The Meaning, Measurement and Analysis of the Employee Experience

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Managing the employee experience is critical to the success of your business. Employees, after all, build the products and deliver service to your customers.  In short, they help ensure the customers receive a great customer experience, which translates into happier, loyal customers. Consequently, business leaders are seeking to better understand how to improve the quality of the employee relationship.

As a resource for businesses, below is a list of articles on things related to measuring, managing and improving the employee experience. The content of these articles ranges from asking the right questions in employee surveys and analyzing survey data to collecting the right employee metric and illustrating how employee loyalty fits into the larger company ecosystem.

Why Employee Experience is Important

Service Delivery Model Highlights the Impact of Employees and Partners on Customer Loyalty and Business Growth

Your company is driven by its relationship with three stakeholder groups. Find out how to collect and integrate the feedback from these different groups to optimize business performance.

• Understanding Your Company Ecosystem to Improve Performance: Each company has relationships with three primary stakeholders: 1) Employees, 2) Customers and 3) Partners (e.g., re-sellers).  The quality of these relationships governs the company’s success. I outline a systematic, practical approach to capturing and leveraging feedback from each of these stakeholders.
• Your Product, Future and Employees: Three Customer Experience Pillars of Growth: While your products bring in new customers and your strategy opens up their wallets, it is your employees who make them stay. Based on a study of several B2B companies, results showed that customer retention was driven primarily by how customers felt about their relationship with account management. People like to be around other people they like and trust, a sentiment that applies to both personal and business relationships. It’s hard for customers to leave you when they like your customer-facing employees.
• Linkage analysis: Linking VOC metrics to constituency (employee, partner) metrics: You can extend the value of your company’s surveys (employee, customer, partner) by integrating them to uncover how your entire ecosystem works. By linking these sorts of business metrics, you can see how to build a company with a culture that fosters employee loyalty.

Employee Turnover

Your relative performance is important. How your employees compare you to previous employers was the best predictor of real employee turnover behavior.

Companies can use two types of employee turnover metrics: 1) self-reported intentions of leaving – in surveys and 2) actual turnover behavior. Here are two articles that show how these metrics tell you different things. Choose your metric wisely.

• Self-reported Intentions vs. Actual Behaviors: Comparing Two Employee Turnover Metrics: Depending on which turnover metric you use, you will get different results in your driver analysis (i.e., trying to discover what sorts of employee experience factors (e.g., supervisor, pay, work group) really drive turnover).
• Your Relative Performance: A Better Predictor of Employee Turnover: The best predictor of actual employee turnover (from an employee survey taken 2 years prior) is how your employees compare you to prior employers. For employee who think you’re only average or worse than most previous employers, their retention rate two years later is only 45%. For employees who think you’re better than most or the best compared to prior employers, their two year retention rate is 85%.

Measurement of Employee Empowerment and Employee Engagement

Employee Loyalty Driver Chart

The insights you gain from the analysis of employee experience data are dependent on the things you measure. Make sure you measure things that are real and meaningful. These two articles review the measurement of employee empowerment and employee engagement. While the concept of employee engagement is fuzzy, employee empowerment is clear and measurable.

• Clarifying Employee Engagement: A Review of Four Metrics: You might hear a lot about “employee engagement.” I don’t buy into the verbiage because, when you take a close look at the measures that companies use to measure engagement, they are simply relabeling “employee satisfaction” measures as measures of employee engagement. Calling employee satisfaction measures another term does not make it a different thing. People need to be precise in their language and measurement.
• Improving Employee Empowerment Begins with Measurement: Employee empowerment is the degree to which employees believe that they have the authority to act on their own to increase quality. This employee variable can be measured and is useful in predicting important organizational outcomes like employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.

Conducting an Employee Survey

Employee Relationship Diagnostic: Product Details – Click image to download brochure

How do you conduct an employee survey? Two things you need to consider: 1) Ask the right questions to get useful data, 2) Know how to analyze it to get the insights you need to improve the employee experience.

• Getting the Most Value from your Employee Survey: This article provides a good overview of an employee survey and how you can derive more value from it as part of your customer experience program. I go over best practices in the types of questions you need in an employee survey and why you need them.
• Using Driver Analysis to Improve Employee Loyalty: This article illustrates how the employee survey data can be analyzed to help you get the most value from the data. Understand how to identify the key drivers of employee loyalty.

Check back for updates. If you have a question about employee surveys, please let me know in the comment section.