Now you can – and it will surprise you what you see!

Introducing the Employee Experience Assessment

High error rates, toxic processes, slow innovation, fast staff turn-over, trouble filling open positions – the symptoms are plentiful, the reason often one and the same: bad employee engagement caused by an overall bad employee experience.

While the term “employee experience” sounds straightforward and intuitive, in reality it is a multi-dimensional result of how organizations have evolved over time. And even understanding the employee experience situation in an organization – let alone change it – is a challenging task!

The team has become the critical success factor

After decades of focus on production efficiency, distribution channels, the mastering of information, and ultimately targeted marketing and a holistic customer experience, we have now reached a point where the availability, talent, and mojo of the workforce have turned into today’s most critical success factor.

However, in recent years this very asset each organization needs for success has become the most difficult to sustain. Business leadership and HR specialists speak with concern about scarcity of talent and the difficulty to retain staff. From free pizza for those working overtime to office happy hours to corporate retreats, they have tried every trick in the book in an attempt to solve this problem, until finally realizing that what they actually need to do is measure and manage employee experience to optimize it over time.

Tools need to address the problem, not apply bandaids

It was only a matter of time until tools designed for this purpose started emerging on the market. They checked all the usual boxes, using metrics and coming up with short-term solutions, but none of them addressed the problem at the core or provided a solid strategy. Basically, what they did was applying a bandaid on a gaping bleeding wound.

And this is where the Employee Experience Assessment (EXA) enters the scene. One of the biggest differences EXA offers as compared to other tools is a comprehensive structure and methods that produce not only quantitative but also qualitative results. Based on these results, companies‘ leadership can easily understand, manage, and optimize their employee experience as needed.

Make sure your approach is comprehensive, yet intuitive

EXA is certified by the Customer Institute, and uses the same global approach applied in the institute‘s other assessment programs. The assessment drops the run-of-the-mill, “same for everyone” questionnaires, and instead turned to personal conversations with those who create or are direct recipients of employee experience.

Basis for the comprehensive assessment approach are 10 topical categories, with 10 detail areas per category. For the employee experience assessment the following categories span across the organization’s status-quo:

• Company – does the organization have a clear vision and objective?
• Customer orientation & products – is the organization developing the best possible products and services?
• Productivity & processes – is the work modern and efficient?
• Knowledge & learning – is know-how a critical success factor and treated as such?
• Culture & work environment – is there a sense of focus and importance to the teams actions?
• Safety & health – can the team feel safe at the workplace?
• Leadership & participation – are employees treated as an asset?
• Perspective – is the organization‘s future bright?
• Compensation & benefits – are employees compensated fairly?
• Employer attractiveness – besides money, what else is there on offer?

From there it gets pretty intuitive. Each of the ten detail areas in the ten categories can score from 0 to 10 points, so the organization can score anywhere between zero and 1000 points, depending on the quality of its employee experience. Globally acclaimed experts who developed this assessment chose this particular approach to make sure companies get a quantitative result but also qualitative feedback for authentic stakeholder verbatim from across the assessed organization. This way they not only know what needs to be improved but also have a basis to measure these improvements against.

Two extremes any assessment tool can fall into are being over-simplistic or unnecessarily time and energy consuming. The golden middle is to get comprehensive results without exhausting your respondents‘ resources. A team of global EX experts with practical experience in all areas of EX relevant business functions have successfully engineered this optimal golden middle into the Customer Institute certified Employee Experience Assessment.

Get certified for extra credibility

As the icing on the cake, EXA offers a globally acknowledged certification program. If, based on the score system, your company accumulated enough points to pass the minimum threshold, it is automatically eligible for a Customer Institute silver, gold, or platinum certificate depending on the assessment score.

First of all, this certificate celebrates and demonstrates the effort your organization put into developing its EX, but also serves as motivation to strive for further improvement and get a higher level certification with the next assessment.

Create employee experience that will attract the right employees

The assessment process is often kicked into motion when the company leadership approaches EXA consultants with a vaguely defined concern about something being wrong in the organization. Most of the time, they talk about tangible symptoms like low employee engagement, projects rarely being completed, or action items not being followed up on, but it is unclear what causes those problems.

To not end up treating symptoms instead of the disease, EXA determines the diagnosis through a thorough assessment. Once the diagnosis is defined, you’ll have a roadmap for your next steps.

EXA helps identify the most urgent areas in need of improvement, but also discovers best practices exercised only in individual units that could benefit the whole company. Additionally, industry best practices not at all applied by the organization yet are identified. As a result, EXA will bring together the company’s overall strategy and measures directed at EX improvement, which is vital for a healthy talent ecosystem.

For more details visit our website www.ex-assessments.com. One of our licensed consultants will help you define the next step to diagnose employee engagement in your organization and design improvement measures.

If you are interested in the employee experience assessment, our consultants will be happy to assist you. We will schedule the first conversation with you to guide you through the program. Contact us at info@ex-assessments.com or visit our website at www.ex-assessments.com

To find out more about the assessment and certification program reach out to us at team@experience5.de.