Managers often conflate employee experience with workplace experience and vice versa. It is not surprising why.
Both are human-centered approaches that ultimately affect one another. If your staff has a rewarding employee experience, it automatically boosts their overall workplace experience and vice versa. But employee experience and work experience are two different concepts and should be treated as such. Read on to learn more about them.
What is Employee Experience?
Employee experience is all about an employee’s interactions with a company’s systems, policies, and people. This means everything from a company’s onboarding process, and finding a work desk to their relationships with their colleagues, falls under employee experience.
Managers can enable a better employee experience by simply implementing seamless work processes, facilitating communication, and providing extensive support to overcome everyday challenges.
Best Practices to Improve Employee Experience
1. Focus on Overall Work Environment
Altering your company’s work culture and environment is fundamental to a positive employee experience. Here are a few tips on creating a better work environment for your staff.
- Appreciate the hard work your staff puts in by extending timely promotions and appraisals to improve the employee experience.
- Identify your employees’ strengths and weaknesses and assign tasks accordingly.
- Provide employees with proper training each time you introduce new practices or technologies.
- Ensure your office has abundant natural lighting as opposed to artificial lighting.
- Adopt diversity and inclusivity to promote a wholesome employee experience.
2. Encourage a Culture of Communication
Employees need clear, consistent, and timely communication to perform their jobs well. In a hybrid setup, managers can make this possible in the following ways.
- Provide technologies that help implement effective communication. Often text-based hybrid chat and email tools are mighty helpful in facilitating communication in a hybrid workplace.
- Find out the communication bottlenecks like improper systems and unresponsive employees and attend to them quickly and fix them.
3. Listen to Employees
Nothing feels better than being heard – be it at home or the workplace. So, hear your employees’ needs and grievances. Here is how you can improve the employee experience by listening to them –
- Float employee satisfaction surveys to collect their feedback on work practices.
- Provide direct channels and platforms for subjective feedback.
- Don’t simply promise to address justified grievances. Take visible action where necessary.
What is Workplace Experience?
Workplace experience focuses on formulating an optimal physical and digital environment for employees to do their job productively. It examines three elements: office space, tools and technology, and people.
Improving the workplace environment is an ever-evolving practice. After all, with time, employee expectations change. However, the underlying goal of creating a viable ecosystem for employees remains the same.
Best Practices to Improve Workplace Experience
1. Make Concrete Changes to the Physical Workspace
Know that employees are stepping out of their homes to commute to the office. So, ensure that they have a good workplace experience to justify it.
Here are a few tips on motivating employees to work in the physical office space.
- Ensure your office has comfortable workstations so employees can work long hours if they need to.
- Provide different spatial orientations for both isolated working and collaborative tasks.
- Ensure employees have the right resources like company credit cards or prepaid cell phones where required.
- Collect feedback about what’s missing in the physical workspace from employees.
2. Provide the Right Technical Resources
Providing the right technical resources includes unrestricted access to certain digital tools and platforms. Here are a few resources you must provide your employees to improve their workplace experience.
- Introduce user-friendly communication tools like Slack and Basecamp that allow quick chatting and dropping files and are mobile-responsive.
- Train them on collaborative digital platforms like Trello so employees can easily track the progress of a project and see tasks and deadlines assigned to them.
- Introduce software for desk booking, meeting room booking, and parking management to ensure employees have a preferred place to park and work.
3. Ask for Feedback
To improve your work culture, don’t cow away from soliciting feedback from employees. Here are a couple of ways to go about it.
- Float objective surveys asking employees to rate their workspace, and how motivated they feel to come in. To solicit honest responses, allow employees to fill out their answers anonymously.
- Let people in leadership roles study the feedback and take proactive measures to improve the workplace experience.
Over to You
With hybrid work practices becoming the new normal, employee experience and workplace experience ought to change. Employee journey is changing and company culture is getting an update.
Human resources experts noew know that new types of physical and technological aids are essential investments today.
WorkInSync employee experience software allows employees to have a positive employee experience at work. From performance management to creating strong employee experience, WorkInSync has everything you need.
For more information on the product, you can opt for a demo today.
