10 Things That You Can Do To Improve The Employee Experience

TINYpulse recently published their 2019 Employee Engagement Report titled The End of Employee Loyalty.

With reputedly one of the largest databases in the world for employee feedback, they are well positioned to provide real insights into employee engagement trends.

In fact, from January to December of 2018 they were able to collect responses from over 25,000 employees, working in more than 1,000 different companies across 20 industries spread across Northern America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

One of the headline findings from the report was that 43% of employees said that they would be likely to leave their current companies if they were offered a 10% pay rise elsewhere. That number was up from 25% in their 2017 survey. Now, the report says that weak company cultures are to blame. That may very well be true. But, healthy job markets can have an impact too.

What is true, however, is that companies cannot become complacent in their efforts to continually improve their cultures, talent development and retention efforts if they want to maintain a high level of employee loyalty.

But, while the report was full of a number of other interesting findings, it was their findings related to the question “What drives you crazy at work and decreases your productivity?” that really stood out for me.

Through that question they were able to identify the top 10 biggest pain points for employees, i.e. those that hinder employee engagement and have a negative impact on the employee experience, the list feels like a to-do list for companies if they want to improve their employee experience.

Here is that list of the top 10 employee pain points:

1. Technical issues with software, and other tools
2. Interruptions and disruptions from Slack, emails and noisy office environments
3. Poor communication from management / lack of training and information
4. Disorganized and time-wasting systems and processes
5. Misguided decisions from management / bad leadership
6. Lack of flexibility / no opportunities to work from home
7. Overworked / under resourced team
8. Office politics / favoritism
9. Difficult customers
10. Too many meetings

Now, while you might not be able to do anything about difficult customers, other than providing some additional training to help your employees deal with these sorts of situations, many of the other items seem relatively easy to fix. That is with a bit of time, discipline and commitment.

And, the rewards of doing so are bountiful.

Look at what EE, in their UK mobile business, achieved when they identified what their customers and their frontline staff said was broken and then set about fixing those problems. Over a two year period, they fixed 81% of the identified issues and, in doing so, they reduced their customers propensity to call by 88% and, at the same time, increased both their NPS and eNPS scores by 21 and 57 points respectively.

The problem is that, like in customer experience, the little things that annoy, irritate or slightly hinder employees doing their work are often overlooked.

They shouldn’t be as they tend to be the things that are remembered and their impact often adds up over time impacting loyalty, performance and the experience that they deliver to customers.