Strong Employee Experience: 7 CEOs Share Their Techniques

What if you Google companies with the best employee experience (EX) right now? What names are you going to see?

You’ll repeatedly stumble upon Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Microsoft, and other tech titans. But how do these companies achieve a great EX? More importantly, why do you think they prioritize it?

Let’s start with the whys and then move on to the hows, namely, the best strategies for improving employee experiences (with examples).

Why Companies Strive for a Stronger Employee Experience

Did you know that 92% of HR managers view EX as their top priority? Transforming employee experience and working on its improvement has become a major trend among today’s leaders.

Let’s look at the top three reasons why.

It makes employees more integrated into the company culture.

A solid EX strategy can improve employee connectedness and integration. Unfortunately, there’s some work to do here for most companies. Only 23% of hybrid workers feel connected to their organization.

It goes hand in hand with employee engagement.

The greater experience your workers have at your company, the more engaged they’ll be. According to Gallup research, companies with top employee engagement levels outperform those with the lowest levels by the following points:

• Productivity – 18%
• Profitability – 23%
• Customer loyalty – 10% 

It impacts employee retention.

You can retain top talent by providing a better EX. Knowing and catering to what employees want helps them be more engaged. Highly engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave the company than those who feel disengaged. This saves companies a considerable amount as turnover can cost companies 90 – 200% of an employee’s annual salary.

7 CEO Tips on How to Improve Your Employee Experience

Here are seven useful techniques for EX improvement suggested by business founders, CEOs, and other C-suite leaders.

Create a “wow” onboarding experience

If signing papers and filling out W-4 or I-9 forms are the only interactions you have with your new hires, you might need to reconsider the way you onboard people.

The study by Brandon Hall Group reveals that a great onboarding process improves new hire productivity by 70% and retention by 82%. Those who receive effective onboarding are 18 times more likely to feel a deep commitment to their organization.

If you’re already delivering a good onboarding experience, how can you make it go from good to great?

“Striving for a better employee experience during onboarding, employers should take a strategic approach to it,” says Michael Power, CMO at DTF Transfers.

“First and foremost, there should be a dedicated onboarding team that can help new employees socialize and integrate quicker into the company.”

Michael suggests that onboarding teams should consist of the following people:

• An HR manager
• A chief happiness officer
• A mentor (one per newbie)

Michael Power also emphasizes the importance of welcome gifts for wowing your new hires right from the start. Whether it’s in-office or remote onboarding, a welcome gift is one of the winning tactics used by brands like Uber, eBay, Facebook, MOZ, and others.

For example, a new hire welcome kit at MOZ consists of a coffee cup, a tote bag, a water bottle, a notepad, and some clothes.

Image source

Enhance communication

Open communication is crucial for creating the best possible employee experience — especially if you manage remote, asynchronous teams.

Stephan Baldwin, Founder of Assisted Living, explains why communication is crucial for remote employee experience and names the common obstacles to interacting and delivering messages successfully in teams:

“Effective communication is one of the main techniques to elevate employees’ experiences, particularly when they work remotely. It is a locomotive for maintaining strong and lasting relationships between team members and ensuring they feel a sense of belonging. Not to mention that it enhances collaboration and boosts productivity.

However, to communicate effectively, you should eliminate the major roadblocks on your way to supercharge in-team conversations. They are inconvenient channels, tech problems, and distractions.”

You can master remote communication by adding the following tools to your tech stack:

• For chatting – Slack
• For asynchronous text-based meetings – Geekbot
• For video conferencing – Zoom
• For brainstorming ideas – Miro
• For collaborative document editing – Bit.ai
• For project communications – Asana
• For effective project communication in Agile teams – Hubstaff Tasks

What else can help you achieve fantastic team communication?

Try out the Hubstaff Communication Manifesto for free. It will get you thinking about:

• Your team’s preferred communication channels
• Asynchronous work schedules
• Response time etiquette for various communication channels

---

---

Want to encourage in-person communication between office workers? How about breaking the monotony of work-related talks with fun office events? Consider some office event ideas like Trivia or Bingo, for instance.

Celebrate everyday wins and reward employees

79% of employees claim recognition of their achievements motivates them to work even harder. But how can you gain a glimpse of your top performers?

Use Hubstaff’s employee productivity tracker to visualize the performance of your employees, set milestones, and notify them about their achievements in real time.

You can also increase employee happiness and appreciate their value with rewards. Grab some employee appreciation ideas from Jim Pendergast, Senior Vice President at altLINE Sobanco:

“For an outstanding employee experience, both monetary and non-monetary rewards work perfectly well. If with money-related rewards everything is clear, most probably, you struggle to find a perfect non-monetary reward for your workers. A couple of ideas to use: e-thanks, appreciation videos, snack boxes, badges, extra time off, personalized gifts, mentorship days with the CEO, etc.”

Don’t forget to shout out about your team’s wins on social media.

See how altLINE Sobanco does that on LinkedIn after a big milestone for their team – factoring $1B+ in invoices.

Image source

Offer valuable employee benefits

Did you know that 80% of employees would prefer more perks and benefits over a pay raise?

Based on the survey by Forbes Advisor, the top five most wanted employee benefits are (with the percentage of employees who rated them as a top benefit):

1. Healthcare benefits (67%)
2. Life insurance (45%)
3. Retirement plan (34%)
4. Paid time off (31%)
5. Mental health assistance (23%)

While these averages are helpful statistics, they won’t tell you much about the unique preferences of your employees.

“Importantly, if you want to improve EX, you might need to ask your employees what benefits, perks, or bonuses they would like to have. In such a way, you can personalize employee experiences to the fullest. In turn, this leads to a higher workplace morale and job satisfaction”, highlights Jonathan Elster, CEO at EcomHalo.

Focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)

According to the CEO study by Summit Leadership Partners, 95% of CEOs position diversity, equity, and inclusion as their company’s focus areas. However, merely 44% have a well-thought-out DEI strategy in place.

What should you do to craft a DEI strategy that is more than just a slogan on your company’s website?

Take it from Tom Nolan, Founder of All Star Home:

“To power your employee experience with a robust DEI strategy, you should tailor the latter to your business needs so that it makes sense. For that, it’s necessary to understand your employees’ identities (sexual, racial, gender, etc.) and examine the main challenges your specific industry faces. If you take the construction and home repair industry, for instance, racist incidents and gender-based pay inequity are the most common challenges to confront.”

Then, Tom Nolan recommends modernizing your DEI strategy and building a more inclusive workplace with these key elements:

• Formulate your unique DEI vision
• Develop a DEI training program for employees
• Concentrate on bias-busting
• Create employee-led resource groups
• Launch mentorships
• Embrace inclusive and diverse holiday celebrations at work

Some large corporations have already made honest strides in promoting DEI in the workplace.

Let’s take Microsoft.

Based on Microsoft’s annual Diversity and Inclusion Report, in 2022, women accounted for 30% of its core workforce. This number has grown one percentage point every year during the past five years, the report states. At the same time, 85.1% of Microsoft employees agree or strongly agree that the company is a diverse and inclusive workplace.

Promote work and pay transparency

Visier’s report shows that 79% of workers want greater salary transparency. With that in mind, it’s important to ensure transparent and error-free paychecks to meet the needs and requirements of your employees.

“Pay transparency is not just one of the recommended practices to create a positive employee experience, it’s also a mandatory requirement from the legal standpoint (in some states),” claims Mark Pierce, CEO of LLC Attorney.

“Employers should regularly monitor wage transparency laws in their states to avoid the legal consequences. For example, The Equal Pay for Equal Work Act and Pay Transparency Law went into effect in Colorado and New York City, correspondingly. And on January 1, 2023, California’s Pay Transparency Act came into force.”

Abiding by the law and implementing a transparent compensation strategy, you not only stay out of legal troubles but also reduce gender and racial bias and build trust among workers.

Why not foster trust and transparency in your team with time tracking software?

You can make all employees’ activities visible, take advantage of timesheets, and automate payroll with Hubstaff.

Visualize career maps

As per Gartner HR research findings, only one in four employees is confident about their career path. That’s why it’s important to map out career steps at your company and make them highly visible to every worker on your team.

Why bother, you ask?

For one thing, you can’t deny the psychological benefits of professional development strategies that help employees see the bigger picture. This will help motivate your employees and empower them to reach their full potential.

That’s when you should turn to career mapping.

Career maps are graphic visualizations of possible career routes for employees.

To visualize career advancements in a stepwise manner, you may use one of the career route builders:

• Careermapper.io
• TalentGuard’s Career Mapping Software
• Zavvy’s Career Pathing Software
• Paddle’s AI-driven Career Paths
• ClayHR’s Career Planning Software
• PathSavvy

Have a look at this example of a career path for Agile software teams.

Image source

Beyond a general, company-wide career map, don’t underestimate how individual career mapping can enhance EX. It’s one of the employee experience tactics shared by Ben Knegendorf, Co-Founder of Dropship Breakthru. He says:

“Sometimes, depending on the personality profile of your worker and finished training and development stages, you can change the trodden path. Here’s what I mean: you can break it completely and create a new one or draw a faster promotion scheme for your most talented and hardworking employee who has demonstrated extraordinary skills and abilities.”

What an Exceptional EX Boils Down To

Employee experience is the beating heart of a company’s performance.

But to help this heart keep beating without any complications, don’t forget these helpful action items:

• Wow your workers at the onboarding stage
• Bring communication to the next level
• Recognize achievements and reward accordingly
• Provide desirable employee benefits
• Include DEI initiatives in the workplace
• Be fair and transparent about salaries
• Show career development paths

These tips will help you create and maintain a stellar employee experience. Before applying them, peer into the list of Hubstaff features and see how you can automate the implementation of these strategies.

Interested in improving your employee experience? Try Hubstaff today.