A Step-by-Step Guide to Building an Employee Experience Roadmap
Attracting, engaging, and retaining talent can be difficult in such a competitive job market. There are always organizations out there offering bigger and better benefits, a better work-life balance, and the most incredible workplace culture.
So, how can your organization compete? How can you create a workplace that employees not only choose to remain at but actively engage with?
In this article, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide on how to build an employee experience roadmap to lead your organization to success.
The benefits of creating an employee experience roadmap
Many journeys start with a roadmap, and this includes your employees’ progression through your organization.
Every employee’s journey begins at recruitment and ends at separation, going through multiple steps along the way. This journey is known as the employee experience, and it’s a vital part of attracting, retaining, and engaging staff.
If your employees have a bad experience at your company, you’re more likely to lose them to greener pastures.
But organizations don’t always understand or prioritize the employee experience, and it can be a tricky subject to navigate.
Like trying to understand the difference between a landline and a VoIP service (here’s a handy guide to landline vs VoIP explained by Vonage), modern solutions to age-old problems often require a roadmap. Without one, you risk getting lost, stuck, or even moving backward.
To begin, it’s important to understand why the employee experience is so important.
Better engagement
Bored, unhappy, distracted, unfulfilled–you probably know the feeling. Becoming disengaged at work creates a huge gap between your skills and your output. You know you can do more, but why bother, right?
This is the reality many employees face. A study by Gallup found that while employee engagement is at a high since recording first began in 2009, only 23% of employees considered themselves “engaged” at work. That’s less than one in four.
The impact of disengaged employees on the global economy is a whopping $8.8 trillion, so they could be costing your company a lot of money.
Prioritizing the employee experience can help you re-engage your staff and set recruits on a path to engaging with your organization from the get-go.
Lower staff turnover
Over the years, research institutions have reported a wide variety of figures when it comes to the organizational costs of employee turnover. While there are dozens of stats to choose from, estimates range from 33% to 200% of an employee’s salary.
That doesn’t even factor in unforeseen costs, such as wasted time, lowered productivity during recruitment and training, workplace morale, and the wealth of knowledge your employees take with them to their next position.
Employees cite numerous reasons for leaving their jobs, and to highlight the importance of the employee experience, it’s not always about pay.
Research by Gallup showed that “engagement and culture” and “wellbeing and work-life balance” accounted for 66% of employee turnover–pay and benefits only accounted for 20%.
Furthermore, Gallup surveyed what attracted employees to new opportunities.
While a significant pay and benefits bonus accounted for 59% of results, work-life balance and personal well-being was still the main reason at 60%. Things like bad managers, job security, DEI, and career development also ranked highly.
While these statistics vary across positions and industries, this is a powerful indication that overall workplace satisfaction and employee experience affect turnover.
A step-by-step guide to building an employee experience roadmap
So, how can you build your roadmap to better the employee experience?
1. Assess your current employee experience situation
To create a map, you need a starting point.
Here are some ways you can assess where you are:
Employee surveys. Keep them secure and anonymous to encourage honesty. The truth can be intimidating, but you can’t possibly get a realistic overview if your employees are paying lip service.
Employee retention rates. Compare your current employee turnover against industry benchmarks.
Exit interviews. Employees on their way out can tell you a lot, such as their reasons for leaving and the general emotions around their exit.
Employee sentiment analysis. Modern HR technology contains AI-driven tools, such as natural language processing and opinion mining, to give employers a more organic view of employee sentiment.
Once you’ve gathered this data, you can determine your starting point. You’ll know the current state of your employee experience and the areas you need to improve on.
2. Define your employee experience goals
Where do you want to end up?
Figuring this out requires analyzing your starting point data and defining what it means for your overall organizational success. In short, how are your weaknesses affecting your business?
For example, you might have noticed your customers becoming increasingly unhappy with customer service, impacting profits and brand sentiment. During your discovery phase, you may hear customer service employees stressing about a lack of staffing and support in their department.
Putting two and two together, you can deduce that your customer service department needs extra support. You can implement changes such as an inbound calling solution to take the load off your staff. This, in turn, improves the overall success of your organization.
You can already see your roadmap unfolding.
Having clear and defined goals helps to get all stakeholders on board, as everyone understands their roles, responsibilities, and objectives.
3. Choose KPIs to measure your success
Once you understand your goals, you need to choose metrics to measure them.
Returning to the above example, one of your KPIs might be customer service ratings and public perception of your brand. Other metrics could include:
Recruitment numbers
Employee retention rates
Your employee net promoter score
Your profits
Output
Workplace reviews on sites like Glassdoor
Behavioral metrics, such as mistakes and general employee behavior
Social media engagement
Wages and benefits compared to industry benchmarks
Every organization will have its own metrics. Measuring these is a tangible way to track progress and improve on ideas.
4. Make a plan
Plotting your unique employee experience roadmap requires understanding your capabilities and implementing realistic solutions.
It’s important to consider a few things as part of this.
Moving everyone in the right direction
Any big organizational changes will require your entire workforce to be on board, from your C-suite to entry-level employees. Your roadmap might require training, meetings, discussions, and decision-making.
Only you know how well your existing workplace environment will accommodate such changes, so it’s important to factor your organization’s culture into your plan.
Focusing on employees
At the heart of your employee experience is, undoubtedly, your employees.
We talked about the reasons for employee turnover and disengagement earlier–this should be your focus. Are staff demanding more flexible working hours? Are they feeling overworked, burnt out, and unsupported? Is your organization providing growth opportunities and competitive pay?
Keeping employee needs at the heart of your employee experience roadmap will help you stay on track.
The technology required
Can you achieve your goals with the technology you already have, or will you need to invest in an upgraded tech stack? For example, if you wish to implement working from home, you’ll need remote working tools, like remote desktop software and internet phone services.
Remember that technology will both enhance your employee experience and help you gain important insights into further improvements you can make.
Prioritize
Your roadmap will contain multiple stops, so it’s important to prioritize which changes are the most vital to improving your organization and the employee experience.
For example, if the majority of your staff reports feeling undervalued, then you should focus on reward and recognition. That means you might focus on finding the right employee recognition software as your first step, rather than making changes to the onboarding process or adjusting your workplace.
Look for changes that will result in the most visible and tangible benefits. This not only improves the employee experience more efficiently, but it also proves to stakeholders that your roadmap is working.
Realistic progress
Aim for achievable progress, not pipe dreams. Lofty goals can be a wonderful standard to set, but constantly failing to reach them can drain your stamina.
Don’t feel pressured to rush or make hasty decisions–remember that this roadmap will keep you on track for years to come. Bad planning leaves you open to long-term problems.
5. Get to work
Based on your starting point, your goals, and your plan, your roadmap should be ready to implement upon completion. Don’t make it a plan for the future—your employees want to see changes now.
6. Measure, measure, measure
Gathering and analyzing metrics during the implementation period is essential to measure the success of your objectives, figure out what is and isn’t working, and improve your plan.
7. Evaluate and improve
Your employee experience roadmap isn’t a one-and-done solution either. It’s an evolving process that will carry your organization toward future success. The data you’ve gathered and analyzed is valuable and will tell you a lot about the success of your roadmap.
Muck like company audits and health and safety inspections, employee experience assessments should become a routine part of running your organization.
Conduct regular evaluations of your KPIs and metrics, analyze your successes and failures, and hold meetings with stakeholders to discuss your findings. Here, you can re-evaluate any goals and implement new and improved ways to reach them.
Building an employee experience roadmap
Employee experience is a vital yet often overlooked part of an organization’s success. So many businesses focus on improving their bottom line but never consider how the employee journey factors into this.
Improving your employee experience can increase retention rates, productivity, workplace morale, and company loyalty. These things have a direct effect on profits, growth, and how people see and engage with your brand.
To achieve this, you’ll need a roadmap. Utilize our step-by-step guide to building an employee experience plan to guide your journey from start to finish and, ultimately, realize the organizational success you crave.
