A great employee experience starts with a well-designed employee experience strategy.
Sure, we know that crafting a winning #EX strategy can be a challenge when kickstarting your #EX journey so we've pulled together four tips to help you get started..
Tip One: Get to know your organization’s CX strategy
Holistic experience strategies are becoming more popular within leading organizations. These strategies bring together EX, CX, and sometimes MX (member experience) strategies to drive consistent and compelling experiences across the experience value chain.
In the absence of an org-wide strategy, spend time understanding your CX strategy and vision. If the customer experience strategy points towards customer satisfaction or loyalty, for example, you can ensure your EX value proposition echoes those messages. This also goes a long way to support the ROI challenges you might face. If your EX strategy is rooted in driving CX outcomes, you're more likely to get the investment you need.
Don't have a CX strategy? No problem. Reach out to your Customer-facing teams and talk about it. Get to know their priorities and explain why you want to ensure your EX strategy is aligned. This will also help you build a network of EX champions who understand the value you're trying to deliver.
Tip Two: Know the EX challenges you're solving
Before you start building your strategy, spend some time speaking with your stakeholders. Get to know the current EX landscape and prioritize the challenges and opportunities based on the research. Designing a strategy in isolation without this insight can result in multiple initiatives that add little value. It will also make it much harder for you to quantify the value of your investments.
Put simply.. Speak to the business, look at the data and think critically about the impact of your strategy. As an organization, we encourage our clients to take a step back and do a pulse check on the current experience before we dive into solutions. Without this human-centered approach to strategy, you run the risk of throwing resources at challenges and opportunities that simply do not exist.
Tip Three: Overall strategic alignment is key
It's a pretty obvious one but alignment with your overall business strategy is absolutely essential. Creating an EX strategy that is detached from the strategic direction of your organization is a recipe for disaster when it comes to getting the internal support you need. It also makes asking for financial or resource investment even more challenging.
We don't mean aligning your EX strategy to commercial targets or new market growth plans but rather considering how your EX strategy can support your organization's strategic goals. For example, an overall focus on customer service excellence and brand loyalty can be supported by working internally to ensure that employees serving those customers have an experience that drives a culture of service excellence.
Being able to articulate how your EX strategy aligns with business priorities will make deciding on where investments should be made much easier too.
Tip Four: Know what's possible and what's coming
We don't want to say curb your expectations but.. ya know, it helps sometimes. Shooting for an ambitious EX strategy with sizeable metrics and measures isn't going to work for every organisation. We're not saying you shouldn't be ambitious but we think over-committing to a strategy can do more damage than good. This is particularly relevant if investing in the employee experience is new for your business. Take time to think about what's possible and what your organization can realistically achieve. Here are a few key questions to ask:
What resources do I have to execute on this strategy?
What have we achieved historically that might help shape this strategy?
What challenges can I see coming that might impact our success?
That's it.
If you're keen to learn more about our EX strategy approach and how we've helped organizations design and deliver results - get in touch!
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