How software can help your employee experience to thrive in 2023

Your organisation can thrive without many things, but the employee experience is not an area to compromise on. However, it's not easy to get it right, and it takes time to build an experience that employees really value. 

And there are several reasons why the employee experience should be on top of your organisational strategy and agenda. Before the pandemic, employee engagement was steadily rising and had been for almost a decade.

However, since COVID began, engagement has dropped to only 21% of employees feeling engaged in their work or company.

This blog will discuss why you shouldn't neglect your approach to creating and maintaining a strong employee experience and ways in which you can use employee experience software to help you deliver an experience that other organisations will envy.

What is the employee experience and why is it important?

The employee experience covers the overall experience someone has working for your organisation throughout their employment with you. It includes every factor of the employee life cycle, including recruitment and onboarding, performance management, compensation and benefits, culture and workplace and communication, amongst other factors.

For your organisation to attract, motivate and maintain talent, the employee experience is crucial. However, it can be an ever-changing aspect of the workplace and can be easily affected by things like organisational change, restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, situations like the pandemic and even management changes or new policies or software.

Significant and small changes can also impact the employee experience and may do so temporarily or long-term if issues aren't reviewed and focused upon.

If you don't measure and assess the employee experience throughout the employee journey, then it's impossible to understand how your people are feeling, which can impact morale, productivity, revenue and employee turnover.

How do you measure the employee experience?

There are several ways you can collect, analyse and feedback on the employee experience in your organisation, but arguably the most effective way to do this is by using the right technology.

For example, in the past, before technology had significantly developed, employee surveys may have been sent to all staff for their feedback either via a paper version or as an email document. While this would still enable you to capture feedback, the collection and analysis could prove very time-consuming. Plus, if you had to input all the data into a spreadsheet and also keep track of who had and hadn’t responded to the survey, it could take a lot of time and effort.

Using technology that does all this for you in one app or piece of software significantly reduces the time and effort spent on collection and analysis, ensures that all information is accurate, is kept in one place and cannot be lost and also allows tracking to see data like completion rates, completion time etc.  

Why employee satisfaction surveys aren’t enough

Research shows that only 22% of organisations are getting good results from their employee surveys, often because surveys focus on too many areas. And while strategically planned satisfaction surveys are effective at gathering feedback from employees, they work best with other forms of measuring engagement.

Surveys provide valuable insights for organisations, whether they are conducted annually to gauge employee engagement, regularly to track pulse, or to gather feedback on the onboarding process. As the organisation determines when to administer surveys, they have the ability to control the timing of feedback requests.

However, sometimes employees will want to offer feedback in the moment or after a work event etc., and they need the opportunity to do this. By using technology that offers instant feedback, you are expressing that you care about the employee's voice at all times and welcome their feedback with open heart. 

In addition, with the rise of hybrid working, the traditional way of working with everyone in the office has gone, so it’s harder to gain or give feedback to the organisation. By offering employees the option of an app where they can give feedback, shout-outs, celebrations etc., at any time, from anywhere, you will be able to establish a feedback culture. 

What employee experience software should you use?

Before you even consider purchasing employee experience software, take a step back and think about what you want to measure, how often and whether you're looking for software that can manage one part of the employee experience or as much as possible.

For instance, you could find software that allows you to design and send out surveys to all staff or selected individuals and track and collect the data. If this is the only way you're looking to measure the employee experience, then this will work for you.

However, if you want other ways of measuring the experience rather than just using surveys, you need to look for software that gives you a much broader reach and measures feedback and performance in other ways.

Human Resources information systems (HRIS) are pretty much the norm for most developed HR departments. However, as great as they are at managing data about employees including personal data, medical records and compensation data, they won't be able to measure engagement, feedback or a sense of engagement levels.

Sorwe employee experience options

With Sorwe, you can empower your employees by giving them a voice whenever and wherever they want. Our survey function allows you to design and distribute various types of surveys, while providing individuals the flexibility to complete the feedback at a time and place that suits them best.

By keeping it separate from HRIS, it doesn’t become just an HR portal but a space where people can speak up.

In addition, we offer employees the opportunity to make suggestions and provide feedback at their convenience through our mobile-accessible platform. This feature enables your team to share their ideas and insights, contributing to a better workplace culture, and giving them the power to voice their opinions whenever they wish.

It takes more than some one-off feedback to truly understand the employee experience in your organisation. To gain an in-depth and ongoing sense of what employees think about working at your organisation, you need to collect feedback and input via technology in different ways and give your people choices. They need to be able to give feedback at any given time, wherever they are, to give you a rounded picture of the workplace experience.