Building a better employee experience with employee data

Tom Wooldridge, Employee Experience Director at WTW

In the last three years, employers have had to react to events that have transformed our experience of work beyond recognition and put great strains on even the most robust value propositions. Global pandemics, cost-of-living, mental health crises, and the Great Resignation are terms we’re all too familiar with. And as such, reacting quickly to unpredictable events has become a painful norm. 

But, to borrow a cliché, it’s time to take back control. We need to be proactive instead of reactive, to build a better employee experience.

Last year, WTW’s Global Benefits Attitudes Survey found that nearly three-quarters of employers globally, plan to differentiate their benefit offerings from other organizations – primarily by delivering benefits and policies that support a more diverse range of employee backgrounds and life stages. Yet only around 20% of employers have a strategy in place to support that objective.

So, how will they get there?

Typically, we help clients inform more strategic choices through two data sets: optimizing their total reward by listening to employee preferences, or mining data on employee behavior to address gaps in their people programs. 

Give your employees a voice in the experience you are looking to create

When big tech companies build a new product or platform, they undertake rigorous user testing to see how people use what they design. They refine their products based on that research. The outcome is that consumers get something they want, without wasting expenses on things they don’t want. The way you build your employee experience shouldn’t be any different. 

“If you have an HRIS system to administer your HR programs or outsource to a provider, you probably have all the data you need to get started already.”

At WTW we use Total Rewards Optimisation (TRO) to do just that. TRO is a methodology, survey, and data analysis tool that helps reallocate reward spending to things that employees truly value. It helps clients gain a better understanding of the expectations of a diverse, multi-generational workforce, compare costed options of rewards, benefits, and policies, and go on to make changes that they have confidence will secure a better return on investment.

For example, I’ve worked with clients who have used it to increase the focus on work-life balance policies over cash incentives to attract a younger workforce or reallocate pension contributions into short-term savings vehicles in response to employee feedback at lower salary ranges.

Use employee data on behavior and choices to predict and influence future needs

We are also increasingly working with clients to measure employee engagement with benefits and policies at a much more granular level, intending to guide employees to better outcomes, as well as creating propositions that support emerging employee needs. We are starting to look for the answers to questions like to what extent do our flexible benefits support employees at different salary levels? How does take-up vary by age? Grade? Function/Business? Across different demographics like gender, race, disability, and sexual orientation? How have the changes we have made to our employee experience influenced peoples’ behavior and how does that differ within those groups?

These questions are the starting points for more tailored, targeted programs to improve lives inside and outside of work. They can be used to design solutions that help retain employees with particular skills, attract more diverse talent, and resolve retention issues in particular locations or grades.

If you’re looking to use data to inform your people, reward or benefits strategy, we recommend the following steps:

1. Source your data. Reach out to benefit providers, payroll, employee relations, owners of various HR systems to collate the data you’ll need (from their pension to how much holiday they took last year!). You’ll need multiple years if you can.

2. Build context. Consider the external market influences that may have influenced employee behavior over the past few years.

3. Select your cohorts. Plan how you might look to differentiate your rewards, benefits, and policies for different groups and ensure you have their data.

4. Conduct analysis. Create a data template that can be applied across all aspects of the employee experience. Focus on presenting data for interpretation, don’t jump the gun and start looking for trends.

5. Gather insights. Look at what all the data tells you across your different cohorts. Who uses certain benefits more than the norm? Who takes more sick days and why?

6. Communicate findings and review your strategy. Use personas of your different employee demographics to bring data to life and help stakeholders to make decisions. Share your findings with business leaders to help them own improvements which can be made at a local level.  

If you have an HRIS system to administer your HR programs or outsource to a provider, you probably have all the data you need to get started already. It’s just a question of knowing how to start. And with so many employers looking to differentiate themselves in the market, it’s important that you do.

The best employee experience programs are created by being proactive, rather than reactive – it’s time we get back on the front foot.

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