How Creating Exceptional Employee Experiences Enables Exceptional Business Results
We all know that keeping customers happy and satisfied is good for business. But did you know that one of the best ways to achieve this outcome is to keep your employees happy with their day-to-day work experience?
Research shows that when it comes to employee experience, you reap what you sow. When companies go out of their way to create an exceptional work experience, they have happier, more engaged employees who work harder, strive to overcome challenges, serve customers better, stay longer, and drive the results that matter most. For example, according to a recent Gallup study, companies with high levels of employee engagement report:
- 17% higher productivity
- 21% higher profitability
- 24% lower attrition
By the same token, if a business sows little into its employee experience, it will likely reap low employee satisfaction and engagement. This can, in turn, lead to reduced productivity, profitability, and customer satisfaction, and high turnover.
How do I create a better employee experience?
As a finance leader who owns multiple processes that impact every employee – for example, travel booking, paying suppliers, and processing expense reports for reimbursement – you play a vital role in improving everyday employee experiences. The key is to look across your business and rethink the status quo – “how we’ve always done it” – and then reimagine a better experience for your employees.
As you do this, remember that people want to be part of organisations that empower them to do their best work rather than bogging them down with busy work. By designing processes, places, and workflows around how employees like to work, you can make mundane, manual tasks, and frustrating processes unexpectedly simple. This shows that you value your employees’ time and talents, which helps create an experience that engages and retains top talent, increases productivity, and keeps employees focused on the important work they were hired to do.
Where should I focus for the biggest, fastest impact?
You may find that your lowest-hanging fruit for employee experience improvement lies in everyday finance processes such as those used to manage travel and expenses (T&E) and supplier invoices. These finance processes affect virtually every employee, and yet they are notoriously executed using paper, spreadsheets, and cumbersome approval processes that delay reimbursement.
According to a survey conducted by AMI Partners, three out of every five small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) consider providing automated expense submission and tracking to be strategically important. These objectives can help employees be more efficient while working, enabling them to focus on more strategic work.
Are these changes that small and medium-sized businesses like mine can afford to make?
SAP Concur solutions meet the needs of SMBs for travel, expense, and invoice management. As highlighted in our customer profiles eBook, employees love the convenience of mobile apps to do their work, the speed and effortlessness of intelligent automation, and the time they save that can be redirected towards a better work/life balance or doing more impactful work for your business. Either way, employee satisfaction and engagement go up, which drives better business performance for you.
Plus, the same technology and apps serve double duty by bringing more visibility into spending, more savings for the business, and more control over the costs that directly affect cashflow. The result is that finance leaders and teams can intelligently redefine the experience of spend management, bringing more efficiency to AP and finance in order to gain the data insights and process optimisations that will ultimately impact the bottom line. For example, with travel, expense and invoice management with SAP Concur solutions, your organisation can save:
• 104 hours per accounting team per week
• Average of between £25-30,000 annually
• £18 per expense report and £10 per invoice
So, the question is actually – how can you afford not to invest in automating travel, expense, and invoice management?
Hear from our customers how SAP Concur solutions enable a better employee experience – and better business performance.
Don’t take our word for it. Read our customer profile eBook that showcases how our customers have used intelligent, automated SAP Concur solutions to save time and hassle, increase efficiency, and accelerate reimbursements.