Customer experience is a huge global industry worth $14bn .
You’ll have heard the rallying cries of many business:
“Customer is king!”
“We put our customers first”
“We’re customer-centric”
Obviously customers are important. No customers results in no business.
But no employee equals no business either.
And neglected and disengaged employees are actually harming your business. Only 10% of the UK’s employees are engaged, compared with 34% in the US and 23% globally. Turnover is up, and productivity is down in the UK.
How can you improve the employee experience?
Traditionally, companies take take take until employees have no more to give. We propose a different approach: where mutual value makes a better world of work for everyone.
We believe if you create a dazzling employee experience your people will be happier and more engaged, and your bottom line will improve.
F5: refresh your employee experience
We hit the F5 key when we want to refresh…
And that’s exactly what our the F5 model does for your Employee Experience.
Read more about the methodology behind the F5 model.
Fascinate
If you’re familiar with the marketing funnel, you’ll know that the top of the funnel is fuller than the bottom. Significantly more people are aware of your brand or your company than who are customers, and more are customers than are advocates.
It’s the same when it comes to your people. At the top of the funnel is awareness and consideration. You might know this stage better as “employer brand.”
Approach Fascinate like marketing. You want people to be aware of your brand and consider it, be that as potential customers, potential advocates or as potential employees.
It’s better for you if this is a constant process, so that when you do have a vacancy, you’ve already built up a following of potential candidates. This can massively reduce your time to hire, and help candidates assess easily if your company is a good fit for them.
Fit
Fit is the conversion stage in the marketing funnel. We call this Fit because it’s a two way thing. One thing can’t fit on its own; it needs something to fit with. The candidate has to be the right fit for you, but you have to be the right fit for the candidate too.
We believe the whole recruitment process should be two way. Let the candidate talk to people in your team, as they’re 3x more likely to trust employees over the interviewer. Recruitment shouldn’t be about selling a role or convincing someone to join your team, it’s about both sides deciding there is a mutual fit.
Fit also isn’t about endless rounds of interviews with no feedback. If you have a decent recruitment experience that centres the candidates needs, you are more likely to hire someone who is a better fit for the role.
X% think that the recruitment experience reflects on the company’s culture and X% would turn down a job offer due to a difficult recruitment experience. Do you really want to risk not hiring the best person for the role?
Even for those who aren’t successful, if they have a fantastic recruitment experience, you are likely to have brand advocates for life.
Fuse
You’ve made the hire, now it’s time to fuse together.
Did you know the etymology of probation comes from “to prove”? That’s why we use the same saying in the criminal justice system, for someone to prove their worth. We believe that if an employee has to prove their worth, then an employer absolutely has to prove theirs too.
We all recognise being sat somewhere twiddling your thumbs because either the system wasn’t ready for you, or your only task was to read a manual or poke around the drive. Is it little wonder that employees take 9 months to reach full productivity? Or that 1 in 5 leave during their onboarding, kickstarting the whole recruitment process again? Taking a human-centred approach meets the new starters’ needs and delivers them a great experience.
Flourish
Great news, your employee is now a fully fledged employee. Other than payroll and compliance training, they tend to get ignored by HR until they hand their notice in, unless something significant happens. 72% are quiet quitters, sitting there quietly while their productivity and profitability decline, until they find somewhere else to go.
If we were using customer experience principles, you would be considering how you could offer as much value to your employees as possible, to get as much value out of them as possible.
Listening to them (no that doesn’t mean once yearly pulse surveys) via regular feedback. Finding their pain points and removing barriers that stop them doing their job effectively. Moving them down the marketing funnel from conversion to loyalty and even toward advocacy.
Five stars
After loyalty on our marketing funnel is advocacy. And that’s exactly what you want to aim for with your employees. You aren’t going to keep them forever, but imagine a world where you part ways happy.
If you keep your employees happy to you, they’ll give you five stars. You want them to keep coming back to you, whether that’s as a customer, a partner, a returning employee, someone who refers others or simply someone who reposts your content on social media,
You aren’t going to keep your employees forever, but you can keep your advocates.
Getting started
Do you want to help design the future of work?
Whether you’re an employer or head up a HR/People team, you can begin transforming your employee experience now.
