The business-changing benefits of excellent employee experience

Enhancing the employee experience may sound like a nice-to-have, but it can significantly impact everything from employee engagement, attraction and retention to efficiency, productivity, profits and more.  

Research from MIT suggests employee experience (EX) is impacted, in part, by work complexity – how hard it is to get work done in your organisation and how much your behavioural norms promote innovation and collaboration.  

Many organisations will layer on perks – doughnuts on Friday or a dog-friendly office – without addressing the work complexity or creating a foundation for culture building.  

“Providing top-notch EX is not just lip service. [It] allows a company to put its workers first by exploring and responding to how they view their employee journeys, then delivering tailored interventions that focus on critical moments that matter to maximize satisfaction, performance, and productivity. In doing so, companies can become more inspiring, collaborative, and centered on creating an experience that is meaningful and enjoyable.”

Jonathan Emmett | Asmus Komm Stefan Moritz and Friederike Schultz, McKinsey.com

Here are some positive impacts you’ll see by improving your employee experience. 

Save time for value-add work – streamline employee systems  

At its most basic, a good EX means your people have more time to do the work you hired them for.  

How easy is it to apply for leave or access payslips? What happens when computer hardware dies? How can team members check all-hands meeting times or connect with colleagues around the business? For many team members, these tasks take time and effort better spent on their day-to-day work.  

They have to log into disconnected systems, email colleagues with questions or approval requests, and resubmit forms when they get something wrong. If their issue prevents them from working efficiently, any delays can cause a ripple effect around their department, the wider business and your customers. 

People want to do a good job – when your systems are set up to let them easily access the information, services and support they need from one simple portal, they can spend more time doing valuable work and improve cross-functional collaboration.  

It also takes pressure off your IT and HR teams. The Forrester Total Economic ImpactTM (TEI) study found that organisations would save over 10,000 hours yearly by letting employees self-serve up to 80% of their repeat inquiries. This would also improve productivity for onboarding and departures by 30%, resulting in a potential 254% ROI with $7.62M in savings over three years. 

Improve employee engagement and retention  

Great EX means people stay longer and are more engaged. Research from McKinsey suggests employees with positive EX are 16 times more engaged than those with negative EX and are eight times more likely to want to stay at a company.  

These are worthwhile aspirations. One study from Gallup found a strong correlation between employee engagement and performance within different work units. Those with the best employee engagement outperformed those with the worst in a range of metrics. They had 10% better customer ratings, 22% more profitability, 21% better productivity and lower employee turnover, absenteeism and safety incidents. 

This seems logical – when your people feel in control and supported around the nuts and bolts of their employment, they have more head space and appetite to engage with your business values and culture.  

Happier customers, better revenue

It feels obvious, and many studies have backed it up: if your people are happier, they’ll take better care of your customers.  

A study of retailers from HBR found that better EX for frontline staff increased revenue and profit. Researchers found that a move from the bottom quartile to the top in EX metrics would increase revenue by more than 50% and almost as much in profit. 

Supporting these findings, another study found a strong link between Glassdoor employer ratings and customer satisfaction scores from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI). A one-star (out of 5) increase in the Glassdoor rating corresponded with a 1.3 (out of 100) improvement in ACSI of 1.3 points/100). This effect was almost double for customer-facing industries. Using data from a separate study, researchers theorised that one extra star rating on Glassdoor could increase long-term market valuations by 7.8% to 18.9%. 

Communication underpins innovation and collaboration

Research suggests leaders can spend as much as 10 hours a week prepping updates, reports and instructions. This effort is often wasted – only 46% of employees say they quickly find the goals, strategies and directives they need. This poor communication can lead to lower morale, sales and missed goals, costing US organisations $2 trillion a year in time and productivity. 

Improving the comms platform could be a game-changer – better UX, tailored configurations and AI-powered search make the platforms more enjoyable to use and information easier to find. Enhanced content publishing functionality would also ensure that the right people see the right information, avoiding information overwhelm.  

This free flow of communication lets you build the trust you need between different departments, and management and staff to build a culture of innovation and collaboration.  

Using ServiceNow’s HR Service Delivery, Sedgwick’s 23,000 employees across the United States visit their HR support center more than 150,000 times every month, while around 1,600 new or updated knowledge articles enable a strong technology-empowered culture of innovation to flourish.

“ServiceNow is a transformational tool. It fundamentally changes how HR is viewed and how HR professionals operate.” Holly Shuter, Senior Manager, HR Shared Services

ServiceNow – for Employee Experience excellence

Your EX can have wide-ranging impacts on your employee engagement and retention, company culture, customer satisfaction, innovation and collaboration. 

At the heart of any great EX is a platform like ServiceNow. It is a single source of truth, pulling together the systems and tools your HR teams and employees need to simplify their work life. It digitises manual processes, optimises existing workflows, and automates repetitive tasks, improving efficiency and collaboration.  

The simplest and most effective way to implement ServiceNow is with the support of their partner, Fusion5. This gives you access to the team’s expertise in system integration and service management, to streamline implementation and ensures you get full value from the software faster. You get holistic business and process service management to drive efficiencies, save costs, and scale effectively. 

By prioritising EX with ServiceNow and Fusion5, your team can get back to what really matters to your bottom line – book a consultation now.