What is employee experience?
The employee experience: everything your employees experience while working for your organization - from the moment they arrive until they leave. Why is this such an important concept? The answer: winning outside is starting inside! You can have so much ambition with your customer or brand strategy, but if your employees don't have the drive, it's not going to work. How do you ensure that your employees have a positive employee experience, are happy in their jobs, and therefore enthusiastically commit to your organization every day? How do you keep your employees energized? Listen openly to your employees and discover where their drives and frustrations lie. Work on the success of your organization.
Employee experience starts with drives
A lot of research around employee experience consists of long questionnaires with aspect questions. At Forum, we approach this differently. We know that how you experience your work starts with needs and drives. When your work fulfills a drive, it makes you happy and enthusiastic. For example, a motivation may be to create a social impact or to have a sense of belonging in a team. When drives are not fulfilled, this reduces engagement. What then remains are the more functional aspects such as tasks, time, and money; the aspects that are often also emphasized in aspect lists that employees have to score in traditional research. If you want to work on a positive employee experience, find out what motivations employees have and to what extent the work fulfills them. The challenge here is that employees are often unaware of their drives and needs: they reside in the subconscious brain. Forum Research therefore turns it around: from asking questions to open listening!
From asking questions to open listening!
In our research, we measure experience implicitly: we start by asking open-ended questions, and then we extract the feeling and the things that cause this feeling from the answers using sophisticated text analysis techniques. Completely undirected, then, we delve into the motivations and needs of the employee. In doing so, we use associative imagery to access the subconscious brain. For employees, these images help as a metaphor to describe their emotions and memories. The things that come out of the research describe what is really going on in the employee's mind, and what an organization can do to assure a positive employee experience!