This article was originally written by Avanade alum Antonia Watson

For years, client experience (CX) has been a key focus for organizations looking for a powerful competitive differentiator. But leading companies are starting to realize that delivering great CX is easier when you have a strong employee experience (EX). This is what workplace experience (WX) is all about. With an environment and a culture that enables and encourages employees to collaborate, develop their skills and be more productive. And the numbers add up. Companies that focus on EX achieve sustainable business value including:

• Double the customer satisfaction
• Twice the innovation
• 25 percent greater profitability than competitors

A new focus on employee experience
At Avanade, uplifting EX is one of our strategic priorities, and we’ve identified three essential pillars of the experience we want to give our employees. We want our people to feel:

• Inspired by understanding the company’s strategy and how they contribute to our success
• Confident that they’re equipped with the right skills to do their best work
• Cared for by the company and their colleagues during personal highs and lows

On our journey to achieve these goals, for year one, we’re re-imagining our onboarding processes, driving the focus on EX across the company, and have created a dedicated EX team to make it happen.

Onboarding is an essential foundation
This year, we plan to hire a significant number of people – and we need an experience in place to support all of those people to feel valued and productive from day one.

Rather than overloading new hires with information, we’ll drive a more personalized experience, making it easier for them to find what they need when they need it. We’re also collaborating with our IT services department to explore technological enhancements we can make to uplift the onboarding experience further.

We’re also encouraging everyone in the business, including our new employees, to grow the networks of support they need to collaborate and succeed in their professional development. A key part of each employee’s network is being an active member of one of our talent communities – groups of people across the globe with shared skills and interests who can collaborate and support each other.

Department integration drives cohesion
The more communication that different parts of our business have with each other, the easier it is to create cohesion in our EX strategy. We believe our EX strategy will be more successful if HR, IT, operations, and our people and business unit leaders work together.

We also have a “change network” of vocal advocates for our EX plans across the company. This holistic approach gives us a complete view of employee attitudes and helps us develop practical EX plans that can be executed effectively in every part of the business.

And importantly, we’ve also drawn up a set of design principles, to ensure EX-related initiatives are implemented consistently throughout our global business.

Dedicated EX teams are crucial
To enable a meaningful focus on employee experience, it’s vital that we have a dedicated team working on EX.

So, whether it’s fostering collaboration between our talent communities, making skills development easier, or working with our IT department to leverage technology to better track engagement – we have people in place to make sure we’re incrementally enhancing the experience for all our people.

Start your journey to great EX
Companies are celebrating and recognizing the efforts of their employees on Employee Appreciation Day, and so are we. But we also strive to show our appreciation every day of the year, and make our people feel inspired, confident, and cared for.

Every business outcome – from innovation to growth – starts with your employees, so it’s time to redefine the importance of their experience in your company.

Discover how digital technologies are redefining your employee experience, and how you can thrive when you focus on EX, in our podcast with research scientists Dr. Kristine Dery and Dr. Nils Fonstad from MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research.

Listen to the podcast now: “Digital innovation and employee experience.”