Why employee experience is gathering momentum and why your organization should care (1/4)
Employee experience: it’s on everyone’s lips. Design experts go as far as describing it the future of work. But before deep diving into its core principles, it seems important to understand the root causes of its recent burst. So, how to explain the paradigm shift undergone by organizations? And why is it so crucial for them to evolve towards employee experience?
1. From work life balance to work life integration
Technological advancements in the B2C world coupled with the infusion of a customer-centric mindset within organizations resulted in the rise of expectations from employees. Indeed, your customers are also your employees. And why would the latter require less care or excitement from their workplace than from any other area of their lives?
In addition, with the development of flexible ways of working (remote working, home office, slashing, …) coming from the start-up sphere, employees are more aware of the potential benefits they could enjoy at work. They are transiting from work-life balance (what we could call the baby steps of employee experience) to work-life integration. In this new prevalent equation, life and work are not considered in competition anymore, but rather of equal weight when it comes to living a happy life.
Providing employees with an experience that helps them blend these components as harmoniously and seamlessly as possible safeguards their satisfaction and lowers the turnover.
2. Employee loyalty is hard to win
The labor market’s increase in flexibility along with the societal skills’ gap means that top talents, when unhappy, will switch jobs without looking back (but with hard feelings! …not so good for your reputation). According to the Deloitte Millennial Survey of 2018, 43% of Millennials expect to leave their job within two years. In the so-called war of talents, unattractive companies will be forsaken: here again, employee experience is an efficient way to capture and retain the scarce top-notch profiles of the market.
3. Wave goodbye to baby-boomers, say hello to Millennials!
Our society is undergoing a major generation renewal: by 2030, 75% of the workforce will be made up of Millennials*. Digital native, this population segment breeds different needs than baby boomers such as ethics, transparency, or a higher degree of care. In a few years, we can expect organizations that do not cater to these requirements to be behind the eight ball. Once more, designing an employee experiences can represent the perfect opportunity for organizations to develop corporate cultures fully in line with Millennials’ needs to bolster their loyalty.
As a result, the worldwide employee engagement is as low as 13%**. Yet, this percentage is on the rise. Organizations are moving fast to close the gap.
What about yours?
Don’t know where to start? Check out the next article of this series: But what is employee experience exactly? Definitions and impact
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Sources:
*Forbes, What The Ideal Workplace Of The Future Looks Like For Millennials
**Gallup, The Worldwide Employee Engagement Crisis
