Sponsored by:
Produced by:
Simon Cunniffe
HR SHARED SERVICES DIRECTOR
Is new technology the key to a positive employee experience?
Employee experience is a combination of technology maturity, processes, and policies. It’s easy for businesses to get distracted by how much budget they spend on employee technology when the focus should be on ensuring that any money spent will improve the experience of the workforce you’re managing. Does the investment directly support key business metrics? If the answer is ‘no’, then it’s probably a vanity investment and worthreconsidering.
Invest in your existing tools and systems first and foremost so that they work as well as originally intended. Then, when introducing new technologies, find a manual way to achieve the desired outcome first. If this proves valuable, then the business case for the new technology becomes a no-brainer, and any guesswork is removed from the implementation process.
When introducing new technologies, find a manual way to achieve the desired outcome first. If this proves valuable, then the business case for the new technology becomes a no-brainer.
For more qualitative insight, running focus groups gives employees a safe space to share their experiences and what could be done to improve them. You can then complement this insight by running external focus groups too.
How valuable is feedback in creating a positive employee experience?
Process leads to people feeling disconnected, leading to poor performance. You can have the best policies in the world, but if it’s too complicated for employees to access them, they are meaningless. To give you a real example, we created a self-service online portal for our colleagues to access occupational health support. But actually, our employees wanted to talk to real people when they needed support, and the online portal was too clunky to be of real value. So we re-designed the portal based on this feedback and created a more positive and meaningful tool for our colleagues.
The simplest way to start finding out what matters most to your employees is just to ask. Net Promoter Score surveys after an engagement with your HR team and a company-wide pulse survey every quarter are a good place to start. For more qualitative insight, running focus groups gives employees a safe space to share their experiences and what could be done to improve them. You can then complement this insight by running external focus groups too. How is your brand achieved externally as an employer, and what are peoples’ attitudes to working with you?
What can enterprise businesses do to improve employee onboarding?
A successful onboarding programme is one of the most valuable things a business can do to create a positive employee experience. As well as being a slick process, the onboarding journey should feel personal to the employee. Making it personal doesn’t need to be complicated. Let an employee know where to park before they arrive. Pair them up with a ‘buddy’ in the business who isn’t their line manager before they start. Simple things like that go a long way. In enterprise organisations, having somebody dedicated solely to the onboarding process and checking in regularly with new team members can be hugely beneficial. We run a 90-day survey for new employees, which gives us valuable feedback, but having a dedicated point of support highlights any issues that may arise before this point.
In an increasingly remote working world where different employees have different requirements, it’s essential to offer a number of different ways for employees to access and consume the content that will help make their experience meaningful. Technology is a crucial part of this, but so too is flexibility - embracing that your colleagues will need to access different information in different ways at different times is one of the most important things you can do to create a positive employee onboarding and ongoing experience.
As well as being a slick process, the onboarding journey should feel personal to the employee.
easyJet is a British multinational low-cost airline group headquartered at London Luton Airport. It operates domestic and international scheduled services on 927 routes in more than 34 countries via its affiliate airlines.
