A great Employee Experience (EX) is a pretty powerful way to boost overall engagement.
In fact, when done right employee experience will:
- Reduce turnover rates
- Boost job satisfaction
- Increase productivity
- Fuel overall business success
To create a successful experience though, you first need to measure the impact of your existing one. Doing so will allow you to identify strategies for improvement.
Measuring employee experience and its impact can be quite the challenge, however, but as Employee Experience specialists, we’re here to help!
This blog will cover why measuring your EX is important, key metrics to consider, and strategies to measure them.
Not only will this help you understand your current landscape, but it will equip you with the tools you need to effectively measure the impact of your new strategies and initiatives.
Why measure Employee Experience (EX)?
EX should never just be another ‘buzzword’. Your EX encompasses every interaction an employee has with your organization and as a result, it should be at the core of your workplace culture.
It’s all about making your employees feel valued, allowing them to grow, and keeping them engaged and loyal to your organization.
It’s become a key factor when it comes to hiring and retaining talent and can be the make or break of an organization.
By measuring it you’ll be able to:
- Identify what is and isn’t working
When it comes to EX, there are lots of components to consider, and by measuring these effectively you can truly understand the impact of each. - Measure your progress
By measuring your EX, you can identify a benchmark to monitor later improvement. You’ll also be able to see the impact of external factors, such as the cost-of-living crisis. - Promote your experience to boost recruitment and retention
Measuring the experience allows you to back up statements with facts, which is really handy for job adverts or company updates. - Your employees feel heard
By giving your employees the opportunity to provide feedback, they’ll feel that their voice matters, and their experiences will lead to improvement for them and their peers.
What Employee Experience (EX) metrics should you measure?
Whilst this can be subjective and reflective of your company’s goals and resources, there are some clear metrics to consider when it comes to measuring your employee experience:
- Recruitment
The employee experience starts with recruitment. Number of applications, successful applicants, glassdoor reviews, and employee feedback are all great ways to better understand how your recruitment process could be improved. Creating employee advocates and ensuring they’re engaged starts before day one, so it’s a really crucial metric to consider. - Satisfaction
Job satisfaction is all about enthusiasm for an employee’s work and their workplace. Using a satisfaction KPI you will be able to better understand overall satisfaction across a range of factors, including working conditions, benefits, salary, and more. - Voluntary Turnover/Retention Rates
High turnover rates are a clear red flag when measuring employee experience and is one of the highest costs to organizations. High turnover rates are a clear indicator of disengagement from a role and/or your organization and tools like exit interviews and surveys are a great way to better understand the reasons for an employee leaving. - Diversity and Inclusion
DEI plays a crucial role in the workplace and helps to ensure employees feel valued and create equal opportunity. Measuring DEI is essential for understanding where your business stands, and avoiding any unconscious bias that you may not know exists. It can also ensure you keep leaders accountable whilst promoting an inclusive culture. - Employee Net Promoter Score
eNPS is a pretty common HR metric to measure engagement and is often done through a survey. It’s a great way to identify your percentage of highly engagement or disengaged employees and why.
- Performance Metrics
Highly engaged employees tend to perform well, which means employee performance is a great way to understand engagement levels. Generally, you’ll consider work quality and work quantity, but it’s also important to track probation metrics, as this could be a clear indicator of how well your onboarding process is working. - Well-being and Absenteeism
High levels of burnout and absenteeism are usually an indicator of poor employee experience. It can be an implication of poor working conditions, poor governance, bad leadership, or lack of work-life balance. Absenteeism and poor well-being will impact engagement rates over time, not just for the absent employee but for their team as well so it’s important that it’s monitored. - Development and Progression
Learning and development is a core driver of employee experience, and creating great development opportunities will help to engage and retain talent. Taking a look at your L&D investments, goal tracking and completion rates will provide a better understanding of how employees view your L&D experience. - Employee Advocacy
If your employees feel engaged, they will advocate for your business and boost sales. After all, consumers are more likely to trust the word of employees rather than messages directly from the brand. Consider social listening to see what your employees are saying about your brand, and engagement with your employee advocacy program (if you have one).
- Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction and employee experience often go hand-in-hand. If you have an engaged workforce, chances are your customer service rockets, and vice versa, so customer satisfaction surveys are a metric to consider.
Strategies for Success
- Objectives
Define your goals and objectives for measuring your EX. There are a lot of components and insights to dive into when measuring employee experience, so it’s important to identify why you’re doing what you’re doing and what you hope to understand and achieve. That way, you’ll stay on track and ensure you’re measuring the right thing. - KPIs
Choose the metrics that align with your goals and objectives. Things like engagement surveys, eNPS, turnover rates etc can be invaluable, but you might not need to measure it all, so use your goals and objectives to guide which metrics you need to measure and how. - Surveys
Don’t just use out-of-the-box surveys, tailor them to your metrics and objectives. Ensure they remain clear, concise, and relevant with a mix of quantitative and qualitative questions for a more holistic view. Don’t fall into the trap of pulling in every question you can think of, keep aligning back to your goals and it’ll make it easier to analyze later down the line. - Anonymity and Trust
Ensure that employee responses will be anonymous and reassure your employees of this so that you can collate open and honest responses. - Data Dives
Once you’ve got your data, it’s time for some analysis. It’s easy to get distracted, so again, align to your goals to ensure you’re pulling the insights you need. Seek trends, patterns, and areas in need of improvement, as well as areas that are doing well. Statistical tools can be a helpful ally here. - Benchmarking
If you don’t already have adequate data to create your own benchmarks, compare your EX metrics against industry ones. This will help to contextualize your data and reveal your competitive standing. - Action Plan
Craft an action plan to tackle your identified areas for improvement and create SMART objectives. Assign responsibilities, set timelines, and establish measurable goals. - Share and Listen
Transparency is key here. Share your findings, acknowledge areas that need improvement, and share what you will be doing to address them, and when. Ensure you maintain open lines of communication and regularly update employees on progress. - Implementation
Now it’s time to bring your action plans to life. Whether it’s a new policy, additional training, workplace improvements, or making changes, start implementing them and follow your action plan to stay on track. - Continuous Monitoring
EX is a journey without any real endpoint, so continuously monitor the impact of your changes and gather regular feedback, and stay flexible. - Refinement
Feedback and results should guide what and how you measure your EX.
The road to happiness
An effective employee experience results in an engaged workforce.
Engaged employees are motivated, productive, and satisfied people who deliver the best results. By tracking your employee experience from start to end, you will be able to truly understand what’s working and what isn’t.
But remember, the future of work is ever-evolving, and as a result, so will the needs and requirements of your employees, so continuously check in and evaluate for maximum success.
