With the advent of Industry 4.0, employee workplace experience has become a key determinant of business success. Open source and easy availability have made technology a level playing field. The key competitive differentiator is the talent and skills of the workforce.

Superior employee experience attracts and retains talent and enables competitive advantage.

Employee experience is the total of what an employee undergoes, from recruitment until relieving. Top talent works only for companies that deliver top-notch workplace experience.

Research by Gartner reveals employees who experience a positive employee experience are 60% more likely to stay. 69% of them are more likely to be high performers. More than half of high-performers also put in more discretionary effort or go beyond their minimum duties.

A positive workplace environment also improves efficiency. A positive human-centric approach reduces work fatigue by 44% and improves performance by 28%. Superior employee experience makes employees want to come to work and reduces absenteeism. Hyper-efficient enterprises keep overheads low. 

The stakes of positive employee experience have become very high. Here are ways businesses can improve their employee experience.

1. Focus on a human-centric work design

Industry 4.0 and COVID-19 have changed the dimensions of work. Long-held assumptions about work, such as centralised offices’ 9 to 5 routine, are now obsolete. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated work-from-home. Increasing digitisation expands the geographical reach of the enterprise. Businesses can now operate from distant locations through the cloud. They send field technicians or sales executives once in a while to do things not possible to execute digitally. Success, however, depends on changes to conventional processes and workflows. 

Most employee experience initiatives still focus on making office work comfortable and efficient. For instance, many companies focus on improving ergonomics, seamless intranet, and the like.

In today’s changed realities, a good employee experience requires a human-centric design. Such a design prioritises the human over the location. 

• Institutionalise remote work and work-from-home. Insisting employees make pointless commutes every day sours the workplace experience, regardless of the perks on offer.
• Redesign workflows and policies around the employee’s physical, cognitive, and emotional needs.
• Empower HR and departmental managers to make empathic leeways. The “rules are rules” approach no longer works. Today’s employees become spoiled for choice and would soon quit than put up with impractical rules.

While the specifics may vary, flexibility is central to the new human-centric approach.

2. Focus on tech adoption

The onus to improve workplace experience falls on the HR team. But with technology becoming more pervasive, the IT team has a more significant role in improving employee experience. In the future, employee experience will depend largely on the success of digital initiatives. 

Offer employees great work apps with a simple and neat interface. Digitisation has become indispensable. Today’s employees demand tools, systems, and software that make their jobs easier. They become frustrated by delays. 

The choice of tech tools, especially daily collaboration tools, affects employee experience. Good apps enable employees to do their jobs well. Hard-to-use apps with convoluted interfaces or poor integrations degrade the workplace experience.

• Deploy the right tools for specific processes. For instance, APIs allow field service tools to link external databases and offer live information. They may refer to the service history, work order details, and instruction manuals. Ready access to such resources speeds up and improves the quality of work output.
• Streamline the systems and processes surrounding software. Avoid fragmented and overlapping systems that introduce friction.
• Have strong data management policies in place. Make sure everyone has access to the data or systems they need. 
• Consider all aspects of technology, including the learning curve. Offer training and support to the digital laggards. 
• Stay moderate with technology. Technology solves many issues and unlocks many possibilities. But technology is not perfect, and creates several new issues. Many businesses have unrealistic expectations from their tools and software. Such expectations lay the seed for employee discontent.

3. Change the management style

Traditional management structures focus on control. Again, this is a fallout of the office-centric work strategy. While managers still need control, they must find less intrusive ways. Empowerment and autonomy are the in-trend managerial aspects in today’s digital age. Micromanagement works at cross-purposes.

• Embrace autonomy. Empower the workforce. Allow the opportunity to take the initiative and apply their discretion within the rules and policies. Managers need to be a resource person rather than a controlling hand.
• Adopt servant leadership style. Servant leaders facilitate and provide all resources and facilities for knowledge workers to do their job. The workers, in turn, reciprocate by putting in their best effort.
• Allow flexible work practices. Employees become more productive and take the initiative when given the flexibility to work from home.
• Offer employees a sense of purpose. Effective leaders forge a value alignment between employees’ personal goals and business goals.
• Provide opportunities for growth and development. Many employees become frustrated and suffer from loss of effectiveness when struck in a similar role for an extended time. Invest in training and development of employees. Allow them to take time out to upgrade their skill sets. Offer healthy job rotation opportunities for employees who want it.

4. Understand employees’ wants

Understand what motivates employees and facilitates the same. As Maslow’s Needs hierarchy states, monetary compensation is only one aspect, and a low level, of a motivator. Knowledge workers seek higher forms of reward, such as recognition. 

• Have a structured mechanism to gather employee feedback. The best employee experience strategy supports two-way communication and expectations with employees.
• Make performance appraisals a two-way dynamic process. Focus on performance management rather than reactive performance appraisals.
• Celebrate employees when they hit their key performance indicators or goals. 
• Promote a culture of openness and transparency. A positive workplace experience allows employees to exchange ideas and information without repercussions.
• Make sure employees have a healthy work-life balance. Pressuring workers to work beyond their work hours delivers short-term benefits. But it will degrade the workplace experience and burn out the worker.
• Conduct exit interviews to learn about HR and people management shortcomings.

Strengthening the employee experience improves job satisfaction. The spill-over effect includes improved performance and low employee turnover. The ensuring upward spiral of profitability, positivism, competitiveness, and resilience makes the business competitive. 

Successful enterprises consider their employees as internal customers. They strike the right balance between end customer centricity and internal customer satisfaction.