Primarily, Canadian businesses focus on user experience as a guiding principle toward commercial success online. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with emphasizing user experience. Quite the opposite: research shows that good UX drives conversion, increases retention, decreases bounce rates and, generally, influences consumers’ opinions of your brand.
But UX is only half of the equation when it comes to running a successful business (albeit an important half). The other half involves engaging, fostering and encouraging your employees – the people that build your business.
In this post, let’s talk a closer look at employee experience (EX). What is it? Why is it important? And how can businesses improve their EX with a custom mobile app?
Table of Contents
What Is Employee Experience?
“Employee experience” is a relatively new term to describe a relatively old phenomenon.
Employees have always defined their relationship to an employer in terms of engagement – their enthusiasm toward, confidence in, and satisfaction derived from the organization and its employment. In turn, engagement affects productivity, brand/product knowledge and company loyalty.
If “engagement” is the goal, employee experience is the means of achieving that goal. You can think of employee experience as the sum total of all the interactions comprising the engagement process: how an employee learns, the modes of communication they use to feel supported, how they interact with tasks, etc.
The Importance of Employee Experience
To summarize and simplify our definition above: good EX leads to good engagement; good engagement leads to higher productivity rates, employee retention rates, marketability to talent, and employee development; and all of those things lead to a stronger bottom line.
According to research from Gallup, 17.2% of an organization’s workforce is disengaged, on average. The research calculates that actively disengaged employees cost an organization $3,400 per $10,000 salary (34%). Using these stats, the annual cost of disengagement for an average organization of 100 people (making an average of $60,000 per year) is $346,000. That’s a significant expense.
The best way to counteract employee disengagement is by redoubling your EX efforts. Let’s look at how to do that.
Credit: Andrea Piacquadio Via Pexels
How to Improve Employee Experience
It’s helpful to break down employee experience into four succinct categories:
- Communication
- Training and Employee Support
- Daily workflow
- And brand engagement
The best way to tackle each of these four categories is to create a custom app for internal use. Work with a company specializing in mobile app development in Toronto to design a product that increases engagement and improves EX. Here are a few specific ways you can achieve that in a mobile app:
- Create easily accessible lines of communication
- Create compelling training modules that gamify the experience and offer rewards for completion
- Implement chatbots to address employee questions and concerns
- Create a visually interesting central hub through which employees can view, complete and share their daily work tasks
- Leverage emerging technologies like AR and VR to increase employee brand engagement.
Remember, the average loss to employee disengagement (for a company of 100 people) is $346,000 annually. A custom mobile app that drives engagement and improves EX should therefore present a healthy ROI.
To summarize, employee experience isn’t a new concept – but it’s an important one. Emphasizing improvements in EX can help your business’s bottom line. To improve EX and increase employee engagement, partner with a mobile app company to create a sticky, employee-forward internal app.