Good EX leads to Good CX: Employees Think So Too
Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers. – Stephen R. Covey, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Good Employee Experience (EX), like good Customer Experience (CX), begins at the beginning. Before employees set foot in your facility or log on to your remote working portal, they are already forming opinions about your company and its culture, just as prospective customers form opinions about your products and services based on branding, marketing, price, and other factors before they make a purchase.
CX efforts are often centered around mapping the customer journey from a customer’s first exposure to a brand through purchase, support, and (hopefully) brand advocacy. Likewise, well-constructed EX efforts start with (or even before) recruitment and continue throughout the employee’s tenure with the organization, and, as CX expert Shep Hyken often puts it, “What happens on the inside [of a company] is felt on the outside.”
Employees are self-aware with regard to their delivery of excellent CX, too. In the report Uncovering the Significant HR Trends of 2024 to Maximize Your Next-Best Step, isolved says, “Ninety percent of employees say the experience they have as an employee influences the experience they provide customers.” And again, it begins at the beginning.
After discovering your organization in one way or another, a prospective employee's first real experience with you is the recruitment process. “Within the talent pool, employee experience (EX) starts during recruitment – and can be the difference between a candidate’s decision to accept or reject a job offer,” according to the isolved Voice of the Workforce (2022-2023) survey report.
The latest report from isolved (2023-2024) clearly states that the main reasons people are motivated to accept a job offer are: salary (68%), location close to home (52%), and health insurance (52%), which top the list. Not far down, however, is interest in the work and the position (41%), tied with interest in a retirement plan.
There’s more evidence of that interest, too: Interest in finding a “personally fulfilling job” has been growing year over year and is up 10 percentage points since 2022.
Once prospective employees decide to accept a position in the company, the next step is extremely important. Onboarding presents the first real impression an employee forms about working in the company, and it needs to be right. According to the isolved Voice of the Workforce 2023-2024 report, 28% of employees are prompted to look for a new job by poor onboarding.
Why? Essentially, it’s because their new employer made it difficult in one way or another. The report specifically points out “limited transitioning” and “excessive paperwork,” as well as “an unprepared first day.” Having all the essentials for their job, including equipment, accounts, access, and information makes a big difference to the new employee.
Onboarding is not a simple process, of course. There are multiple areas of a business that play a role, whether the new employee will be in-office, hybrid, or remote. Many organizations use automation to smooth the path for new employees, connecting HR, IT, payroll, facilities, and other departments or functions, ensuring that the employees are informed, prepared, and equipped to join the company ranks.
Just imagine being a new hire who arrives to find that they have no laptop or that they have the laptop but no access to the software they will need to begin work or no access to the portal for making changes to benefits or other HR services. This is one of the reasons onboarding can have such an impact; the process exposes a new employee to how things actually get done in the organization and can shine a light on any discrepancies between the “real” culture (how things are done) and the culture that is advertised (how the company says things are done).
If a company states its desire to “hire the best,” for example, but the new employee’s first impression is that the company doesn’t care how hard it is to get through onboarding or to do the basic job, we can’t fault them for thinking, “How much effort will they be willing to put into taking care of the company’s lifeblood, its customers?” It’s worth saying again: More than one-quarter (28%) of new employees are already looking for the door if they have a bad first experience. If they are looking for an exit, they aren’t focused on taking excellent care of customers.
But onboarding is only the beginning. Once they are in the workforce, the work itself takes precedence. The recent findings by isolved show that the work—and the employee’s relationship to it—is the strongest factor in retention.
Recommended by LinkedIn
While the strongest reason prospective employees might be attracted to a company is salary, they stay because they are committed to the work. That bodes well for CX because they are highly likely to produce good results. Whether the employees are directly customer-facing or not, both the company and the customer will benefit from high-quality work. The company also benefits financially by avoiding the high costs of replacing valued, experienced employees.
Putting all of this together tells us:
· Employee Experience contributes to Customer Experience.
· It’s not just a platitude—employees feel it, too.
· EX is strongly affected by early interactions like recruitment and onboarding.
· Employees want to do good work that they can value.
· Employees stay when they feel they are doing valuable, fulfilling work.
· Good work contributes to and amplifies good CX.
· As many business studies from Gartner, HBR, and others have shown, good CX increases the bottom line.
Making processes like onboarding consistent and low-effort for new hires by streamlining and automating wherever possible, and getting all the departments involved communicating with each other. Get your new hires to work quickly, and with their eyes on the work they do for you, your stakeholders, and customers, not watching the clock and checking employment ads.
Resources:
Uncovering the Significant HR Trends of 2024:
Voice of the Workforce 2023-2024:
I simplify (and automate) operations.
7moGood read! If the recruitment process isn’t good, don’t expect onboarding to be better. I like the connection from CX to EX. I’ve found that this is a very difficult area to do well early in the journey though. One of my favorite books is The Power of Moments but admittedly we’re too focused on product market fit etc. to intentionally craft the onboarding experience. We do our best to create a create a culture by leading by example day by day…that’ll have to do for now 🤷
A great #EX leads to a great #CX! Thanks for sharing, Roy!