EX Measurement Best Practices (Forrester Report)

According to Forrester’s latest report, most companies who invest in employee experience (EX) invest so much of their time and attention in the surveying of employees that they overlook other insight sources and fail to fully capitalise on the data they do collect. 

And failure to adequately measure and improve EX has the potential to cost the company dearly. The Society for Human Resource Management conducted a study and found that replacing an employee comes with a price tag of between six and nine months of that person’s salary, whilst the Center for America Progress found the cost of replacing highest position employees such as executives, to cost as much as 213% of their salary. Furthermore, it’s noted by Josh Bersin, Principal and Founder of Bersin by Deloitte, that a new employee can take up to two years to reach the same level of productivity as the person they replace.

With these costs in mind, what are the best practices for measuring and improving your employee experience?

In this HX 101 we’ll cover the three takeaways from Forrester’s  ‘EX Measurement Best Practices: New Data Sources, New Insights, And More Accountability: How to Continuously Shape A PEAK Employee Experience’ report and provide you with a complimentary copy (usual price $499 USD).

The report answers two key questions:

• How can you measure employee experience efficiently and in a way that better reflects what matters to your employees?
• How can you translate the data you collect into insights and actions to create better employee experiences?

Using examples from KFC, Adidas, Macy’s and Allstate Northern Ireland ,researchers Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian and Samuel Stern provide a number of practical examples, including sample questions and checklists. Here are the three key takeaways:

1. Improve EX data collection sources

Employers rely too much on surveys, don’t measure the moments that matter most, and don’t generate insights in a timely fashion. They need to modernize and improve employee surveys, taking advantage of other sources of insight, such as the data found in workplace analytics, open data and publicly available information on sites such as Glassdoor to get a more rounded and complete picture of EX.

1. Go beyond data collection – create accountability for insight and action

Investment must be made in turning data into insight, understanding those insights and the actions that need to be taken for making improvements. Accountability for who is responsible for each element (or metric) of EX measurement and improvement is important. The goal is not only to track how good or bad employee experience is over time but to extract the insights and use them to improve it.

1. Create an environment of employee confidence

EX leaders will only succeed when they communicate transparently and regularly about how EX measurement data is used. This includes communicating what they heard, what actions are being taken, and, critically, what is not being done to employees. When employees are confident that employers will take their concerns and feedback seriously, they are more likely to provide honest and accurate information.

The EX Measurement (EXM) Framework

Forrester provides a 3×3 matrix framework to the types of metrics that should be measured at three different levels and go on to describe how to create such a framework for your own organisation. 

The researchers demonstrated usage via a number of examples, including our own project with Allstate Northern Ireland whereby we deepened the insights from data already collected by analyzing the verbatims from the annual survey Allstate NI had been conducting for years and conducted a series of new modernized survey using our Emotics emotion AI platform to deliver ‘Decision Ready Insights’.

Source:Forrester blog (EMX matrix)

The 3 types of EX metrics

A closer look at the 3 types of employee experience metrics in the EXM matrix.

Source: ‘EX Measurement Best Practices: New Data Sources, New Insights, And More Accountability: How to Continuously Shape A PEAK Employee Experience’, Forrester, 2019

The 3 levels (altitudes) of EX

A closer look at the 3 levels of employee experience in the EXM matrix.

Source: ‘EX Measurement Best Practices: New Data Sources, New Insights, And More Accountability: How to Continuously Shape A PEAK Employee Experience’, Forrester, 2019

The report goes on to provide insights and examples from KFC, Adidas, Macy’s and Allstate Northern Ireland and a checklist to see where you currently sit on the road to EX measurement excellence. 

If you’d like the full report, a complimentary copy is available from the link below.