Improving Employee Experience in Workplace: How can HR help?

What is employee experience?  

Employee experience refers to how an employee feels about their organization during their employee period.  It includes interactions, experiences, career growth, and development within a company. Employee experience is observing what an employee thinks, feels, and experiences with an organization. Once employees gain positive experiences in the workplace, they feel motivated, constructive, and perhaps glad to bond with the organization for a long time. If you are concerned about your organization's growth, concurrently you must consider your employee experience in the workplace.

Why is employee experience important?  

Employee experience plays a crucial role in any organization since the employees have multiple job options in this competitive world. Employee experience will immensely impact the trademark of an organization either positively or negatively. The positive impact results in employees' long-term bond with the organization, employee retention, and job satisfaction on the other hand negative experience results in leaving the organization, writing bad reviews about the company, talk about this experience with colleagues that creates a bad name for the organization.

Employee experience lifecycle: The employee lifecycle includes six phases of communication between the organization and employees:

• Attraction   
• Recruitment  
• Onboarding   
• Development  
• Retention   
• Offboarding.  

Attraction: First impression is the best impression, likewise attraction is the initial stage of the employee lifecycle. In this phase, the organization is ready to hire people for certain postings and should build strong business tactics to attract employees.

Recruitment: Recruitment is the activity of hiring people for the right job at the right time. Recruitment is a streamlined process of identifying new employees and inducting new employees. Throughout this entire journey, make sure that the employee has a good experience that will increase the brand image of an organization.

Onboarding: It’s important to guarantee that the newly hired employees will feel as comfortable as possible from the very first day itself. A well-planned onboarding process helps to connect easily with their job roles, work environment, culture, and colleagues.

Development: The organization should invest its time in employee growth and development, The organization should provide training and development sessions often to the employees that help not only in enhancing the employee knowledge apart from employee growth, but it is also beneficial to the entire team. The employee can guide their team members on the right path and can be capable of problem-solving, decision-making, and many other skills that reflect the organization’s efficiency.

Retention: The organization focuses on strategies and policies to hold their employees long in the organization. The development phase is a part that relates to employee retention. If the organization helps to develop their employees' knowledge and skills, they can stick with the organization for a longer period and they know about every policy and procedure the organization follows throughout the year. This assists the employees in accomplishing their tasks in a short period with an effective management system.

Offboarding: The main motive is to gain fair feedback from exiting employees to help future employees. No employee is going to be with you forever in any organization, so it’ll be helpful to the organization to rectify the concerns that have been addressed by the staff who left the organization to build a better employee experience.

How can HR help with employee experience?

Employee experience completely depends on how the organization treats their employees during their employee period. However, most of the organizations fail to fulfill employee experience. The HR management should focus more on employee experience to maintain job satisfaction and work experience in the company.  

Flexible working hours: The organization should understand and modify the hours according to the employees' needs and wants. Fixed working hours may cause work stress and affect the mental and physical condition of the employees, so they can't focus on their work properly. The organization can follow,  

• Remote work - Offer work from home in any emergency or unavoidable situation. 
• Hybrid work - Offer both online and offline modes of work according to their needs. 
• Office work - Offer flexible working hours to accomplish tasks effectively.  

Manage work-life balance: Work-life balance is a key to well-being, retention, job satisfaction, and much more. It is a task of managing both professional and personal life. Bad work-life balance results in low employee turnover, absenteeism due to stress, pending work, not being recognized, and leaving the job. To tackle this situation, HR managers should communicate about the work-life policy and procedures, train their employees, measure their performance, and reward the employees. Recognition boosts the employee to work hard. A positive and good work-life balance leads to employee retention and job satisfaction.  

Encourage feedback: Feedback is some advice, or suggestion that can be given by anyone at any time to improve their performance. HR managers should consider employee feedback in every task they are doing. Taking employee suggestions even in a small task makes them feel motivated and stimulates the employee to work harder.  

Friendly work environment: A supportive zone creates a positive employee experience tenure. A friendly work environment is where every new idea of an employee will be valued, flaws and faults can be rectified, and every day will be a learning phase where they can learn and experience new things to enhance their knowledge and skills. 

The positive outcome of employee experience  

The organization can enjoy many benefits if it provides good employee experience. Benefits include  

Employee engagement 

Higher retention rates 

Improved productivity 

Innovative ideas  

Increase in employee well-being 

Job satisfaction.  

Conclusion 

In conclusion, HR plays a vital role in employee experience by focusing on the onboarding process to offboarding, investing in enhancing the employee skills and knowledge in the relevant field, prioritizing employee well-being and work-life balance, creates a friendly workplace environment. If any organization wants to give the best employee experience, then the organization should satisfy all the employees' needs and wants.