By Greg Belkin, Senior Director, Product Marketing
Empower employees with workflow automation so they can perform their jobs better, delight your customers more, and scale your business faster.
Just as consumers expect seamless experiences with your brand, so do your employees. And it’s no secret that happy experiences breed loyalty. Modern business leaders know that customer experience (CX) is a principal driver of success. A positive customer experience leads to repeat business, something essential for retaining an edge in today’s highly competitive market.
But who ensures that customers are happy and want to continue engaging with your brand?
Your employees.
And if your workers aren’t happy, they won’t perform well, or be inclined to treat consumers with the care and personalized attention they now expect. As such, creating a positive employee experience (EX) is as imperative for driving the bottom line as your customers are.
Getting the employee experience right isn’t easy. It requires a comprehensive and holistic view of your workers (we call it “Employee 360”), and an approach that enables them to do their jobs better, faster, and happier.
Employees want stability and loyalty, just like your customers.
So where do you start?
According to a recent analysis by the Forbes Human Resources Council, one practical step that HR and business leaders can take to improve the employee experience is to focus on the Employee Value Proposition or EVP. The EVP is the set of benefits or key differentiators that employers offer employees in return for their commitment to the company.
Sound familiar? It should.
The EVP should work in harmony with your company’s overall Value Proposition to the market to create consistency with your brand from all angles. You should offer the same level of value to your employees for working for your brand as you do to customers for engaging with it. This attention to detail and consistency is key to attracting talent, retaining it, and bolstering employee engagement.
Delivering on the EVP should extend throughout the employee lifecycle – from recruitment and onboarding, through to the physical work environment, internal communication, performance assessment, feedback channels, team-building activities, mentoring, and performance incentives. You don’t stop engaging with and nurturing your customers, right? The same goes for your employees.
Setting the stage for exceptional employee experiences
It goes without saying that happy employees are more productive and passionate about furthering your company’s mission. Recent studies confirm that companies with high employee engagement are 22% more profitable, yet only 33% of employees feel engaged at work.
Of course, disengagement and low morale can result from some of the more ‘obvious’ signs of an unhealthy workplace, like micromanagement, inadequate compensation or benefits, or a lack of growth opportunities. But some of the more insidious reasons for low morale – like outdated or deficient technology, manual business processes, unclear goals, and a lack of centralized visibility — can be just as detrimental.
As such, an often overlooked aspect of providing a comprehensive EVP is the inclusion of tools and processes to empower employees to succeed professionally and personally.
So what tools should you be looking for? We’re glad you asked.
Automating business processes requires you to have your applications and systems connected. You want to look for a unified integration platform that connects key endpoints, centralizes data, and automates workflows so you can simplify and streamline business processes. This not only accelerates change adoption and helps you scale your business faster, but it also improves employee morale by ridding them of tedious tasks (and giving them more time to focus on higher value priorities, like your customers).
Employees can also create their own solutions. No-code application development tools put them in the driver’s seat by empowering non-technical employees to easily build their own “gap apps” that solve business problems. Besides making technology implementation easier for workers, this approach frees up valuable resources from central IT, unburdening those teams and enabling organizations to focus on growth.
Invest in employees to future-proof your business.
By empowering employees through a strong EVP, they can better work to better deliver your VP to customers. And you don’t have to be a mathematician to know that empowered employees + delighted customers = accelerated business growth.
However, Forbes analysts observe that employee hardware and software are often regarded as business costs to be minimized and amortized. The flip side is these expenses are an investment in the employee experience – and just as important as (and probably cheaper than) the costs to attract, convert, and retain customers.
Long story short: organizations who treat the employee experience with as much strategic intention as the customer experience will outperform their competitors.
