2025 is here. As a company, you’ll have goals and aspirations for the next 12 months: be it financial growth, client retention and so forth.
Improving the employee experience can help towards achieving these goals. Being inclusive, and giving everyone the chance to succeed, should help hugely in the year ahead.
Let’s explore what we mean.
First, what is the “employee experience”?
The employee experience is the journey employees go on in your company, right from the day they interview for the job to the day they leave the business. It encompasses everything about working at your company and their feelings towards you throughout that journey.
Why is an inclusive employee experience important?
Your employees are your biggest advocates or biggest detractors and they’re the lifeblood of the company.
Recognising this, many organisations try to appear inclusive and equitable. They’re prone to writing about their DEI commitment on their website and marketing collateral. But the lived experience of people within the company often contradicts these values.
Simply put, inclusion is not something you can simply talk about. It is something that is experienced, and so you need to take concrete steps to make it work.
We help companies on these steps, and we’ve distilled the key points here.
Step 1. Gain stakeholder buy-in and co-create SMART goals
Before you improve anything, you have to work out what success looks like. What are you working towards? It might be improving your hiring or onboarding practices to be more inclusive, or retaining certain demographics who don’t stick around in your organisation.
What’s important is that these goals are specific, measurable and time-bound.
Without these goals, you’re simply talking about DEI rather than acting to make it happen.
Tip: It’s always a good idea to make sure that all departments have their own KPIs. For instance, CHRO should have different objectives to the COO, CMO, CTO, etc.
Step 2. Map out the employee journey and identify key moments that matter
The employee journey is the accumulation of experiences at every major touchpoint.
We’d suggest mapping out the journey in your company and the moments that matter that you need to pay special attention to.
Typically, these will be:
Recruitment
Onboarding
Work Allocation
Performance Appraisal
Growth Opportunities
Personal Experiences
Exit
Have you got all these areas ironed out? For instance, Performance Appraisal and Feedback are common problems we’ve seen when dealing with clients. Why? Well, managers are often vague about what employees are expected to do. For instance, a new hire might be asked to be a “team player”, without ever being told exactly what this means.
Research also shows that the feedback managers give is either vague or hard to understand, and that they rely on “blur” words. They might tell someone to be more proactive. But what specific example is being cited? Where and when should the employee have been more proactive?
By mapping out the employee journey, and paying attention to these key moments, you’ll help employees thrive.
Step 3. Evaluate recruitment and hiring practises
Many hiring managers unconsciously hire people that look and speak like them. This is known as “affinity bias.” That’s because, instinctively, we’re all prone to wanting to deal with people that we believe we have a shared background with.
Commonly, 54TwentyFour finds that pregnant women are discriminated against; that people with strong accents are less likely to be hired; that people who are over the age of 50 will be viewed less favourably; that disabled individuals will lose out on jobs.
Hiring managers will also be more likely to side with candidates who are good-looking and well-spoken. These candidates will also often get offered higher salaries - irrespective of whether they’re best qualified for the job.
By training hiring managers on these biases, you can guard against building homogenous teams. Instead, a greater diversity of people will be given an opportunity.
Step 4. Design inclusive onboarding
A good rule of thumb is this: in the first 90 days, what are the must-haves to make everybody, regardless of their identity, feel like they belong and are set up for success?
Most companies have what is known as an induction, which runs on the first day. But new-starters come away from this session with their heads spinning.
In reality, true onboarding takes months. To help facilitate this, set new employees up with a buddy. A buddy is someone in the company who is not the employee’s direct manager. This allows the buddy and new employee to talk openly.
Building an inclusive team also requires a degree of flexibility. You need to be aware of the individual’s circumstances and their unique needs. Imagine you hire a graduate who is the first person to be working in an office in their family. You might need to be willing to give them upfront payment for the first month.
On the other hand, a new mother might have a completely different set of needs - like flexible working hours and the chance to care for her baby during the day.
Step 5. Support work-life balance
The nine-to-five contract is reflective of a world that has long gone. These working hours often no longer apply. Instead, many employees are working remotely during the week but finding that they are answering WhatsApps and emails long into the night.
While remote work has its benefits, Instant Messaging means it’s easier than ever to encroach on an employee’s digital boundaries.
To guard against this, set real digital boundaries. Be specific. No employee should be expected to answer a WhatsApp or call after working hours, for instance, even from a client. When on leave, an employee should not be asked to reply to an email - no matter how urgent.
Institute a culture - and a set of rules - in the company that respects these boundaries. Failing this, burnout will surely occur, and staff turnover will be common.
Remember: It’s important to support a work-life balance, because effective Knowledge Work requires time away from a screen.
Step 6. Develop inclusive leadership practises
Inclusive leaders treat their employees like individuals; they listen to their unique needs and adjust their management style accordingly. However, as we’ve found, managers often aren’t trained to do this. Instead, they’re promoted to a management position off the back of individual successes, rather than by demonstrating they have the management chops to handle a team.
Good leaders distribute work fairly, mentor and support team members equitably, and promote employees based on merit while ensuring equal opportunities for success.
Tip: Good managers will make your life so much easier in the long run. They’ll create successful environments for their team to thrive in.
Step 7. Monitor and refine the employee experience
One of the best ways to refine the employee experience is through surveys. Ask staff members how they’re being supported, and what their experience of the company is like. Are their KPIs clear (step 3) and are they receiving tailored feedback from their managers?
The survey should always be linked to the SMART goals (step 1). Does the employee believe the team is diverse? Do they believe they have a realistic prospect of earning a promotion? Do the company values - as outlined on the website - match the reality of life within the company?
All of this is extremely valuable to know, because as we’ve stressed, your staff are your biggest advocates or your biggest critics. And it’s in their own interest to let you know exactly what is going on.
Ultimately, growing a business starts from within. Hiring fairly, growing a diverse team, and treating people like individuals actually makes a team stronger. You want different voices, ideas and minds to come together for the good of the whole. In the Knowledge Economy, this is crucial.
Discover more about our Employee Experience program, and chat to us today about working with the 54TwentyFour team in 2025.
Comments