How to Position Employee Experience at the Centre of Corporate Culture
Does your employee experience truly align with your organisation's mission? Is there strategic alignment with your business objectives and the employee experience and workplace culture you provide?
According to multiple 2023 predictions, employee experience is fast becoming a cornerstone of successful organisations. However, more is needed to ensure a satisfactory employee experience. It must be actively positioned at the centre of the corporate culture. This means developing strategies that deliver personalised employee experiences and workforce satisfaction at every touchpoint.
Defining Employee Experience and Corporate Culture
Employee experience is an employee's journey through your organisation, from pre-hire to post-exit. It primarily revolves around the interactions that employees have with different teams and departments, as well as your organisation's systems, processes and culture.
On the other hand, corporate culture is the shared values, beliefs and behaviours that determine how your organisation operates internally. It includes factors like organisational structure, communication style and workplace environment.
But why is positioning employee experience at the core of corporate culture so vital? The numbers speak for themselves: Research by Gallup has revealed that such an approach can result in a 51% reduction in absenteeism, a 64% decline in safety incidents, and a 29% enhancement in quality. Separate research has also found a link between positive employee experience, customer satisfaction and financial revenue.
Employee experience and workforce satisfaction are paramount for successful business outcomes and necessary to improve company culture. However, you can only create a stellar employee experience strategy by understanding its current position and data-driven decision-making on how you need to improve. This is where people analytics comes in.
Understanding Employee Experience
When creating your employee experience strategy, it is imperative that you align it with the organisation's mission and purpose. This is crucial as it ensures your company's unique culture resonates through every stage of the employee lifecycle. It creates authenticity and meaning for those who are part of the organisation and a sense of belonging and commitment.
One organisation that is doing this exceptionally well is Organon, a global healthcare company focusing on women's health. Since the company's conception in 2021, company culture has been the number one priority and focus, and through that, building out the employee experience was crucial. On the Digital HR Leaders Podcast, Aaron Falcione, CHRO of Organon, shares that when speaking to the CEO over dinner regarding the concept of Organon, the CEO had expressed that:
"...if we have the most pristine and exact strategy... but we get the culture wrong, we will fail. And it was as binary as that. And that if we really get the culture right, our chances of success as an organisation go up exponentially. And so we started from that moment, building Organon to be a culture-first organisation."
To achieve this, the employee experience should thread seamlessly through every touchpoint of the employee journey, from recruitment and onboarding to development and retention. And this is where people analytics and data-driven decision-making can help you identify and address any disconnects and ensure that your employee experience meets each individual's needs.
Optimising Recruitment with People Analytics for Inclusive Hiring
The employee journey's recruitment stage is employees' first experience with you. Therefore, it is essential that you embed your values within every process and stage - as early as the application and interview processes. People analytics can help with this.
You can use data analytics and data analysis to help identify unconscious biases in the recruitment process, ensuring the hiring process is fair and inclusive. By tapping into predictive analytics, you can identify prospective employees who best fit your organisation's culture. Plus, you can use people analytics to track applicant progression and answer important questions such as: Are candidates receiving prompt responses? Is the tone aligned with your company's values?
Enhancing Onboarding with Data-Driven Insights for Long-Term Employee Success
Onboarding is another crucial stage in the employee experience process. It helps orient new employees to your organisational culture by giving them an insight into how things work, who the key players are and what their job role entails.
In essence, the onboarding stage of the employee journey is where your employees start to gain a real feel of your company culture, so again, it's essential to ensure that their experience aligns with your company values.
By analysing relevant data from employee feedback surveys, you can identify which aspects of the onboarding process are helping create the desired employee experience and what areas need improvement, enabling more personalised employee onboarding experiences for each new hire.
However, the true power lies in integrating onboarding data with other critical stages of the employee lifecycle, such as performance evaluation. This integration provides a comprehensive view, revealing how onboarding quality influences subsequent performance outcomes. Such holistic analysis empowers organisations to optimise onboarding strategies that foster initial engagement and lay the foundation for sustained productivity and growth throughout an employee's tenure.
Leveraging People Analytics for Enhanced Career Development and Employee Satisfaction
Look at performance metrics: are your employees excelling? But most importantly, do they feel they have the developmental needs that should form your company culture?
This is where employee listening, one of the top areas where people analytics adds the most value, comes into play. For example, let's look at how Organon are using employee feedback to foster a culture of personal development.
"Career development at Organon, as a new company, has become a very big focus for us this year, and that is a direct result of the last survey... It scored relatively high to benchmark to external benchmarks, but internally one of our lowest scoring items compared to all the other really positive feedback we were getting. And so it was really clear, our employees were speaking to us, and we said, "Okay, we need to put together a comprehensive solution that helps address some of those issues". And we launched this year the first of many years of a reimagined way of thinking about careers and career development here at Organon."
But you don't have to simply rely on surveys or advanced sentiment analysis such as voice and text data to measure employee satisfaction in terms of development. By having a good understanding of the current skills of your employees and an internal marketplace, you can identify skills gaps and provide relevant training and development to help employees reach their personalised career goals.
Enhancing Employee Engagement and Collaboration Insights
Similar to development, measuring employee engagement and workforce satisfaction can be achieved through sentiment analysis.
As an example, Aaron Falcione provides invaluable insight into how their employee listening strategy has helped them position employee experience at the heart of their company culture:
"We have an annual census survey...where we capture sentiment and map that sentiment to both the external benchmarks, but as well as our own values, to see how people are experiencing the culture. We ask for opportunities where we can enhance the overall level of engagement, reinforce what's working, and what's helping to advance our company, the vision and mission of the company, but also where there are gaps that need to be addressed. And it's had a profound effect on our priorities as an organisation, what we focus on, and we are going to do this regularly, where we have periodic pulsing of the organisation."
Suppose you tie this in with collaboration data, such as insights gained from Organizational Network Analysis (ONA). In that case, it provides you with a comprehensive view of employee engagement, helping you answer questions on who feels isolated, who are the movers and shakers, or who are the trendsetters regarding collaboration.
Mastering Employee Retention
Finally, you have retention. A vital part of any Human Resources strategy, employee retention is essential if you want to maintain a competitive advantage.
Retaining talented and engaged employees is not only crucial for the performance of your business, but it also helps demonstrate that you have created an environment where they can thrive. This, then, creates a positive impression on prospective candidates looking to join the company, increasing the likelihood of them wanting to work there.
Here, you really want to drone into your exit surveys: Why are your employees leaving? Is it because of a bad manager? Is it because of the lack of development opportunities? Or is it something else entirely?
You could also look into your performance data to identify any patterns related to employee retention. For example, if you have high-performing employees leaving earlier than expected, you need to investigate why and use people analytics to determine what could be done differently.
But if you want to get that one step ahead, consider adopting predictive analytics to identify attrition risks in advance and allow you to find ways to retain key talent proactively.
Don't Be Afraid to Experiment
In the words of Aaron Falcione:
"Get more comfortable with that experimenting, continue to try those new approaches and know that in the end, it will add, not detract from the overall experience."
Remember, people analytics is about more than collecting data. It's about understanding what the data means and using it for data-driven decision-making on how to improve the employee experience within your organisation.
So keep measuring and adapting your strategies, gather continuous feedback from your employees, and make sure you focus on the areas that are most important to them - and you will be well on your way to positioning employee experience at the centre of the corporate culture.
TRANSFORM YOUR PEOPLE ANALYTICS FUNCTION TO ALIGN WITH YOUR STAKEHOLDER NEEDS AND DELIVER MORE BUSINESS VALUE
At Insight222, we partner with our clients to ensure their people analytics efforts are calibrated with stakeholder needs and help them develop an effective roadmap for success. We partner with you to build a clear picture of what your business leaders value about people analytics and then help you understand how to reach their aspirations. The outcome is a roadmap with prioritised activities to combine quick-wins and long-term success. This, typically 16-20 weeks in duration, is a perfect way to immerse your team in leading people analytics practices. Contact us today to find out more and being your journey to transform your people analytics function!