HR technology has become mission-critical over the last few years. Vendors pushing everything from recruitment, performance management, and surveying have hit the market, promising to give employees and employers everything they need to be productive. There’s no doubt that these tools provide value. But to make a truly positive contribution to the employee experience, they need to be housed under an employee experience platform.
When an employee joins a new company, they are embarking upon a unique journey full of twists and turns that comes to define their employee experience. Success and satisfaction along this journey are largely dependent upon how much organizational support they receive from the company. Information must be readily available, and people must be efficiently guided towards the resources they need to do their job.
In 2019, the average HR department was using 22 different tools to manage the employee experience. That equates to one for time & attendance, another for benefits, yet another for learning, and the list goes on. Compare that to how most companies structure their customer experience: providing one central hub for all interactions and hiding the somewhat messy backend behind a sleek user interface that can accurately predict how the customer will act next.
In fact, if we compare customer experience (CX) to employee experience (EX), we see that companies have typically prioritized a positive and cohesive customer experience. After all, that’s where most of the money is coming in. However, employee experience has a financial aspect as well.
The average cost and time to hire a new employee are about $4,000 and 42 days. From there, it takes a new employee anywhere from 8 to 26 weeks to achieve full productivity. This learning curve costs a company between 1% – 2.5% of annual revenue as they get up to speed. After they’ve been thoroughly trained in company processes and culture, losing a good employee can cost a company between one-half to two times the person’s salary, as a conservative estimate. Employee experience may not be generating revenue, but it certainly has monetary value.
Investing in the employee experience can be linked to strong business results. According to a study by IBM, organizations in the top 25 percent of employee experience are nearly three times more profitable and report twice as many sales as those who score in the bottom quartile.
This demonstrates that investing in the employee experience links to better business results. Customer experience cannot exist without employee experience since they are jointly combined. Research shows that companies with a strong customer experience have employees that are 1.5 times more engaged than employees at companies with a lesser customer experience.
Now that we’ve established the link between strong CX and EX, how can we achieve that ideal employee experience with an employee experience platform?
An employee experience platform focuses on four main parts:
Streamlines your HR technology
- The more websites and log-ins that employees need to remember, the less likely they are to adopt new programs. This can also lead to log-in fatigue and security issues. By having one main area where employees can access everything they need – performance, technology help, benefits, and more – you increase the likelihood that employees will actually use these sites and enable them to take charge of their employee journey. The same way that you wouldn’t make a customer log into 5 different sites for things they need, your employees should not have to go on a wild goose chase to complete basic tasks.
Grants high-level visibility into performance
- Employee experience platforms give employees, managers, and admins the ability to review performance, goals, OKRs, and feedback. Employees are able to easily track their progress over the course of the year, while managers can follow up on important initiatives and provide relevant feedback on current projects. Admin access ensures that the HR team can follow up on who is engaging with the tool and collect data to influence future programming.
Aligns on work and priorities
- Even if you have frequent check-ins with teams and communicating goals, it can be difficult to ensure that teams are actually working on priority-level work. By using an employee experience platform to communicate common goals and priorities, whether that’s through a goal setting framework or OKRs, can help employees stay on the same page and keep track of other initiatives throughout the company. This level of transparency also drives collaboration across teams to achieve company objectives.
Drives employee engagement
- Employee experience platforms make employees’ lives easier, which in turn helps them to be more productive and efficient. It also shows that the company prioritizes the employee journey. As we mentioned earlier, highly engaged employees are more likely to stay with their company and drive profitability. From a business perspective, it makes sense to invest in the employee experience.
In the past five years, Google searches for the term “employee experience” have increased by 130 percent. Employees and companies alike are focusing on the benefits of a positive workplace experience, and employees are seeking companies that place a premium on this. It makes sense that organizations that implement employee experience platforms attract and retain top performers while driving strong business results. We’re moving towards a more human way of working – prioritizing employees while driving productivity and efficiency – so it only makes sense to invest in the tools that will help you achieve that goal.
Author Bio
Adi Janowitz is VP of Customer Success at Hibob. Adi has vast experience in building and leading Customer Success organizations in SaaS companies. In her recent role, she re-built the EMEA CS department at WalkMe. Prior to that, she built the Idomoo global CS org from the ground up. Adi’s focus is on boosting retention by building a scalable KPI-driven CS organization while creating KPI coherency for the entire company.
