Ways to Develop Employee Experiences to Drive Better Productivity

Far from knowledge, skills, and experience, enhancing employee productivity is the ultimate tie that binds your business as an optimally functioning whole. Encouraging 

your employees to work harder, better and stronger—all in favor of your business—requires implementing a set of tools that do the job for you. 

All of this can be, to say the least, a tedious task. However, the benefits of taking action towards building a productive workforce are immeasurable. 

To maximize your employee efficiency, productivity, and overall performance, consider enforcing any of the following strategies. 

1. Introduce Employee Journey Mapping

Journey mapping is an excellent tool for better productivity. Visually representing the employee’s evolution in a company—journey mapping allows for continuity from the moment of recruitment to that of departure. Like an actual map, these tools show an employee’s progress within the company, which is why they’re great for increasing productivity, motivation, and employee retention. Employees are able to see how much they’ve grown and developed, their important milestones and events, and points of improvement, among other things. This leads to an increase in motivation, productivity, organization, and even higher levels of employee satisfaction.

Journey maps also allow managers and team leaders to more easily engage with employees, assess their needs, goals, and ways to achieve them, fix bad experiences, and leverage the good ones. There are several stages of journey mapping. It typically starts with recruitment and ending with the employee’s leave, whether resignation or retirement. It’s worth mentioning that a journey map is most effective when it’s committed to and updated regularly. Remember: this is a tool that needs to be used continuously, it’s not a one-time solution that will solve all your problems. 

2. Enforce Employee Intercommunication

Good communication is imperative for the smooth sailing of all businesses. And while it’s always encouraged and welcome, it doesn’t always get the focus it needs in most companies. Establishing a company culture where the right accent is placed on communication leads to empowered teams. It also encourages teamwork, builds a community where everyone can contribute with their thoughts, and get their ideas heard. This will also lead to fewer errors due to miscommunication and a clearer overview of the entire work.

When you enforce employee intercommunication, you encourage employees to seek help when they need it from other colleagues. This improves the entire team dynamic and empowers your teams to vocalize their thoughts. What’s more, it will reduce the defensiveness that people tend to have when faced with negative feedback, so they’ll be more open to constructive criticism. 

It’s entirely up to you which communication channel you would like to use, whether it’s face-to-face through regular meetings and feedback sessions, virtually through video conferencing mediums, or team-building events, dedicated to employee intercommunication and socializing. There are also communication tools like Webex cloud calling, Slack, Jabber, or collaboration tools like Trello and Asana where everyone can keep track of progress. 

3. Refine the On-Board Experience

The onboarding process is a must-have for all businesses who want to invest in their employees. It’s a chance for the employee to get familiar with their coworkers, work environment, as well as the way the company is operating. While there are people who learn better when thrown in the fire, studies suggest 77% of new hires who have had proper onboarding reach their first performance milestones. So, taking your time to design a suitable onboarding program can lead to a positive experience for your employees. This in turn will increase productivity, as they will not only get a proper welcome but will be familiar with the work of the entire company and easily find their place within your community. 

It’s important to create an onboarding program tailored to each employee as no two individuals are the same. The objectives should be clear and measurable so that you can see more easily what can be achieved and what needs to be adjusted. It will be easier for employees to find where they fit in, what the position requirements are, and how things work. On the other hand, it will be easier for you to keep track of their progress, get to know your new employee and their skill sets, and see how you can make the employment mutually beneficial.

4: Implement Stay Interviews 

Aside from the initial recruitment interview, there are two other types of interviews that are just as important. You’ve probably heard of the exit interview, where an employee is asked for feedback on their reason for leaving. While this provides good insight into the things that could be better, it’s too late at this stage to keep the valuable workers from leaving.

The Stay Interview is done between a manager and an employee where they talk about what drives them to continue working for the company. This is a great way to understand what motivates employees, but it’s also a great chance to understand what needs to be improved. This way, you won’t have to conduct an exit interview with a worker you couldn’t afford to lose. 

The stay interviews can be done as frequently as your HR department needs them. They are usually a good indicator to employees that the management appreciates their work and cares for them. Positive reassurance like that can only lead to happy and productive employees. It can also solve a lot of retention problems, as you’ll have fewer exit interviews to do once you understand what truly makes your employees stay. Given that retention issues cost companies up to $550 billion last year, it is definitely something to consider as a business owner. 

5. Incorporate Employee Wellness 

It’s no secret that physical activity boosts overall morale and productivity and by incorporating a wellness program, you’ll promote physical, mental, and emotional health. Showing that you care about your employees’ well-being, makes them feel appreciated and will result in more productive and motivated individuals. The company culture should promote overall health as it creates a positive environment everyone loves to be a part of. The wellness programs can be tailored to the needs of the company and employees and can include anything from a healthy breakfast at work to monthly spa getaways. 

To truly incorporate employee wellness, it’s not enough to give employees a gym membership. Wellness promotes health and overall growth among other things, so you need to pay attention to mental and emotional health as well. It’s important to be mindful of sick days, off days, enough paid vacation days, paid parental leave, regular health checks, and more. There is a lot of room for creativity for the wellness program, so take the time to tailor it to your employees’ needs. Think about what would make them happy and incorporate it into your program. You will have happy, healthy, and productive employees who love what they do. 

6. Consider Employee Feedback 

Great companies are built on great teamwork and healthy relationships forged over time. In order to create a good team, you need to have a positive company culture, where employees trust each other, no matter their seniority level.

This is where employee feedback comes into play. By giving employees the chance to provide feedback, you’re showing respect and validation. But it’s not just about listening to the feedback but also implementing it. In this way, employees will feel heard and more motivated to work and improve. It’s important to assure employees that negative feedback will not be penalized so they feel more comfortable sharing their issues too so that you know what to improve. 

There are many ways to generate employee feedback. It can be done through surveys, questionnaires, open discussions, one-on-one meetings, voting polls, and more. If you feel like employees don’t feel comfortable sharing feedback openly, you can make it anonymous as well using whistle blowing systems. This will make employees more open to sharing their feedback with you so that you can grow and improve as a team. Remember that it’s not just about collecting feedback for the sake of it, but considering it and implementing it.

However, you really need to take a lot of time to create an environment where this can function properly. So, don’t be afraid to lead by example!

7. Design Career Development Programs

No one can truly stay in one job position for years without learning anything new and stay motivated. People need something to drive them further, a goal to achieve, and a challenge to overcome. A great way to motivate people is by offering them career development programs. These programs are a great model for possible progress within the company and give employees the choice of direction where they want to go. It’s a great way to motivate employees and to increase interest in learning and career growth. 

When designing the Career Development Programs, it’s vital to keep in mind the profile and skill set of the people you currently have and the ones you will potentially hire. Knowing their skill sets and capabilities will be easier to guide them in the right direction. Assigning a mentor to help employees advance in their careers is important as well. The mentor should guide the employees towards the most logical career path and help them achieve the milestones. With proper feedback and guidance from the mentor, the employees will strive to work hard to learn, improve, and ultimately reach their goals.

Additionally, this can also improve the recruitment process in your company. Instead of putting your focus on the external market of labor, you can focus on your workforce.

8. Incorporate a Training System 

Learning is a continuous process, and soft skills are the core of how well your employees perform in the workplace. So, integrating a proper training system and expanding the skill set of your employees can benefit any company in the long run.

It’s important to assess your employee’s needs when it comes to soft or hard skills and develop a program based on that. When it comes to actually incorporating the program, you can consider mentoring, courses, traditional training sessions, coaching, or seminars. 

Integrating a suitable training system can benefit employees in multiple ways. Aside from increasing productivity, you can expect an increase in motivation as well, mainly because your workforce will feel valued at their workplace. Furthermore, you can expect other operational processes to improve as your employees gain more skills in communication, conflict resolution, team dynamics, feedback, and so on. 

To sum it all up

Working with people can be quite the challenge because there are so many different individuals and characters, however, it’s also the beauty of it. Creating a positive employee experience will reduce your turnover, and increase your worker’s motivation, productivity, and overall satisfaction. You might feel like there’s a lot of work to be done, but truth be told, it’s the little things that matter the most. 

Building a strong team takes time and dedication, but once you have the foundation down, productivity will skyrocket! Listening to their feedback, promoting a positive work environment, implementing Wellness programs, and offering them career development, are just some of the things that you can do to develop the employee's experience. Additionally, being innovative and creating a dynamic environment can immensely benefit you. 

The result? 

Hardworking, productive, and highly motivated individuals who love coming to work. 

Focusing your energy on all of these things will certainly take your company to the next level. So, take your time and start planning out your next actions towards a ground-breaking productive workplace!