The Proven Science of Employee Experience

This article was made possible thanks to contributions from Chris Hesano, Deneen Davis and Nicole McConnell.

Does your organization listen to employee feedback? In a Verint survey of just over 4,000 employees in the U.S., Verint found that 85% of employees who participated in an employee survey reported they saw little action taken by their employer as a result of their feedback.

If you are reading this, it is almost certain that your organization is doing something to measure employee satisfaction, engagement, retention rates or each of the above. But just measuring isn’t enough. To stand out as an employer, your organization needs to go beyond just measurement—to doing the right things to drive a better employee experience.

Why should you care about getting the employee experience right? The costs can be significant if you don’t. Whether it’s lost prestige and more difficult hiring, covering the cost of lost production or headache of frequent turnover, there are real impacts from a poor employee experience in your business.

The good news is you do not have to do this alone. Verint has spent decades innovating and delivering best-in-class solutions, services, and know-how so that you don’t have to wonder where to prioritize resources and efforts.

Employee Experience the Verint Way

Let’s dig into the Verint Methodology. It starts with how we measure.

Verint applies proven science and technology to the measurement and analysis of the employee experience through the lens of employee satisfaction. This allows us to:

• Measure employee satisfaction at the corporate, organization, regional, jobsite, or individual level
• Focus on identifying obstacles to employees’ ability to do their responsibilities well
• Deploy via secure email and other innovative ways directly to your employees, anonymously.

For employee engagement purposes, you may ask any number of questions about compensation, leadership, advancement opportunities, support, direct supervisors, and more.

Where Verint adds more value is in helping your organization understand the answers you receive. This isn’t as simple as assigning lower scoring areas higher priority and more budget.

For example, compensation typically scores quite low. A traditional employee experience approach would see that compensation is rated as unsatisfactory and either raise pay or blame the lack of pay increases on the market.

The challenge is looking beyond the basic compensation number. What Verint clients often find is that while compensation may receive lower scores, improving mobility and advancement is a larger driver of employee engagement, satisfaction, retention, and overall employee experience.

This is because advancement and the career growth that comes with it directly leads to feeling recognized for work and often an earned compensation increase as well.

Why We Always Ask Three Employee Satisfaction Questions

Because Verint encourages more holistic thinking when it comes to employee engagement, we don’t reduce employee satisfaction to just one question.

Instead, we ask three questions for greater precision and increased value from asking the questions in the first place. While the exact phrasing and techniques are reserved for our customers, this deeper level of insight can be critical when you’re making decisions about the employee experience overall.

These aren’t just any three questions either. We ask the same three whenever possible, allowing us to build a predictive model of employee engagement and satisfaction at any scale.

When I’m in client meetings, one of the important things they want to know is if we tell everyone to ask the same three questions. And we do, because that lets us benchmark any organization against its peers by industry or size and benchmark down to the store or location level. No one else does that quite like Verint.
– Deneen Davis, Sr. Manager Customer Analytics, Verint

Take Employee Experience from Bench Warming to Benchmarking

How you send the survey and what questions you ask are critical but having a singular employee satisfaction (ESAT) metric isn’t enough on its own. Understanding how you measure up and how the experience differs from department to department, region to region, or even between you and your competitors and peers can have an outsized impact.

Verint has collected feedback from employees at organizations across every industry, organizations from private to public, civilian to military, retail to insurance, and more. The fact that we’ve delivered surveys and gotten responses and employee feedback data across multiple industries translates to benefits to your organization when you use Verint to understand your employee experience.

This benchmarking can provide critical information that you may not otherwise have. For example, maybe you’ve received a Great Place to Work certification, but internal ESAT scores are below your industry average. Alternatively, you may have questions about how employees feel about their supervisors. A quick look at the benchmarks can help you gauge not only the internal sense of supervisor quality—but also how that compares within your industry.

Empowered by these benchmarks, you can truly understand what areas require your focused effort. To take the employee experience to even greater heights, you must then learn the cause-and-effect relationships between changes to the employee journey and the experience they receive.

Link Business Decisions to Employee Outcomes

Without knowing which actions will yield real benefits, business decision-making can quickly become a guessing game. Relying on simple correlations, incomplete data, or faulty assumptions based on earlier experience can waste valuable time and resources.

That’s why Verint Predictive Modeling leverages artificial intelligence along with patented experience management data science models developed over two decades of research.

By finding cause-and-effect patterns and correlations across time, you can connect employee satisfaction drivers with measurable business outcomes. Instead of wondering what a structural change might do to metrics such as likelihood to recommend, stay intent, and more, you can preview the future. That’s the power of our predictive model.

Unlike point solutions that offer a fragmented view of the employee journey, Verint’s powerful voice of the employee and predictive modeling solutions let you capture and measure feedback from every touchpoint, everywhere, in real time.

Imagine being able to start every day knowing your top employee experience priorities.

Because Verint has applied our proven predictive data-science model consistently for so many years, we can enable you to benchmark your organization’s performance against peers and best-in-class in more than 800 categories.

Are You Ready for Employee Experience Excellence?

We hope you enjoyed this dive into the Verint voice of employee methodology, our predictive model, and why our way is different than what you might have tried before.

Whether you’re just beginning to improve the employee experience or you’re trying to make it a differentiator in the employer marketplace, Verint can help.

You can start by checking out some of our resources, like this Guide: The 2023 CX Leader Handbook: How to Overcome Four Core Challenges. While the title mentions CX, it’s chock-full of lessons that your business can apply to employee experience just as well.

Another powerful document is our Engagement Capacity Gap study, one of our prestige reports detailing how and why organizations meet or fail to meet their engagement expectations.

From our friends in the Workforce Management side of Verint, check out The Talent Management Playbook, which goes into detail on how you can deliver visionary employee experiences from recruitment and performance to growth and engagement.

Alternatively, if you want to get started and learn more about the Verint difference, don’t hesitate to schedule a demo today.