The Employee Experience According to Maïeutyk

The employee experience (EX) is very similar to the concept of customer experience, but with your employees or candidates included in the equation. With today’s labour shortage, having an employee experience is a strategy that should not be overlooked if you want to grow your business.

Employee experience is more than just attracting qualified workers or how satisfied your employees were in the last annual survey. 

The employee experience is the systematic encounter between your company and the stakeholders who work or are considering working in your organization. This includes new applicants, collaborators, and your current employees.

An employee experience strategy focuses on improving the meeting space between the company and its candidates, employees, and collaborators. The goal is to make this meeting space as positive and memorable as possible.

The employee experience is the set of interactions lived by candidates before becoming an employee and then as an employee. To optimize the employee experience, knowing your company’s DNA and the needs of your candidates and employees is essential. Here’s more on that:

An Employee Experience Tailored to Your Image

Your Company

Company culture is an integral part of your brand’s DNA. However, the concept of culture is vague and intangible. At Maïeutyk, we help you identify your company’s purpose and values during our co-creation workshops. This exercise also clarifies and articulates your corporate culture.

During these workshops, we use maieutics (we call it Maïeutyk), which refers to the Socratic method. Maieutics is the art of helping individuals discover and formulate their inner truth through questioning techniques and dialogue. Our facilitator specializes in this questioning technique, which helps to “exploit” your team’s innate wisdom.

Your employer brand is the culture you promise candidates and employees. The employee experience is the promises you can keep.

Your Employees and Candidates

Do you know the perception of candidates who consider you an employer? Does this perception change over time once they become employees?

The employee experience is the sum of all the interactions that both candidates and employees have with your organization. From the physical or virtual recruiting process to the support during the onboarding process, training, annual evaluation, etc., each of these elements contributes to creating either a positive, negative, or neutral impression of your company.

The goal, of course, is to provide a positive experience that can be repeated sustainably.

However, if the experience is negative, steps can be taken to improve the situation. A negative experience requires that you have a mechanism in place so that candidates or employees can share with you the reasons for the negative experience.

Finally, a neutral experience is considered a failure. It is an admission of “non-experience” that is often very difficult to correct due to the lack of information on the subject.

An employee experience strategy aims to optimize each interaction between your company, candidates, and employees throughout their entire employee journey.

What are the challenges of an EX strategy?

The challenges of developing and implementing an employee experience strategy are even more difficult than optimizing customer and brand experiences. The main reason is that the customer journey is generally shorter than the employee journey.

In fact, your employees are systematically evaluating you 365 days a year, over several years!

The risk of disappointing or making a bad impression is much greater!

An employee experience strategy must manage the various touch points of the employee journey and ensure that the expectations of your candidates and employees are managed on an ongoing basis. This is where the challenge lies!

Your teams must know and live your corporate culture.

Finally, it’s impossible to make everyone happy all the time. An integral part of a culture is that it is a living entity, with both the organization and employees playing a role and being responsible for making it real.

Happiness at work is everyone’s responsibility!

The immense challenge of bringing happiness into the workplace cannot only be the organization’s responsibility. Happiness in the workplace is only attainable if everyone, employee and employer, accepts a share of the responsibility.

The employer’s responsibility is to provide a space for dialogue, both at the team and corporate levels, in addition to offering a respectful, stimulating, and safe work environment.

The employee’s responsibility is to open up and use this space for dialogue. Reach out to each other, their co-workers, their boss, different departments, etc.

As such, creating this space may require both the employer and the employee to step out of their comfort zones and come to it with an open mind and a lot of humility.

Employee experience: a driving force to help you achieve your goals.

In conclusion, a company’s objectives are achieved by mobilizing its employees. The keys to success are a team aligned around a shared vision where everyone understands their role and has the skills, tools, and motivation to achieve it.

A good employee experience strategy allows you to establish priorities and a detailed action plan to achieve your goals. I also invite you to measure your employee experience and observe its evolution. To do so, check out our new blog post on 11 ways to measure employee experience.

To understand where your company stands regarding employee experience, don’t hesitate to contact me for a free diagnostic.