How do your employees think?

Since SAP's acquisition of Qualtrics almost three years ago, at the latest, everyone has been talking about experience management (XM) and, with it, employee experience. However, managers still do not have a sufficient understanding of what their employees expect from their workplace.

This is the conclusion of a recent survey by Unisys. In fact, 66 percent of companies in the EMEA region plan to adopt a different operating model in the future than they did before the Covid 19 pandemic. However, views on the design of the new way of working differ between managers and employees.

New Way of Work

The majority of the companies surveyed (61 percent) say they want to ensure employee safety and achieve higher productivity (47 percent) through new working models. For almost two-thirds (64 percent), an overall improved employee experience is the most important reason for a "new way of working.

In practice, this principle is not yet sufficiently anchored: For 66 percent of employees, family-friendly working conditions are important, but only 49 percent of employers consider this point significant. The discrepancy is even greater when it comes to employee and team development: 51 percent of employees consider these issues to be crucial to a good employee experience, compared with only 31 percent of managers. By comparison, this difference is much smaller in North America, with 63 percent of employees and 51 percent of companies.

Managers also have many more concerns about the practical implementation of home office than their employees. For example, 38 percent of managers but only 24 percent of employees fear problems with communication and collaboration when teams work from home. 38 percent of managers believe that they have too little insight into the work of their teams as a result of home office; only seven percent of employees share this view.

Also, 38 percent of business leaders see difficulties in accessing data and information, while only eleven percent of employees share this concern. Dealing with unfamiliar and new technologies due to Re-mote Work is seen as a challenge by 41 percent of business leaders, but only ten percent of employees. 

Despite all the concerns, two-thirds (66 percent) of EMEA executives say working from a home office is just as productive - or even more productive - than being present. Based on this, 42 percent of companies are planning targeted investments for more growth, relying on technical innovations to take off after the corona pandemic. The results of the study, commissioned by Unisys, are summarized in the IDC white paper "Digital Workplace Insights: Seeking Digital and Experience Parity to Support the Hybrid Workforce".

How Qualtrics solves the problem

To close the gap between the experience perceived by managers and the actual experience of employees, innovative solutions are needed to measure employee experience - from the very first touchpoint with the company. A new Qualtrics solution, for example, helps to attract skilled workers by optimizing the experience of recruiting, applying, interviewing, and
Job offer.

With Qualtrics Candidate Experience, companies can optimize their posting, recruiting and hiring process by gathering and directly implementing candidate feedback at multiple touchpoints. After all, a positive employee experience starts before the first day of work, during the hiring process.

With the majority of employees now working from home, the employee experience is more important than ever. Qualtrics Candidate Experience makes it easy to see what potential new employees experience at each stage, from posting and recruiting to interviewing, acceptance and onboarding.

The new solution enables companies to act quickly to attract the best candidates. Candidate Experience automatically collects feedback throughout the process. In this way, HR managers learn what the mood is like among applicants. This enables them to take immediate action to -optimize conditions for all candidates, regardless of the outcome of the application.

Expe-rience data obtained with Qualtrics, such as applicant feedback on the recruiting and hiring process, can be combined with operational data from applicant tracking systems, such as acceptance and rejection rates or time to fill. Aggregated analyses or forecasting models can be created from this, for example.

Not only does this optimize the pool of applicants, but it can also continuously improve recruitment efficiency, the quality of the hiring process, and employee retention. Good experiences during the hiring process also ensure that job candidates pass on a positive image of the company, whether they are hired or not.