Now more than ever, remote work is in the spotlight. As the global health crisis redefines the way organizations operate, effective communication and collaboration between remote teams is more important than ever. Leaders are now tasked with helping employees adapt to the new reality of working from home, focus, and maintain a positive attitude. A great place to get started with achieving these goals is by measuring the remote workers’ employee experience.
What is the employee experience?
The employee experience is the sum total of every work-related experience in your employees’ journey. A positive employee experience is key to boosting satisfaction, engagement and commitment within your organization.
Why should you measure the employee experience of your remote workers?
Remote work is attractive because it offers flexibility and allows employees to achieve better work-life balance. Research shows that working remotely can increase productivity by 13%. Pivoting to remote working, because of a global pandemic, however, might prove to be a challenging transition.
The easiest way for managers to navigate the transition is to engage remote employees in a conversation and understand how they’re experiencing the new reality of working from home and in which areas they need more support from the organization to be successful.
Tracking down the employee experience of at-home workers will set in motion a process that can be broken down into four stages:
Stage 1: Measure
The first stage refers to the efforts you make to actively measure the at-home employee experience. Traditional employee experience metrics, such as the employee NPS or employee satisfaction can be used as a starting point. But, in reality you can decide to measure whatever makes the most sense for your organizational success and the wellbeing of your employees. For example, you might want to track how your employees feel about:
- the digital tools and technology at their disposal
- the level of virtual collaboration between teams
- learning opportunities and reskilling needs
Stage 2: React
Employee feedback about remote work is extremely valuable especially when accessed in real time. When you are able to react in a timely manner to critical feedback you ensure that your staff feels heard and supported but, more importantly, you can address issues that might disrupt daily tasks and decrease productivity. This is very important, especially when it comes to enabling remote workers. If, for example, you receive feedback that your online meetings are not productive or take too much time, you might want to immediately reconsider your agenda design and/or the structure of the meetings.
Stage 3: Analyze
Systematically measuring the employee experience will allow you to collect data over longer periods of time. Analyzing that data will help you uncover trends, identify issues with your workflow, and learn what makes your employees feel happier, inspired and more effective. This stage will give you the necessary insights to make better decisions in the next and final stage.
Stage 4: Lead
Analyzing employee experience data will empower you to make decisions that take into account employee input and redefine your organizational design around employee expectations, needs, and wants. This will help you improve employee satisfaction and advocacy, boost the overall employee experience and as a result the customer experience as well.
In times of crisis, such as the one we are currently experiencing, the decisions you make to support your employees while working from home will have an even bigger impact on productivity, performance, mental health, and safety.
An employee experience survey template
Based on the latest global health developments, we understand that measuring the employee experience in a remote work setting might be a new reality that many organizations are starting to think about. We thought we’d create and share an employee experience survey template which can be used as inspiration to get you started with tracking your employee’s experience while working from home.
Access the template here. Note that:
- the template is showcasing a survey designed to gauge employee sentiment towards their online meeting experience
- you can reply to the survey questions and browse through the entire survey. Your answers will not be stored
- this is an example of a multilingual survey template to showcase how the same survey can be used even if your remote teams are working in different languages and across multiple geographies (like ours)