Your employee experience means everything. Reinvent the experience to create a more desirable, productive workplace that retains your talent.

Employees are quitting and job-switching at near-historic rates as they reassess what matters to them. Your employee value proposition (EVP) needs to resonate in a new way, and your employee experience (EX) must deliver on it. Here’s how to address both.

Laura Hoppa, Principal Performance Consultant at parent company TiER1 Performance, also presented on this topic at the 2021 eXLearn Virtual Conference to discuss how to make small changes with a big impact on retention by focusing on the moments that matter most to engagement and performance. To listen to her presentation, watch the YouTube video.

1) Adopt a customer experience mindset and radically design for today's workforce.

Believe and behave as if your employees are your customers. Because they are—they’re simply customers with a different need. They have something you want (their talent, energy, ingenuity, determination, passion, and loyalty) and to gain more of it, you can offer more of what they want. That means intentionally designing an attractive, holistic employee experience (from pay, incentives, and benefits to culture, tools, and systems).

Today’s post-pandemic workforce is setting a higher bar for what they expect from an employer. Now is the perfect time to examine your existing employee experience to ensure you are aligned with their needs. Traditionally, much of the employee experience in a modern workplace is built on a system of uneven (and artificial) power dynamics. It’s also driven by fear. Managers and leaders are situated “above” their team in the organizational chart. They control recognition, pay increases, learning opportunities, career moves, and promotions. Whether anyone is aware of it or not, this often plays on the basic human fears of failure, rejection, and shame to goad people into giving more time and energy at work.

These dynamics happen in even the “nicest” of workplaces. It’s not only the individual temperaments of leaders that are responsible for creating a fear-based reality. It’s also the organizational structures and human systems within an organization—like org design, budget ownership, compensation structure, access to information, and performance management norms—that shape any employee experience.

The reaction that people have within an environment is biological. We’re hardwired for a limbic system response (fight, flight, or freeze) that keeps the human body stressed and anxious and, over time, leads to burnout. It’s not the way we want customers feeling, and it’s not what we want for employees either.

With a customer experience mindset, we approach the components differently. We put our employees at the center of the process, appreciating their needs, hopes, and desires. Together, we search for ways to elicit positive emotions in our workforce—those associated with becoming engaged, enjoying holistic wellness, deepening relationships, and pursuing a shared purpose. Those are the feelings that enhance performance and support success.

Then we design a journey to realize those results. All along that design process, we uncover where deep, structural factors are creating headwinds to the desired experience, and we transform and evolve the organization accordingly.

2) Be transparent about your company's employee value proposition (EVP).

Once you feel confident in the employee experience you’ll deliver, document it as an Employee Value Proposition (EVP). This is a win-win statement that puts words to the traditionally unspoken bargain that defines your employment relationship, on all sides. (Stakeholders are all the entities that impact or are impacted by a business. Conscious businesses recognize that each of their stakeholders is important and all are connected and interdependent, and that the business must seek to optimize value creation for all of them.)

Highlight the cultural elements that differentiate you, but don’t spin. Be honest about where you’re working toward an aspirational state that you‘re still reaching for—in other words, where your transformation is in progress. Be clear about where you’re not transforming and why. Bring your people into shared understanding of the complexity and context around the decision. Get real about the company’s tough challenges; where you’re asking for their discomfort, service, and sacrifice; and the high bar required for success. Sugarcoat nothing.

This is the uncomfortable part for many leaders, but it’s absolutely critical. Many, many companies become disheartened by the results of their EX initiatives or when their investment doesn’t move them forward. Learn from their lesson: overpromising drives up employees’ expectations, only to ultimately disappoint and disengage them.

3) Share your employee experience and live up to it.

Once you’ve got the candid reality down—the awesome benefits, the real challenges, and the high expectations—share it as a recruiting tool to attract talent are all in and ready to be part of the real deal.

Just as important, use the EVP as an alignment tool with your existing employees. Seek to understand whether it aligns with their experience. Ask whether the organization is living up to its aspirations, and how you might work together to personalize this experience to individual needs. Listen. Then, importantly, respond with action.

Talk to your leaders about how, ultimately, we are all responsible for creating the desired experience for each other. Ask them:

  • Is this the experience you are striving to deliver to everyone you work with?
  • Are you fostering the culture described here?
  • Is there anything you want to do differently?

From that point forward, engage in continual employee listening. Your organization should seek both quantitative and qualitative ways to continually assess whether you are living up to the overall expectations you’ve set. Consider investing in an Employee Experience Platform (EXP) that will keep a finger on the pulse of employee sentiment across your enterprise, day to day, in real time, and provide the data in usable insights.

4) Use your EVP to reinvent outdated performance review processes.

Your EVP can, and should, form the basis of ongoing performance management or employee success conversations. Managers should frame these meetings as mutual, candid check-ins on the employees’ whole system of performance factors, not only the individual’s behaviors and results. It starts with asking (as above), how are we, as an organization, showing up for you? Based on the expectations established in the EVP, are you experiencing any recent surprises or disappointments? How am I (a person who’s here for you, in your corner) living up to my part of the bargain?

Next, an employee should be invited to share where they believe they lived up to—or fell short of—expectations. That will naturally open the door for a powerful, shared conversation where leaders can add to the individual’s self-assessment, thereby offering helpful, supportive, actionable feedback.

5) Leverage your EVP to help strength organizational trust.

As you regularly hear the workforce’s assessment of how the organization is living up to the stated EVP, you can celebrate those wins. On the other hand, as you hear about gaps, you’ll have the opportunity to recognize missteps, ask for grace, and make amends. Perhaps you’ll become aware that a decision was misperceived as a gap, giving you the chance to offer greater context as to what’s behind it and how it ultimately DOES align to the EVP.

In all those scenarios, you’ll gain trust throughout the company by listening and responding with action. That is how you’ll show that you hold the EVP—your shared agreement—as an unshakeable touchstone. It’s also how you’ll show people that you prioritize them; that they matter. THAT is what they are looking for. That, in itself, is their desired experience—and the one that will go a long way in retaining your people for the long run.

We love to chat about mapping the moments that matter within the employee experience, especially those that impact employee retention. If you’d like a partner to help you design a custom approach to enrich your organization’s EX, contact us today. 


This blog post was originally published on parent company, TiER1 Performance’s website here.