As your team grows, it’s important to think about how workers perceive your organization. Setting employee experience goals helps you improve retention, which is essential for the true growth of your organization.
Today, we want to go over the basics of employee experience and how to set up goals to measure it at your company.
Looking for some actionable ways to improve the employee experience? Check out our article that shares five easy strategies your organization can use.
What Is Employee Experience?
First, let’s cover the basics. What is employee experience exactly? Employee experience is the way that your team members perceive your organization and their role in it.
In an ideal world, your team members would have a positive employee experience, meaning they are happy at work, feel included, and can do great things while working with your organization.
Unfortunately, many team members don’t get a positive experience. According to HR Daily Advisor, “only 17% of respondents say their employer offers an “exceptional” experience.”
Organizations have a long way to go before more employees rate their experience highly.
7 Employee Experience Goal Setting Tips
So, now that you know what employee experience is and where most organizations stand, how do you ensure your organization does well? First, you’ll want to create some employee experience goals.
1. Get Clear on Why Employee Experience Matters to Your Organization
Before you start setting goals, you need to get clear on why employee experience matters. There are many initiatives that you might choose to focus on as an HR leader. Why are you choosing to improve the employee experience?
Getting clear on your ‘why’ will help you justify the costs of these initiatives to other leaders on your team. Understanding what goals you need to set and going after those initiatives takes money and time. The positive effect of those goals might not be seen for a quarter or two. You need a great plan in place to justify the costs of this endeavor.
So, why should organizations care about employee experience? Simple: it improves retention.
2. Take Stock of the Current Employee Experience
Before you can set any goals, you need to know what’s currently happening in your company. Therefore, we encourage you to set aside some time to work on the following activities:
- Send out an employee experience or engagement survey like Gallup’s Q12 survey.
- Perform exit interviews for any employee leaving your organization.
- Chat with new hires about how they perceive the employee experience.
- Connect with other leaders to uncover any gaps they’ve noticed in your company’s employee experience.
After you’ve done some analysis, you should better understand where your team currently stands. With this information, you have a baseline, and you can work to improve things from there.
3. Work With Employees to Define Their Ideal Experience
Next, you’ll want to move into working with current employees to understand their ideal experience.
If they could work at a perfect organization, what would their relationship with the company look like?
Do you want to make this even more helpful? Consider surveying your organization by department and as one unit. Different departments might have unique ways of working. When understanding an ideal employee experience, it might be worth it to understand each department’s unique challenges and triumphs.
4. Connect With Company Leaders to Define Their Ideal Experience
After you chat with employees, you should do the same with company leaders. Leaders must have an ideal experience as the head of a department or team.
Company leaders have a big picture understanding of the organization’s weaknesses and strengths. The best part about company leaders is they can give you a better understanding of the current state of your organization and help you set more realistic goals.
5. Combine the Two and Make It All Actionable
After you speak with employees and leaders, it’s time to combine both ideal experiences to create something actionable for your company.
You can work using the SMART goals method, which encourages you to create goals that are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-Bound
The aspects of this method you’ll need to pay close attention to are attainable and time-bound. Employee experience change doesn’t happen overnight. So you need to break down your larger experience goals into smaller, attainable chunks that have set deadlines.
For example, instead of saying, “I want to be the best employer in my geographic area,” you could say, “I want to be recognized in my area with a Best Places To Work award by the end of 2024.”
Taking a few moments to dig deeper and research your goals will make them better for HR and company leaders.
6. Present Your Latest Employee Experience Goals and How You Plan to Achieve Them
Once you have a set of goals, it’s time to share them. Let your team know what they are and what your plans are for achieving them.
If you need some help explaining your goals, you could bring in some of the bigger picture items you were brainstorming.
To follow the example we gave above, “We want to be the best employer in town, so we want to win the city’s Best Places To Work award by the end of 2024, and we’ll do this by…”
Your team needs to know your game plan so they can follow your lead and accomplish the goals you set. The more detailed your goals are, the easier they are to follow.
7. Follow Up to Ensure That Employee Experience Goals Are Being Met
It’s easy to let goals collect dust after you’ve shared them. A famous quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry states, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” Your team needs to make a plan and follow through on it.
You can do this by setting up milestones for your goals and adding designated goal check-in dates on your calendar. Be sure to keep your team up to date on progress and encourage them to check in with you and keep you honest.
Conclusion: Set Your Company’s Employee Experience Today
Employee experience takes time to turn around, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start today. Use this article as a jumping-off point to discuss how you will improve your organization’s experience at work.
Are you ready to use Workrowd when planning your organization’s employee experience? Reach out to us at hello@workrowd.com to see if we’re right for your team.
