What is employee experience? Why should companies be focusing on it?
Employee experience is a worker’s perceptions about their journey through all the touch points in their work environment and their professional life. It is directly linked to customer experience, originating from the Sales field.
Its approach consists of paying attention to all the interactions and experiences lived by an employee during his or her professional career, from the moment they join the company up until the time they leave it. Employee experience impacts the company’s employer brand when it comes to employees and potential candidates.
While the concept of employee experience is still relatively new, it is already being considered crucial to ensure employees’ performance, productivity, and well-being at work, as well as loyalty to the company in critical moments.
In order to improve employee experience, you need to set up programs and initiatives that take into consideration the needs and concerns of employees.
By providing a pleasant and caring work environment where interactions are smooth and processes and work tools are efficient, you play an important role in optimizing company performance.
To better foster this experience, you are required to implement “symmetry of attention”, meaning the quality of the relationship between a company and its customers is symmetrical to the quality of the relationship between the same company and its employees.
By providing a superior employee experience, you play an active role in building your team’s trust and commitment, while also gaining further knowledge of your employees to better satisfy them.
Beekast activities to improve employee experience.
To help you improve employee experience, Beekast offers 4 activities to make your employees’ daily work life more productive and enjoyable:
- Weather report: This allows participants share to the mood they perceive in the team at the start of the meeting so that you can best adapt the following activities.
7 weather conditions ranging from blue skies to thunderstorms are at their disposal. For example, if the barometer is trending towards dark or rainy weather, discuss with your team the best way to continue the meeting.
This activity gives you an idea of how your group feels about a meeting or a decision.
- Cross-Sketches: A very useful template for sensitive topics and one of the best ways of untying tongues in record time on topics that participants are hesitant to speak about.
Each participant uses a sketch to represent their take on the workshop’s topic. The sketches are then presented in succession to the other participants, who are asked to interpret them. These interpretations, under the guise of another participant’s drawing, often reveal the root of the problem.
At the end of this workshop, the ideas that best explain the analyzed problem will be identified, and the implementation of an action plan will be essential to launch a new dynamic.
Thus, you will be able to collect your colleagues’ opinions on any subject or difficulty they may encounter in order to better understand their needs and expectations.
- Brainstorming: the ideal method to collect the maximum number of ideas on a given topic. Your employees will have the opportunity to unleash their creativity and come up with ideas for progress or problem-solving.
Here, participants can express their ideas in a direct way. Afterward, you will get a visual report which will allow you to prioritize, make collective decisions, and solve problems.
By giving weight to your group’s ideas, participants feel more comfortable expressing themselves, and as a result, are more productive.
- Speedboat: This is a brainstorming activity based on the boat analogy, often used by agile teams for continuous improvement.
During this activity, the group, who form the crew of a boat sailing towards its goal(s), express themselves around strengths that push them forward and weaknesses that slow them down. This activity encourages discussion and expression to get an overview of a topic.
This activity can be used to solve problems and identify drivers while allowing even the most introverted employees to express their opinions for the benefit of collaborative work.
To go even further, discover our ready-to-use “One on one” session template that you can import into your session in just one click. This template helps you initiate discussion, collect feedback, and share information with your employee to establish a culture of trust between a manager and their team.
With these activities provided by Beekast, improve employee experience in a remarkable way, thanks to our inspirational models that ensure smooth communication with your teams!