How to Make Employee Engagement a Daily Habit One of the latest business buzzwords this year is EX, or the employee experience. Organizations are beginning to realize that they need to create a positive employee experience in the same way they have focused on the customer experience. In this ever-tightening job market, it’s mission critical to keep employees happy, fulfilled and challenged. Only then can they keep their customers happy. Focusing on EX means evaluating an employee’s entire life cycle with the company, from before they even apply for a job to beyond their last day. It’s so critical that Forbes even dubbed 2018 the Year of the Employee Experience. What is the EX, exactly? EX is not just about what it’s like to work day-to-day in the office, and it’s not about benefits, half-day Fridays, sleeping pods, beer fridges in the break room and other fun perks, though those things do enter into it. But EX is deeper and more meaningful than that. It’s about truly 8 RuralLeaderMag.com | May 2019
engaging employees. Employee engagement (EE) and EX are intertwined so closely they can be called one and the same. The problem with EE: There’s a disconnect. In a recent study, Dale Carnegie found that 70 percent of top executives believe that employee engagement has a strong impact on financial performance. In a similar study, Deloitte found that 85 percent of company leaders say EE is an important strategic priority, but Dale Carnegie found that just 31 percent of frontline employees and managers strongly agreed that their company is actually making engagement a top priority. Clearly, there’s a disconnect between what execs are saying and what employees are feeling. That’s because there’s a piece left out of this puzzle: the employees’ managers. The key to aligning executive priorities with what
