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Organizations say they want to optimize employee experience, but how they define and measure success is an open-ended question.
The default tends to be obvious measurements like employee retention. But such cursory, quantitative assessment is no longer sufficient to assess if their efforts to boost employee experience are bearing fruit.
How else can business leaders measure the impact of their EX investments? And what is “employee experience” these days anyway?
Defining Employee Experience for a New Era
“If you ask 10 companies what they mean by the employee experience, you'll get 10 different answers right now,” said Larry Mohl, founder of Rali, a platform that helps shape employee experience.
Over the past few years, he said, employees have started to realize they carry a lot more power with companies and they can now “vote with their feet.” This, he said, makes finding and keeping the right talent to achieve business plans and goals incredibly difficult.
The profound shifts in work-life integration has made it clear that employee experience is intimately connected to how organizations manage change. “In my mind, you can't separate change experience from employee experience,” said Mohl.
He offers the process of bringing employees back to the office as an example. Companies that disregard employees’ perspectives do so at their own peril, he continued.
“What's your approach? Send out a memo to everybody saying ‘you need to be in the office for three days a week’? Well, we saw what happened when companies tried that. A lot of people quit the next day.”
Mohl believes that companies get better employee experience when they manage change in a “people-centered” way. “The simple way I think about it is, does the company do change to people or does it do change with people? Do they include people in the process of change in a way where they feel emotionally connected to it?”
Being people-centered requires seeing employees as whole and complex individuals, including their emotional life.
“Managers are no longer just dealing with whether people are showing up on time and meeting their deliverables,” said Mary Slaughter, a global human capital executive, consultant, executive coach and author. “The pandemic ripped off the veneer, and we got used to dealing with the whole person. The person with kids walking in the background or a dog barking or a sick family member living with them,” she said.
Employees who feel seen and heard as whole people are far more likely to have a good experience at work. Employers can pursue that by not only making change with their employees, but also giving them the flexibility they need to thrive in all parts of their lives.
“It's not about work-life balance, like a scale with work on one side and life on the other,” Slaughter said. “It’s not that. It’s a straight-up integration. The workforce sees that work has to fit into the flow of their life.”
Related Article: Employee Experience Is About Work-Life Integration, Not Balance
'Emotion Is Data; Get Used to It'
Culture has become such a vast area for companies, and it makes managing and measuring employee experience that much more difficult.
Slaughter recommends using an employee engagement survey to rate employees’ emotional state on a numerical scale. It’s a good start, but don’t stop there, she continued. Also ask them to talk about their experiences.
“You want people to tell you that color commentary that’s behind the number,” she said. “Qualitative research asks people why they feel the way that they feel, and both quantitative and qualitative research have a place in corporate life. My headline is ‘emotion is data; get used to it.’”
Related Article: The Action Is the Message: Why You Need Employee Engagement Data
How to Get the Data You Need
The most straightforward way to get data to assess employee experience is having an honest conversation. Ask your employees questions you want the answers to. And if the conversation is difficult, you can even do this anonymously to offer an even more candid environment.
Mohl suggests asking questions like whether employees feel that they trust their leaders, whether they feel their leaders are effective and whether they feel they work on a healthy team. The word “healthy” is key in the latter question, since employee experience is centered on the process of work, not just the outcome.
“It's not just the fact that my team is high-performing,” said Mohl. “If you can say yes to the statement ‘We have conflict, but it's productive,’ then you’re probably having a good employee experience.”
Mohl also suggests asking employees whether their work has meaning to them, since employee experience improves when workers can see a connection to purpose and values. Asking whether the company prioritizes inclusion and belonging is another good idea.
“Inclusion and belonging is a cultural underpinning for a positive employee experience,” Mohl said. “Do I feel like I'm included? Does my voice matter? Am I involved with decisions that affect me?”
Finally, ask employees whether they have opportunities for upskilling and career advancement, as those are also key elements of positive employee experience.
Along with rating scales and questions, leaders can seek input from a variety of other sources, such as external job-rating sites like Glassdoor; exit survey data in which people are often forthcoming; and turnover data parsed by demographics such as race, gender, age and geography.
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One other option is analyzing employee communication on internal collaboration platforms. This can be controversial, as it introduces privacy concerns, but it is a promising avenue for insight into employees’ feelings. Mohl’s company Rali uses AI-powered tools that allow companies to collect and analyze this type of traffic. He believes it’s an efficient way of getting insights on a large volume of subjective employee perspectives.
“I think we're in this really great period of exploration around this topic,” said Mohl. “We’re deepening the analytics, data and conversation about what it takes to create a great employee experience.”
Ultimately, there’s no “right” answer about how to measure employee experience. The keys here are to find ways to access and assess workers’ feelings and to continuously experiment.
Related Article: When People Analytics Meet Workforce Analytics, Employee Experience Insights Follow
