Why an employee experience solution is a must in 2024

Are you set up for business success in 2024?

Here at Culture Amp, we believe this answer is strongly correlated to how prepared a company is to prioritize and maintain a robust employee experience (EX).

The past few years have made it very clear that a successful company is one that can weather the uncertainty that comes with change. We moved from a global shutdown in 2019 to calls for return-to-office (RTO) in 2023. The Great Resignation made the fight for talent fiercer than ever in 2021, only to peter out in 2023 as tighter labor markets and uncertain economic conditions led to layoffs and hiring freezes.

The key to adapting to these changes? A strong employee experience that prioritizes people and culture. After all, the employee experience encompasses everything your employees experience during their time at your organization – onboarding, performance reviews, experiences with leadership, career growth, and more. Put simply, when employees feel engaged by the employee experience, they are far more likely to stick around and work hard – even when the tough gets going.

It follows, then, that an employee experience solution that streamlines the experience of understanding, managing, and taking action on EX is invaluable for driving business impact.

In this article, we explore why – and how – an employee experience solution like Culture Amp is a must in 2024.

The business case for employee listening

A strong employee experience that fosters high engagement comes with many proven benefits, such as:

• Higher customer satisfaction and profitability. Recent research found that companies that perform well on employee experience metrics also tend to perform well on customer satisfaction metrics. Moreover, revenue and profitability were also positively correlated.
• Greater talent attraction. Glassdoor found that applicants rate company culture higher than compensation, with 77% of respondents saying they consider company culture an important factor when considering whether to join an organization.
• Decreased turnover. Culture Amp's people scientists have found that for every 1% increase in engagement, companies see a 0.7% decrease in turnover.
• Increased likelihood of receiving funding. In our 2021 Culture Crunch report, our people scientists found that organizations with higher engagement scores were more likely to receive funding than companies with lower engagement scores.

As evidenced by the studies above, it’s well worth it to craft an intentional employee experience. By fostering a culture and organizational approach that focuses on the things your people care about most – development, a sense of belonging, DEI, leadership competency, etc.– you can drive performance and maximize business impact.

Why you should invest in an employee experience solution

With so many types of HR software out there, why is there any need to invest specifically in an employee experience solution? Isn’t a human resources information system (HRIS) enough?

While an HRIS is helpful for managing employee data and other types of backend administrative-focused work, it doesn’t have the right tools for managing the more human side of HR – aspects like engagement, performance, development, DEI, and the wider employee experience.

Below, we share five invaluable things that an all-in-one employee experience solution like Culture Amp empowers you and your teams to do with ease.

1. Facilitate and streamline employee feedback processes

Collect better feedback more easily with science-backed survey questions and templates. You can customize the survey to fit your organization’s specific needs or use them right out of the box.

Designed internally by our team of people scientists, you can trust that our surveys yield accurate results and trusted insights into all aspects of your employee experience. Whether you’re measuring engagement, onboarding to exit, DE&I, or using event-based pulse surveys, you know that you’re getting the data you need to take action strategically.

2. Unlock advanced, real-time data and insights

Data is vital to strategic decision-making, which is why easy and seamless feedback processes are key to success in the modern world of work. By investing in employee experience software, you’re able to not only collect better feedback but also gain access to the advanced analytics capabilities that make interpreting and taking action on data a breeze.

Some examples of advanced, real-time analytics capabilities include:

• An intuitive dashboard with data sliced by department and by demographics, making it possible to surface disparities within the employee experience
• Visual deep dives such as heatmaps, trendlines, and benchmark comparisons that allow you to quickly interpret data with ease
• Built-in benchmarking that helps you understand where your company stands compared to its competitors
• Comment analysis, which leverages text analytics to help you get maximum insight from written feedback to automatically classify feedback by topic and by sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative).

Moreover, Culture Amp helps you identify opportunities for impact across your organization. Reports are easy to generate and customizable for every level of the organization, so your managers have the information and the direction needed to drive change.

3. Empower and support managers

The manager experience is intrinsically tied to the employee experience. As a matter of fact, Culture Amp data has found that managers have the greatest power to improve the employee experience. Unfortunately, managers are often short on time and resources, making it difficult to juggle day-to-day tasks and meetings with the responsibility of supporting and managing their direct reports.

That’s where an employee experience solution like Culture Amp comes into play. You can use tools across the platform to help managers:

• Upskill their leadership abilities with Skills Coach, an L&D tool that uses the magic of spaced repetition to help managers learn key management skills during the flow of everyday work.
• Make their 1-on-1s more strategic and effective with a built-in 1-on-1s tool that makes it easy to plan, prepare, and conduct better 1-on-1s with their direct reports.
• Guide and promote their team’s development using employee development tools that make tracking and talking about growth more informed, aligned, and easy. Managers can easily view their direct reports’ development plans and help their team progress toward their career goals.
• Receive the critical feedback they need to grow with a 360 feedback tool that ensures managers are getting feedback from not just their managers but also their direct reports and cross-functional peers.

4. Get ahead of potential issues with predictive analytics

Don’t let yourself get caught off guard – by leveraging the predictive analytics capabilities built into many employee experience solutions, you can forecast and proactively address potential issues before they become a serious problems.

For example, Culture Amp makes it possible to stop turnover before it’s too late with tools like Retention Insights, which detects early turnover signals and deep insights into what might motivate your people to stay. Then, use those insights to precisely target your retention initiatives for maximum impact.

5. Drive performance at scale

Drive performance outcomes with Perform by Culture Amp, which is just one part of our wider suite of employee experience solutions. Enable managers and employees to continuously align on performance expectations and feedback, while making the actual performance review fairer, lighter, and more accurate.

Use this tool to:

• Facilitate ongoing performance conversations. Combine 360 feedback, goal setting, and 1-on-1 capabilities capabilities to make it possible for managers and employees to proactively collaborate and check in on performance goals.
• Create and sustain a culture of continuous improvement. Move away from traditional performance reviews that focus only on assessing past performance and towards sustainable, ongoing improvement by embedding a process that combines clear expectations for your team with the performance feedback they need to course correct in real-time.
• Lighten performance reviews and create a fairer process. Traditional performance reviews are stressful and time-consuming, relying on managers to accurately remember the performance of their team over an entire year. Lighten the load with an employee experience solution like Culture Amp, that automatically collects, organizes, and centralizes performance feedback throughout the year so managers can easily produce fair and accurate reviews.

The best time to invest in an employee experience solution was yesterday

The second best time is today. By investing in an employee experience solution like Culture Amp, you can create an intentional culture that drives your business forward. Set up both your people and your business for present and future success with intuitive employee engagement, development, and performance tools built for every member of your organization.

Supercharge your employee experience with Culture Amp

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