6 Strategies for Optimizing Employee Experience in the Modern Workplace

A Gallup survey indicated that highly engaged employees are more likely to show up at work, and high-performing business units see a 43 percent difference in turnover. 

Engagement starts with experience, and an optimized employee experience (EX) is directly tied to your company's productivity, growth and performance.

To improve your overall excellence as a company, you must ensure your employees are well-adjusted in your setup and able to thrive in their roles — right from onboarding. 

Depending on your company and needs, you might use HR tools, new hire questionnaire forms or learning and development solutions.

We’ve developed six efficient and equitable strategies for well-rounded employee growth. Let’s take a look.

6 Strategies for optimizing employee experience in the modern workplace

Research shows that only 13 percent of employees are fully satisfied with their experience at work. 

While most businesses focus on improving the customer experience and sales, the employee experience takes a backseat. 

An optimal employee experience is key to improved performance and company growth. Employee experience can:

• Encourage engagement.  
• Retain talent.
• Support an efficient workforce.
• Boost employee morale.

When your employees are happy and satisfied with their work, they're willing to go the extra mile and perform to the best of their abilities. This is why you need to focus on overall development and a well-rounded effort to support your team.

Below are some efficient and equitable strategies that help optimize every aspect of employee experience to help you easily foster a growth culture in your organization. 

1. Meaningful engagement

When we talk about improving the employee experience, one of the end goals is meaningful engagement that leads to retention. You don’t want your top talent to leave you once you’ve trained them to perform to the best of their abilities.

Engagement is so much more than sending a one-and-done welcome email. There are many meaningful ways to engage employees that lead to retention. We recommend meeting your employees where they are first. You can use Notion forms for employee onboarding and ask new employees to fill in their new hire questionnaire. This gives them the chance to explain who they are, and how they want you to support them.

📌 Working remotely? Check out our 21 tips for a memorable virtual onboarding experience!

As you scale your company, we recommend investing in employee retention software. These platforms are meant to drive employee engagement, foster connections, make colleagues feel seen and appreciated, and through all these aspects, ensure retention.

An important distinction to make here is that such a tool doesn’t automatically guarantee or ensure retention. It deploys the procedures that pave the way for retention by driving engagement and ensuring satisfaction. Here, you can use your Notion forms to monitor monthly progress, and if you notice a repeating complaint or pattern, make sure to react sooner rather than later.

A retention tool offers features such as performance reviews and engagement surveys that help you gauge employee satisfaction. These tools also usually offer skill development and learning paths to improve EX.

2. Prioritize a seamless onboarding process

One of the most effective ways to enhance employee experience right from the get-go is to make onboarding itself a smooth, successful transition

Onboarding stages are the foundation of the employee experience. Make sure you outline each step before your employee ever walks in the door.

When done right, an onboarding process instantly familiarizes the employee with the company, job role, peers and company culture. It also eliminates the anxiety they may feel joining a new company and creates a positive impression.

The key to developing a seamless onboarding experience is to keep it succinct and simple. Don't overcomplicate things; it will only create friction for the new hire. They can always learn the more complicated processes as they settle into the company.

📌 Scribe Tip: With Scribe, you can use AI to turn even the most complicated processes into visual guides — in seconds.

When they join, keep the process limited to the necessary procedures. This will keep things simple and quick. 

Lastly, don’t forget to take their feedback through Notion forms so that you can improve the experience for the next hire.

Here are some quick tips to improve your onboarding experience:

• Reach out to the new hire before their first day (after the offer has been made) to take care of preliminary administrative tasks beforehand and reduce the toll on day one.
• Take care of the essential tasks when they arrive, such as creating their IDs and adding them to work groups on your communication tool.
• Make them feel welcome with an onboarding kit.
• Give the hire adequate time with each task and they may be nervous and require more time for even simple tasks. (Use Scribe to turn any task into process documentation)
• Make sure the employee socializes with their peers to break the ice and get them settled.

3. Create clear & consistent schedules

With the rise of remote work (and remote work challenges), many employees, especially those working rotating shifts, feel there's no clear distinction between their professional and personal lives.

This can lead to confusion, anxiety and dissatisfaction with work. A business must create schedules to help employees create healthy boundaries between their work life and free time.

Creating schedules for rotating shifts allows you to clearly define roles for your team, ones they can be prepared for, and request changes to as per their schedules. Something like an employee management software would help you build and share shifts easily.

Clear schedules pave the way for positive conversations around your workplace. 

Your employees won't be as prone to falling victim to burnout or overdoing it. Their fixed shifts free up time for leisure and recreational activities, boosting morale and a healthy relationship with work.

Here are some tips for creating efficient work schedules for your staff:

• Invite input from your employees about their preference for shifts.
• Get to know your team to understand their skill set and what shifts will suit them.
• It’s important to keep the shift schedule available to everyone at all times so that they know their exact role and plan everything accordingly. 
• Make sure the schedule is flexible so that employees can make changes as per their needs and inform everyone about it.
• Track work hours to ensure that the work is equally divided between a team and no one is overworked.

4. Relieve them of the parking hassle

Okay, you might be wondering why we're bringing outside-the-office aspects like parking maneuvers into an employee experience discussion. But parking anxiety is a legitimate issue that can affect an employee's overall experience.

When employees spend excess time looking for a parking spot, it disrupts their mood, peace and determination for the day. They simply start the day on the wrong foot and are bound to carry that bad mood into their work.

Not the mention, they’re always anxious about whether they’ll be able to find a spot for their vehicle. One of the most efficient ways to resolve parking conflicts in your workplace is to install an office parking allocation software.

A solution like this lets employees book available parking spaces by locking in the date and time period on the time. The employees may download the system on their mobile phones or computers, whatever is more convenient to them.

Once an employee reserves a slot, they will receive a notification confirming the details on their phone or web app. Users can cancel on their own or let it cancel automatically if they don’t show up on the allotted time. The space will be freed and become available for other users. 

Benefits of a parking software

Installing a parking software system is an investment that can go a long way in easing parking conflicts in your workplace and ensuring employees a positive parking experience with you. Here are some of the key benefits of using a parking software:

• It will boost your parking visibility as well as digitize entry and exit. 
• Eliminates manual parking management as well as reduces your environmental impact as a company. 
• Saves the time and effort of the employees and helps them manage their parking on their own without outside help. 
• Helps you collect relevant data about the parking habits of your employees to further enhance their experience. 
• A real-time solution to parking woes that discourages misinformation and delays. 

5. Offer upskilling opportunities for personal development

Ensuring your employees are constantly learning and developing with you is an excellent way to enhance their experience. This has a direct impact on morale and satisfaction.

Providing necessary training will also aid in expanding the scope of an employee’s job role. It will enable them to take on more responsibility. Additionally, they will feel supported in taking on new challenges.

Learning and development software solutions are available to help train employees on the job. They create learning courses that are personalized to the learning abilities of the learners and are scalable to allow learners to go at a comfortable pace.

You can also use a process documentation tool like Scribe to build training materials and upskill employees on your cross-functional processes.

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6. Performance reviews

Including performance reviews in a discussion about employee experience may seem counterintuitive, as it's often associated with pointing out flaws. But performance reviews are essential to help employees grow.

Conduct one-on-one sessions with your employees periodically to let them know how they perform. This doesn't mean just build a list of their shortcomings. Outline what they’re doing right and what you expect of them. It will help clear their head about their role in the company. 

Invite them to ask questions if they’re confused about anything. Only offer constructive criticism and be polite. Make sure that the session is collaborative and constructive and that there's nothing to be afraid of.

Provide assistance to your employees in every aspect to enhance EX

Employee experience is one of the most crucial pillars in creating a positive company culture. It’s your responsibility to make sure that your employees are happy, satisfied and performing to the best of their abilities to help your company grow.

Enhancing EX includes providing them with adequate training and counseling. It also includes taking care of outside-the-office matters like allotting parking and creating flexible schedules to allow ample time for recreational activities. 

Use our HR onboarding guide to start creating powerful employee experiences today.

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Author bio

Atreyee Chowdhury is a freelance content writer with more than 10+ years of professional experience. She’s passionate about helping SMBs and enterprises achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted and compelling content. She loves to read, travel, and experiment with different cuisines in her free time. You can follow her on LinkedIn.