Rebecca Reffell, head of strategy at Havas People, explores the meaning of ‘employee experience’ and how it is transforming the employer brand.

Once upon a time in our sector, HR struggled for a seat at the leadership table: tyrannical fax machines pumped out instructions, eye-wateringly expensive recruitment ads were the only way to reach our audience, and our work was mostly about bums on seats. Today, employer branding is a strategic imperative for most organisations and how we make a lasting impact on organisations has changed dramatically. Now we’re seeing another shift. A move away from using employer brand’s powers to simply talk about good things employers do, to using it to supercharge communications and design of employee experience (EX).

Let’s start with some shared language. EX is the everyday, lived experience of your people. It’s every moment - big and small - from when somebody starts a job to when they leave that organisation (and, we’d argue, for some time afterwards). Employee engagement, on the other hand, is the level of enthusiasm and dedication an employee feels toward their job, career and the organisation they work for. Employee engagement is often measured in one hopeful moment in an annual survey. Employee experience sums up a multitude of moments.

Put simply, the better your EX, the happier and more engaged your employees are. And, let’s face it, there is nothing better for your employer brand than joyful employees.

OK, you may say. Let’s find out what our employees like about their experience and talk about it. That’s the best of both, right? Well, yes. And no. It’s great to talk about the good; the aspirational; the exciting things that make you a fabulous employer. But what if your EX is not delivering against your employee value proposition (EVP),? What if there are specific moments in the employee lifecycle that are failing? Don’t doubt it will be felt by your organisation. We talk more publicly about work today than ever before (er, hello #worktok) and the business implications of failing to hire or to retain brilliant people are felt daily on the bottom line.

We get it. In complex organisations, it’s hard to influence beyond our immediate sphere. But we think a better connection between employer brand and EX can help everyone do better. In most organisations, people are not making the essential link between the promise they make to talent and the experiences that are being designed. In many cases, experiences are being created with no thought to proper design at all.

Here are some steps you can take to improve that connection:

• Build your network and work with them: when we worked with Haleon, we designed co-creation workshops for those responsible for designing EX and the EVP, so everyone felt involved, resulting in design principles everyone could use.
• Start with the human: what are the moments that matter to them? Does the promise flow through the candidate experience to those critical early days spent onboarding? How is your promise of ‘growth’ really playing out for people wanting to move roles? 
• Keep being curious: don’t just think about uncovering the ‘sells’ when you’re creating your EVP. For a major bank we compared employees’ ideal experience to the reality across 30 EX moments. The patterns of highs and lows revealed identified priorities for communicating what mattered most to employees and to improving EX accordingly.
• Share and care: who is doing great work in this space in your organisation. What can you learn? What can you share – data, great practice, experiences?
• Get to the heart of the problem: will enhanced communication solve your challenge? Or is there a need for better experience design?
• Don’t be afraid to experiment: what’s the minimum viable change you can make to make an improvement? How can you prototype an approach as proof of concept?

Another fascinating shift and massive impact to be made in the world of employer brand. We’re excited to see what comes next!