Employee to Advocate: 5 Tips to Enhance Employee Experience

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Turn your employees into company advocates with our five top tips on enhancing employee experience.

Does Employee Experience Outweigh Customer Experience?

It is a riddle as old as time: which came first, the chicken or the egg?

While you ponder on that one, let us ask you this: in an organization, who matters most, the customer or the employee? Let’s think for a moment. Our customers bring us the business which keeps our organization afloat. But where would our customers be if our employees weren’t doing their job well? So, we ask you again. Chicken or egg?

In today’s world of influencers and online reviews, opinions matter almost as much as facts. With the wealth of information out there right at our fingertips, we have access to so much more than ever before. One thing we can’t seem to get enough of is other people’s experiences.

Not only do they appeal to our sense of curiosity, but even further, learning about others’ experiences gives us reference to determine our own!

While an unsatisfied customer can harm your company’s reputation with a single negative post, an employee’s bad comments can do just as much damage…if not more! Equally, just as a happy customer can do wonders for business, so too can a happy and fulfilled employee.

With all this in mind, it’s not a stretch to suggest that you should be considering both employees and customers as equally important audiences. So, while there is no doubt that we should appreciate and delight our customers, turning them into promoters and advocates for our company, can you say with certainty that you are doing the same with your employees?

Is Employee Experience Really Worth the Investment?

Yes, it is…because business (and life) is all about the experience!

How do we turn customers into advocates?

By delivering the right products or services? Check.

To the right people? Check

At the right time? Check.

And in the right way? Check, check, double-check.

In doing so, we aim to create unique experiences that are well-tailored to your customer’s needs. The same can be said about the employees. Offering employees a good paycheck or a company car may be nice, but when was the last time you heard someone share that on LinkedIn? We’ve noticed that posts garnish a lot of engagement when people talk about what’s happening at their workplace. This takes many forms, such as sharing a positive team experience or celebrating company-related milestones. In other words, people share experiences!

In the same way we think of our customers, we need to offer our employees the right working environment, fitted to their respective skillset, reflective of their respected personalities, all within the right setting. Organizations are moving beyond the “one-size-fits-all” approach where everybody is offered the same package or placed on a standard career ladder. After all, we are all different and our needs can differ greatly.

The focus today is much more about building company culture and engagement, this means enabling great work environments, cultivating a high-performing team, and enhancing happiness, all inside the workplace!

Take Your Employee Experience to the Next Level with These Tips

We’ve outlined five things you can do right now to enhance your employee experience. Read on and get prepared for all the “World’s Best Boss” mugs that are sure to come.

1. Personalize the employee approach

Just as we do with our customers, start by defining who our employees are and segment them into different employee personas, which are fictional representations of your workforce.

Develop a concise profile to include their goals, expectations and challenges, and then tailor your employee approach accordingly.

For example, someone from your operations team may have different needs as one of your sales representatives. Start with their functional needs, and then work further to their personal preferences. Do they have children and would value flexibility? Do they have a long commute and prefer more remote working? Are they more productive in the morning, or would rather brainstorm over lunch?

2. Mapping the employee journey

We know customers go through the buyer journey, so it is no surprise that employees go through their own journey as well.
The employee journey charts the entire time someone spends at your company, from the hiring process all the way through to offboarding. The journey needs evolution at every stage, so tailor the experience accordingly and identify critical moments that simply matter more.

Remember your first day at work? What about your tenth? Identify those key moments that matter, such as an employee’s birthday or the start of a big project, but also when the going gets tough, like when someone is sick or experiencing a difficult project roadblock. Think about how you can support them in such a circumstance and turn these into positive, memorable experiences by adding that extra personal touch.

3. Develop meaningful relationships

When you think back to a really great experience you had as a customer yourself, whether you were buying a mobile phone or at a restaurant, what do you remember the most? The product itself or the experience you had? Did you feel well understood and therefore got exactly what you wanted?

Now imagine if you could say that about your work. Spend time to get to know your employees on a personal level, know their pet’s names and what they like to do at the weekend, what makes them happy and what they find difficult. Take time to talk outside of work items and become friends beyond just professional needs. After all, loyalty is a two-way street, and you are certainly more loyal towards someone you like!

4. Bring purpose to everyday life

It may sound simple, but it really does all start with the WHY! What makes you get up and go to work every morning? What do you care about the most? What makes you proud? Quite simply put – why are you here?

There is more to a job than just a means to an end. Connect your people to something bigger, something more meaningful that you company stands for, and embed this purpose into everything you do. Link your “why” into your everyday communications: share stories, celebrate success, and have conversations about how an employee’s personal “why” can align to the company “why”. Make it about more than just the tasks at hand and connect this WHY to your employee’s experience every step of the way.

5. Commitment to personal development

Your company might already have a development program, which is great. But is there room to further customize this program? Consider a more agile approach to developing people, one that empowers employees to identify their own performance gaps and choose personalized learning methods best suited to them individually.

Aside from your bi-annual performance reviews, offer more regular guidance on their daily job performance. Take time to talk to your employees about challenges they face on a regular basis and find ways to support them. The key is making this a part of your regular routine. It’s great to go to the dentist every six months for a checkup, but you should brush your teeth every day as well, right?

Drive Employee Engagement with Powerful Comms

It’s no big secret that employee engagement drives performance. Take the time to enhance your employee experience and engagement will follow. Advocacy takes time, but it all starts here. Because when it comes down to it, there is no chicken or egg. Remember, employees have joined a company because of the great impressions during the interviewing stages. It is, however, a choice to stay and contribute every day, and even more so to then actively promote it to the world!

With our team of dedicated specialists, Mach Media is here to help enhance your employee experience every step of the way! By incorporating purposeful communications with creative designs and tailored messaging, we keep your internal audience in the know, so you can focus on building those meaningful relationships directly.