Related: The empowered employee experience

The question is, what are some of the best practices for implementing effective employee experience initiatives?

The essentials of effective EX programs

What sets best-in-class employee experience programs that deliver results apart from the rest? Here are the fundamental steps organizations must take to not only capture the voice of the employee, but act on it by implementing changes that drive satisfaction.

• Listen to employees — continuously, in real time, across channels, and by capturing direct and indirect forms of feedback, such as survey responses, comments on social media, employee crowdsourcing suggestions, and other employee behaviors and signals, such as PTO usage, the volume of IT and HR tickets, meeting attendance patterns, and more.
• Analyze employee insights at scale and in the moment using artificial intelligence (AI) to make sense of massive data sets to identify your organization's top employee experience themes and overall employee sentiment. A strong EX platform will be able to help organizations immediately identify areas of positive, negative, and neutral sentiment, whether that's specific company policies or tools employees use on a daily basis. EX technology also helps organizations understand what's driving strong engagement and pinpoint opportunities to improve experiences.
• Involve the right stakeholders across different areas including HR, managers, operations, facilities, IT, and other employee-facing teams and empowering these individuals to affect meaningful changes designed to improve the employee experience at the individual employee level and across the organization. For instance, if when conducting employee listening initiatives, employers discover that new hires feel like they're not getting enough support during the onboarding process, it's crucial to route those learnings back to the individuals who can have an immediate impact on improving that aspect of EX.
• Take action based on employee feedback and be transparent in communicating next steps in a timely manner, when there's time to have an impact, and turn things around, not months or years after the fact. For instance, leaders could use recurring all-hands meetings to share the top topics employees have discussed via surveys and other channels, and talk about how the company plans to address these concerns going forward. And not every solution has to or should come from executives. Companies can empower employees to be problem solvers by using crowdsourcing platforms to collect workers' best ideas for how to address employee engagement challenges.

Taking things a step further, the Medallia Institute and Josh Bersin, global industry analyst and CEO of the Josh Bersin Company, researched employee experience programs across more than 600 organizations to understand the link between strong employee experience practices and positive people outcomes like employee satisfaction and engagement, and found key elements that separate employee experience leaders from employee experience laggards.

For one, employee experience leaders capture timely data, using a diverse set of direct and indirect sources, monitoring community channels, using crowdsourcing software, analyzing call center calls, and surveying employees via SMS, video, digital, and other forums during their regular flow of work, such as immediately following an HR or IT transaction. In addition, leaders check in on how their employees are doing more often than employee experience laggards, and are 3.5X more likely to collect employee feedback on a monthly basis or even more frequently. This matters as laggards who check in with employees via fewer channels and gather their feedback less frequently risk making critical business decisions based on incomplete or outdated information, hampering them from achieving the true agility needed to thrive in today's landscape of continuous change.

Technology is another differentiator between leaders and laggards. Nearly half (43%) of leaders say they use AI to automatically analyze employee feedback to get a clear picture of sentiment, emerging themes, and trending topics, compared to only 5% of laggards who report doing the same. AI can help organizations scale their listening programs to make sense of millions of data inputs from a range of sources in the moment, versus taking weeks or even months to manually analyze the data.

Having the right tools in place to capture and analyze employee feedback isn't enough. To be truly effective, employers must create an environment in which employees feel safe enough to share their experiences, even when it comes to speaking up about difficult topics. When asked to self-report the degree to which they agree that they foster an environment in which employees are secure enough tell the truth, the Medallia Institute and Josh Bersin research found that EX leaders are much more likely to agree rating their agreement as a 3.37 out of 4 — compared with EX laggards who report a 2.06 out of 4. Similarly, we find that over half of EX leaders survey their workforce on topics related to diversity and inclusion in contrast to only a third of laggards.

It's easy for employee experience to be relegated to the function of HR, and that's often where it lives within laggard organizations. Nearly all (93%) of EX leaders, however, have a dedicated employee experience team, compared with only 59% of EX laggards. Beyond setting up an EX function, EX leaders recognize that employee experience initiatives need to be cross-functional efforts, inclusive of senior leaders, managers, HR, IT, facilities, and other relevant employee-facing groups.

Why EX is always worth the investment

Findings from the Medallia Institute and Josh Bersin also reveal the potential ROI of employee experience. The research indicates that EX leaders are more likely to report they've met or exceeded their financial targets and agree that they have high levels of customer satisfaction and retention, compared to laggards, and they're 12X more likely than laggards to self-report 20% or more year-over-year revenue growth. EX is also a powerful shield against turnover, with experience leaders reporting 40% less employee churn compared to the competition.

Research from Gallup and the American Psychological Association aligns with these findings, drawing further links between employee engagement and stronger business outcomes, including lower absenteeism and turnover and higher productivity, sales, and creativity.

Organizations can take things a step further by pairing EX data, like employee attrition rates, sentiment, and engagement scores, and customer experience (CX) data, including NPS®, customer satisfaction, and customer retention, and be able to clearly see the impact of their EX programs on CX KPIs and overall business outcomes.

Melissa Arronte is employee experience solution principal at Medallia.

Read more: 

• Engagement drives culture. Here's how to measure it.
• Creating a workplace culture of belonging in a remote-first world
• Employee experience drives human resource efforts