Five keys to optimizing employee experience

The battle for the hearts and minds of employees is played out daily through their workplace experiences. Organizations are now turning to creating environments conducive to a more engaged and productive workforce. They are designing employee experiences that not only attract and retain crucial talent, but that optimize the individual and the collective potential in the workplace. By optimizing experience, they optimize workforce productivity and business potential.

To better understand the challenges and opportunities associated with this trend, we conducted in-depth interviews with more than 30 individuals who had expertise in different facets of employee experience, including executives, providers of services and software tools designed to enhance employee experience, IBM subject matter experts, and seasoned researchers in this field.

Our research shows that employee experience is an important and complex issue, requiring companies to evaluate the close connection between employees’ physical, social, and cultural environments, as well as the tools and relationships they need to accomplish work on a daily basis.

We found that a number of factors shape employee experience, including: the formation and development of work-based connections and relationships, the design and ongoing use of employees’ physical work environments, and the tools and social platforms employees use to accomplish work-related activities. Our research shows that organizations can enhance employee experiences through increased levels of personalization, transparency, simplification, authenticity and organizational responsiveness.

For companies looking to improve the employee experience, adopting the employee perspective can provide an important starting point — using data and analytics to identify needs and measure impact on business outcomes. Understanding key milestones in the employee journey can further refine insights into areas where experience may be lacking and what actions can be most effective. Applying a holistic, iterative design approach to change can help ensure that employees see improvements relevant to their work and can set their expectations for continuous reinvention. The human resources (HR) function cannot bear sole responsibility for improving the employee experience; doing so requires a cadre of support from other functions such as marketing, IT and real estate/facilities, as well as leadership from line executives.

In this report, we explain how our findings that the employee experience is created by interactions across three spheres, called the core components, which we define. We then delineate four methods of enhancing employee experience, based on our interviews and research findings. They include making potential changes to physical workspaces and to software tools.

From our discussions with experts, we identify five key practices that successful organizations are using to create more effective experiences for their employees.