.
