How to Curate the Perfect Employee Experience

A common term to hear within a business is ‘customer experience’. This refers to the entire journey that you take your customers on, from when they hear about your brand, engage with your marketing, and through to their final impressions of their time with you.

This is an incredibly important consideration because it refers to how your brand is perceived by your audiences – it’s essentially how your brand exists in the competitive industry.

However, what you might not consider to quite the same degree is curating the perfect employee experience. Even though they aren’t paying customers, it’s just as important to give this aspect of your business just as much focus.

Stage 1: The Hiring Process

The beginning of the employee experience is arguably one of its most important aspects. The hiring process will completely shape the first impression that your new staff member has of working with your business, and a negative start could hinder your chances of improving that perception as the weeks progress.

What can be especially difficult about getting off on the right foot here is how long the hiring process actually is – not just deciding on who to hire in the first place but the opening days and weeks to their time with you.

1. Applications

On some level, the application stage can feel like the one where you and your business are the least involved. Instead, the focus is arguably on the applicant and how they structure their application.

This might be forgetting about how important and delicate the actual wording of the job description should be to get the kind of result that you want. You’re trying to paint your business in a good light here – they have to choose you as much as you have to choose them, after all.

That means that you need to be specific in highlighting why they should work with you. This goes beyond salary and benefits; this is about what kind of culture they can expect to find, what kind of hours they’ll be working, and whether there is any flexible element involved.

Even after they have applied, being sure to keep them in the loop by letting them know that the application is received, perhaps how long they can expect to wait before hearing from you, and delivering on that promise, are all good ways of making this a positive experience.

2. Interviews

When it comes to selecting who to hire from among these various candidates, different businesses are going to have their own systems.

Some might be content with just one interview, but others might have multiple and some sort of work trial to assess how right they are for the job. Again, this information should be included in the initial job description, as you don’t want people to be repeatedly caught off-guard by another new hoop that they have to jump through.

It’s also a good time to remember that you’re trying to appeal to the applicant as well as the other way around, and making too hard of a point about the standards you expect from them at this stage might give off a bad impression.

Instead, giving them the opportunity to ask questions and trying to encourage them to relax might help them feel more at ease and in a better position to exhibit the best that they have to offer. Being able to do your interviews remotely can also be helpful for those who live a bit further out.

3. Early Days

Once the whole process is seemingly behind you and you’ve decided on the right person for the job, you’ll enter the tentative first steps of your employment.

Many businesses might have a probation period wherein you take time to assess whether this person is a good fit for the role after all, giving you the chance to temporarily withhold benefits and part ways if it doesn’t work out. This enables you to avoid putting yourself in a position where you’re investing a lot of time and money into a candidate who doesn’t end up being what you were initially looking for.

While you might feel as though the whole application and interview process were about checking for these potential flaws, it’s very difficult to tell how someone is actually going to function in a position until their work has started for real.

Stage 2: Occupying the Position

When do those early days end? It’s hard to say for sure.

Some people might fall effortlessly into a new role and others might take a while to get to grips with their surroundings. It’s all about their personal working style and how used they are to the kind of work that you’re expecting from them.

Still, once you’re confident that they’ll be sticking around beyond the initial period, you might feel more comfortable easing them into what else the position has to offer so that they can represent your brand to the best of their ability.

1. Staff Training

One way that you are likely going to go about that is through providing them with specific learning materials that pertain to their new job. While this might be a consideration for the early days for some businesses, others will see the training going on for a long time – in the background of the development of the employee.

E-learning can be a perfect fit for this. With a business intranet platform, developed with consultants like claromentis.com, you can customize the kind of learning that you want available and the ways in which your employees test the knowledge that they’ve gained.

For instance, you might find that having a quiz at the end of each module can ensure that people aren’t just clicking through the slides and have to instead actually focus on what is being learned. You can decide the score that needs to be achieved for a pass to be considered and for you to feel as though they’re ready to test this knowledge in a practical way.

2. A Positive Work Environment

Once all of that is in the rear-view mirror, however, and you feel as though you have a new staff member who is perfect for the team, you want to make sure that they feel the same way.

Perhaps the most effective way of going about this is to develop a positive work environment that encourages people to stay on their own accord. You want to cultivate an atmosphere that encourages your staff members to offer their best work, rather than trying to force it out of them with tactics like micromanaging.

This, after all, might backfire and simply make the new employee feel more negatively about your business.

What Next?

This might feel like a lot of work to have to maintain, but it’s important to note that there isn’t really a closed book when it comes to curating the perfect employee experience.

Your employees are always going to be thinking about their careers and whether or not their current job is the one that they want for the foreseeable future. That means that you have to consistently be thinking about what you can do to encourage them to stick around.

This can be especially difficult now that you’re in a position where your employees are valuable assets and extensions of your brand, meaning that it’s important to be especially mindful of how you respond.

1. Staff Turnover

One of the reasons that you might be more concerned about employees coming and going is that the more it happens, the higher your staff turnover becomes.

This is naturally going to take a toll on your business as you continuously spend resources on training new hires, but it’s also a statistic that might prevent people from applying to your company at all. However, it’s important to understand that you can’t force people to stay – and this is where the importance of a positive work environment comes into play.

If you’re doing everything that you can – creating a positive, trusting work environment with plenty of opportunities that let employees have a degree of control over their work/life balance – you might find that your staff turnover remains low. This is all that you can do, but naturally, it won’t mean that nobody ever leaves, and that’s okay.

2. Letting Go

When someone does decide to leave, you might try and keep them around through offers like an increase in their salary, but sometimes that’s not the issue at play. It might just be that their life has moved on, and the position is no longer right for them.

Being civil and friendly, however, can ensure that this bridge doesn’t burn up at this point. After all, even though you’re sad to see a trusted employee go, they might come back again at some point to investigate a career with you. Even if they don’t, they could leave and speak highly of their time with you – encouraging others to apply.

In the end, there are far more benefits to parting ways on a positive note than digging your heels in and refusing to accept this change.