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Think about the way a great customer experience makes you feel. You probably want to do repeat business with that company. Maybe you even tell your friends about the experience or post your compliment on social media. And for good reason. Organizations that prioritize improving the customer experience establish loyal customers, create positive endorsements, and generate increased profits. Now consider your employees. The need to establish that personal connection and create a transformational experience is very similar to the customer experience. The only difference is that your employees are now the customer.
What if your business focused on improving the employee experience as much as the customer experience? Instead of simply looking at how your company attracts and retains customers with innovative products and services, think how you can deploy personalized, multimodal messaging to recommend the right benefits to the right employees. Personalizing the experience means they’re receiving the message that pertains to them, instead of deleting yet another mass email that speaks to only a subset of the employee population.
And benefits should run across the entire employee journey—from leadership opportunities for personal growth to health and financial wellness. By encouraging employees to engage with benefits packages, you enhance the employee journey and retain highly-productive employees. In addition, you not only foster a strong and lasting company culture, you enhance your company’s reputation and improve job satisfaction. Let’s take a look at how this can be done.
Enabling New Hires to Hit the Ground Running
The employee journey is underway by the time a new hire officially joins the company. But don’t wait until a new hire’s first day, engage with them before they start!
Immediately engaging a new hire pre-boarding helps streamline the entire onboarding process and promotes communication from the beginning. It’s challenging to find time to nurture employees prior to day one because we’re all busy with other HR functions. We have to recruit and train employees and administer benefits. This makes automated data-driven messaging a life saver.
For example, utilize a data-driven communications platform to send timely, personalized messages that guide new hires to crucial information they need on day one. It could include a quick tutorial for internal software, a heads up on the paperwork needed for their first day, introductions to team members, or a Q&A opportunity with their manager before day one. Such messaging can facilitate early relationships with employee affinity groups, local colleagues, and their managers, while improving the employee experience.
You can also take this further by giving new hires a preview of their health and financial benefits. Providing information ahead of time gives employees time to review, discuss, and make educated decisions that impact the health and wellness of themselves and their families.
The result? Employees feel welcomed and valued, helping to maintain that “new job” excitement and immediately boosting time to productivity.
Discovering Tomorrow’s Business Leaders
Employee turnover is expensive and often suggests a problem with employee engagement. It is essential to guide employees through their professional development. Empowering employees in their development goals is another opportunity to enhance the employee experience.
A communications platform that uses predictive analytics and behavioral science can recommend relevant courses that match an employee’s performance review. Use your communications platform for data points like engagement with professional development programs, follow-ups from performance reviews, or tenure in a role to identify employees who show a knack for people management. From there you can send these individuals relevant messaging around management training for future leaders.
Proactively guiding employees to their next role within the organization demonstrates that developing and maintaining employees is vital. In turn, your company will benefit from improved employee experiences, reduced employee turnover, and decreased hiring costs.
Establishing Healthy, Productive Employees
We all know how difficult it is to set aside time for a yearly checkup or even to exercise. However, putting personal health on hold or postponing health concerns can set your employees up for a potential health crisis. Supporting employees in their home life so they remain healthy and productive at work is an employee experience home run.
You can help employees maintain their health by sending meaningful, proactive messaging that triggers employees to seek various types of preventive care. A data-driven communications platform recognizes the needs of individuals or family members who need to be proactively reminded about relevant preventive care screenings and to take action. Taking an active role in employee health is a great way to show you care, improve the employee experience, and reduce company healthcare costs.
Establishing Brand Advocates for Life
Eventually, employees leave. Sometimes they retire, and other times they accept a position at another organization. However, that doesn’t mean they had a bad employee experience, or the relationship must end.
It’s beneficial to provide a graceful exit and find reasons to maintain contact after someone has left. For example, company benefits like 401(k) plans or HSAs will remain with the former employee. There will also be important tax documents that will need to be sent to these individuals. You can send relevant communications to former employees about how to roll over their 401(k) plan or HSA, maintaining a positive rapport, even after they’re gone. Additionally, consider offering an alumni relations program to cultivate ongoing communication after employment. By engaging former employees you make them more likely to recommend talent, share positive company reviews, or even mentor future employees.
Creating an unbeatable employee experience starts when a prospective employee first engages with your organization and encompasses every stage of the employee journey through departure. Supporting employees in both health and career goals from the offset can build a life-long relationship between the company and employer, even after they leave the organization.
To retain talent, a sophisticated communications platform provides an open channel of communications between employees and HR (and their managers), fosters employee development, and equips teams, managers, and leaders to communicate the right messages at the right time through every touch point. As a result, you create brand advocates for life and elevate the employee experience.
