Better employee experiences build better organizations 

Even if you know nothing about HR, you know something about employee experience. It doesn’t matter if you’re a salaried employee or a temp, a senior executive or a new grad, or a software engineer or a barista, anyone who’s ever had a job knows how it made them feel, how engaged they were, and how committed they were to showing up the next day.

What’s notable is that while some organizations seem to be keenly aware of this employee experience, others appear to be completely oblivious. And whereas employers may have gotten away with turning a blind eye in the past, we’re now in a radically different talent landscape that demands a much more concerted effort for leadership to deliver a positive employee experience that attracts and retains workers.

But just like with conversations around company culture, identifying what employee experience “means” can be exceedingly difficult. To start, employee experience can encompass so many things (everything from benefits programs to communication styles), but it’s also different from person-to-person, meaning employers need to consider how employee needs and expectations vary amongst an increasingly diverse workforce.

To help better understand what’s happening at the cutting edge of employee experience and provide insight into what may be next, we invited some of the country’s leading minds and experts to discuss employee experience in a recent #MercerChats tweet chat. Below are some of the highlights from our conversation.

It’s a lesson we all learn growing up: you get out of something what you put in. This also applies to employers, who are realizing that the more they invest in their people (and their experience as an employee), the more value those employees bring. Lori Almeida shared that employees with a positive experience are 16 times more engaged than those with a negative one and 8 times more likely to stay at their company. If leaders need a reason to invest in employee experience, look no further.

The tricky part can be figuring out where to start. Stela Lupushor shared that a great experience comes from being proactive in designing HR programs, but in simple terms, organizations can prioritize employee experience by valuing what their people value. It means taking the time to ask employees what matters to them and what makes their lives more difficult, as Carrie Maslen pointed out, and solving for these issues where they can. This helps bring talent closer to your organization’s mission, purpose, and values, per Kathleen Kruse, and puts your organization on track for its own success.

Having a well-designed employee experience isn’t just a luxury for employees. It’s instrumental in transforming organizations for a more agile, digital and hybrid future of work. Consider reskilling programs: they’re not there to make employees feel that their organizations care about their career mobility; they allow organizations to maintain their workforce in an ever-changing skills market. Ravin Jesuthasan shared this example to point out that a better employee experience can create better organizations, but it applies elsewhere as well.

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, agility hates complexity. The barriers to decision-making and communication that bog down organizations are the same ones that wear on the nerves and patience of employees, so by eliminating them, as both Mark Babbitt and Will Ferguson hit on, organizations can improve for their people and for themselves.

Ultimately, the key is that organizations can’t let their employee experience become wallpaper – something that constantly surrounds them but that they never pay attention to. When organizations build an employee experience that creates opportunities for their people to grow and advance, as Tamara McCleary suggested, they can improve not only their people’s future, but their own.