Exploring the 5 Pillars of Employee Experience Week 2022

March 4 is Employee Appreciation Day, but one day is hardly enough to understand the whole employee experience. And that’s how Employee Experience Week was born! Hosted by BambooHR, this week-long event explores the importance of the employee experience, and for Employee Experience Week 2022, we’re focused on five key employee experience pillars: 

• Mental health 
• Quality of life 
• Growth 
• Compensation and benefits 
• Culture and values

Since every organization has its own culture and values that make up its employee experience, we asked Rachel Leonard and Colt Simpson, two HR professionals and BambooHR customers, to share how they tackle the five employee experience pillars in their organizations. 

Rachel Leonard — Human Resources Director at Genesis Digital

What kinds of things does your company do to help improve the employee experience?

We’ve put significant effort into minimizing bureaucracy and paperwork, and that’s helped give our employees the fastest route to success. 

For example, we used to do things like reports manually and it was really inefficient and led to unnecessary errors that took up time. Now, we’ve streamlined a lot of our processes by leveraging technology like BambooHR to improve employee engagement and make everyone’s life easier.

In what ways is technology improving the employee experience? 

Partnering with great tech like yours has helped tremendously with our employee retention and overall work environment. 

We’ve been able to automate things like the way new employees sign up for insurance, the way we onboard, the way we do payroll—it’s allowed our employees to focus on doing better work rather than better paperwork. That in turn has created a better work experience for both human resources and the rest of the company.

How do your company’s values take the five pillars of employee experience into account?

I think quality of life and mental health go hand-in-hand. We want our people to take care of themselves and we’ve worked hard to build a culture where people feel safe coming to their manager with “life stuff.” 

A generation ago, the ethos was to put your head down and just get it done. That doesn’t work anymore. We’ve even gone as far as to bring in an emotional support coach. Not a counselor, but someone who people can talk to—whenever, about whatever. 

There is an understanding in our company that you can’t do your best work if you’re not OK, and allowing our employees to prioritize their mental health has had a huge benefit on our employee experience. 

Colt Simpson — People Manager at Ellis Mather Group

What does Ellis Mather do as an employer to help improve the employee experience?

We want our people to grow and be successful, and to achieve that, we’ve committed to providing quality external training to all our team members. We’ve done that through external speakers, accredited courses, or bite-size trainings. 

Not only does this complement our in-house training, it provides different viewpoints for our team members to learn and adapt from.

In what ways is technology improving the employee experience? 

The tech we now use, including BambooHR, allows for more interaction with team members because it gives everyone more flexibility in terms of location. 

I think it just requires companies to adapt, but this is something I think we have done very well. We use technology to host regular team quizzes, especially during the lockdowns where our teams weren’t seeing each other.

How do your company’s values take the five pillars of employee experience into account?

I love that work-life balance is important to BambooHR because we value that tremendously. I think a lot of these values all work together in fact—when your life feels balanced, your mental health is better. And for a company, balance and mental health leads to a better employee experience, which in turn increases retention. So it’s a virtuous circle. 

One example for us is we recently undertook a benefits review and overhauled all of our benefits to increase the holiday time for our team and introduced even more flexible working hours, so our team can have a better work-life balance.