Prioritizing customers over employees can drive short-term revenue growth, but will also cost companies in long-term employee retention and engagement, Tiffani Bova, the global growth evangelist at Salesforce and author of the forthcoming book The Experience Mindset, wrote in the Harvard Business Review.

Wanting to identify the key drivers of the employee experience in order to help executives improve the customer experience, she and her colleagues conducted a study of thousands of employees and executives from around the world and across multiple industries. Using regression analysis, they pinpointed the five most important factors in creating a better employee experience: mutual trust, C-suite accountability, alignment of employee values and company vision, recognizing success, and seamless technology.

Mutual trust results in employee empowerment, demonstrates management’s confidence in its workforce, which fuels employees’ trust in leadership and each other, she wrote. “It also motivates employees, promotes creativity and collaboration, improves retention, and reduces risk aversion, all helping the bottom line.” At Apple, for example, store employees do not need to request special approvals to solve many customer problems. Ritz-Carlton workers can spend up to $2,000 to fix a guest issue without managerial approval.

Such inclusion leads to a 47 percent increased likelihood that employees will stay with a company and a 90 percent increased likelihood they’ll go out of their way to help each other, she wrote, citing an April 2022 McKinsey report.

“C-suite accountability means ensuring company leadership is committed and responsive to both the business and its workers,” she wrote. “Create a culture in which everyone understands that employee experience is a collective responsibility.”

Hilton, for example, established cross-functional teams that ensure a formal, structured way for the C-suite to monitor employee experiences. “How you treat your team members guides how they treat your customers, Chris Silcock, Hilton’s EVP and chief commercial officer, told her.

To align employee values and company vision, the C-suite must be responsible for clearly enunciating those values, then making sure that corporate actions are consistent with them.

“Clear goals with well-defined milestones and success metrics connect employees to their company’s mission and help them understand their role in advancing it,” she wrote. “We found in our research that ensuring employees feel valued and core to the company vision is a significant driver of reported increases in revenue. However, only 36 percent of employees reported feeling that way.”

Recognizing success “can be a cost-effective way to boost employee engagement, which has positive spillover effects on loyalty, retention, and productivity,” she wrote, but that goes beyond praise. “It also involves identifying and nurturing potential, giving employees the skills needed to grow.”

Unilever, for example, created a leadership development program that involved workshops in which employees created individually tailored plans focused on a purpose that’s both important to the individual and in keeping with company goals. As a result, 92 percent of those who attended a workshop said that their jobs inspire them to go the extra mile, while only 33 percent of those who had not attended felt the same way.

Seamless technology to reduce employees’ day-to-day friction means that technology is not “an end in itself but a tool for increasing productivity and reducing effort,” she wrote, finding that technology is one of the most poorly rated dimensions of employee experience.

“Can you imagine asking your customers to toggle between multiple tabs just to place an order with you?” she wrote. “Probably not…[y]et that’s what we ask of our employees every day when the systems they use aren’t integrated. The result is reduced satisfaction and a terrible employee experience.”

“These five elements are intertwined,” she wrote in conclusion. “Each builds on the others to establish a stronger employee experience and unleash new value. Happy workers make happy customers, and managing the nexus between the two will make leaders and investors happy, too.”