Employee expectations are higher than ever, here’s what to do about it:

HR teams are facing more challenges than ever before when it comes to employee experience. 

We’re balancing a lot! Like:

• Adapting to hybrid work 
• Connecting employees & teams
• Managing employee wellbeing and mental health
• Employee retention 
• Attracting talent 
• Building company culture 

I could probably add another dozen challenges but you get the idea, managing employee experience is not as easy as folks may think it is. 

But the benefits of great employee experience are awesome: 

• Higher productivity 
• Higher employee engagement
• Great employee satisfaction 
• Lower employee turnover
• Strong company performance 

If you want to reap those benefits but you’re struggling with building a strong employee experience, I got you!

I’m going to share my secret recipe to building a stellar employee experience and the tools I leverage to ensure every employee is having an A+ experience. 

3 steps to creating a stellar employee experience:

1. Learn what your employees want 
2. Leverage partners for thoughtful planning
3. Solicit feedback 

Let’s dig into what each of these steps entails and why they’re a part of the recipe! 

Step 1: Find out what employees actually want 

You know what’s super powerful?

Asking your employees about the experience they want to have at your organization. 

Isn’t that a wild idea! 🙂 

You can accomplish through a lot of methods:

• Surveys
• Polls 
• Listening tours from either HR/managers/leaders 

To note: with any type of information you collect you should set expectations accordingly and share what you plan to do with this data. 

Why does asking have to be part of the recipe? Because you’ll never know where your areas of opportunities are or where to focus for the greatest impact if you don’t ask! 

Tools you can leverage to learn more about your employee experience: 

• CultureAmp for surveys, benchmarking data, and insights
• Qualtrics for surveys, manager assistance, employee journey analytics

Collecting and leveraging data is the foundation to being successful when it comes to employee experience. 

In the event you don’t have those tools or budgets for tools here’s a list of 45 questions you can leverage to create your own survey! 

Step 2: Leverage partners to execute 

(Not so) fun fact: Most 100+ employee companies have about 10 different partners to manage employee experience. 

How can you thoughtfully plan and deliver a stellar employee experience if your solutions are fragmented? 

Spoiler alert: you can’t. 

We’ve all been there where you’re managing multiple vendors while simultaneously executing complex employee programs and the chaotic day to day of HR. 

It’s not surprising that the average HR employee reports feeling burned out!

The first step to thoughtfully planning is to streamline your solutions under one partner.  

Partners like New Stand can help you:

1. Connect hybrid teams: they provide in-person and virtual experiences, like social events and employee gifts, to help unify teams that operate in a flexible model. 

2. Activate & enhance culture: they offer unique and thoughtful programming, from team-building to company content, to supercharge cultural efforts. 

3. Help your return to office: they can upgrade your company’s onsite amenities, including pantry services and food and beverage offerings, to help promote office attendance.

Some aspects of your employee experience like entertainment, fun events, onsite amenities and moments of appreciation you want to happen on autopilot. 

New Stand can do that so you can focus on other important things!

I’ve learned that leveraging partners is key to executing an exceptional employee experience because it can be impossible to do everything on your own. 

Trust me, I’ve tried. No one wants to come to my trivia hang outs anymore…

I’m on a quest to feel less burned out next year and part of that journey means delegating tasks so I can focus more on important projects. 

I hope that you’re able to do the same! 

Step 3: Solicit feedback.

Ahhh, this feels full circle!

This is the part of the plan that can make or break your employee experience. 

For every employee experience you launch like a virtual event, in-person hang or even appreciation swag it is helpful to ask your employees about their thoughts. 

Why is feedback so important?

A lot of employee experience can feel like an experiment. 

You can test different tools, partners, experiences. 

But you need to collect feedback because it’ll tell you what is working and what isn’t. 

And when something isn’t working, PIVOT (said in Ross Geller’s voice). 

Additional resources:

• 25 post event survey questions you can use 
• Get the most from pulse surveys 

Level up your employee experience: 

Are you ready to level up your employee experience?

Same! 

It’s why I was excited to partner with New Stand on this deep dive. I’ve been consistently impressed with their offerings and how to partner with them to elevate the employee experience. 

They can handle:

• Onsite amenities 
• In-person events 
• Virtual events 
• Personalized team building and social events 
• Employee gifting 

Attracting, retaining and motivating employees has never been as easy as it is with New Stand’s help improving and managing your team’s everyday workplace experience! 

I hope you enjoyed this deep dive! I’m looking forward to sharing more tools with y’all in the future.