Retain your people through great employee experiences
By focusing on employee experience, companies can offset a tight labour supply, zero in on what matters most to their people, and improve resiliency to market pressures.
As we emerge from COVID (albeit slowly), employee experience is a trending topic. As consultants who specialize in employee experience, we know it’s a complex topic and that the definition of what it takes to create a great culture is unique by industry and by organization.
NimblShift defines employee experience as an organization being dedicated to creating the conditions where people can thrive and are enabled to perform at their best.
This is brought to life through engaging, inclusive leaders; creating experiences where people grow and develop; systems and tools that make it easy for employees to do their job; and, fair and equitable rewards and recognition.
There are a few critical trends that are driving organizations to place more focus on employee experience:
1) Shifting attitudes and declining loyalty
Attitudes towards work are changing and employees are leaving their jobs at higher numbers because they believe they can do better elsewhere or create their own start ups to secure greater flexibility and a healthier work-life balance.
A 2021 study by Robert Half found that 27% had a shift in perspective due to the pandemic and prefer to work for an organization that better aligns with their personal values.
2) A need for adaptive digital skills
Technology features prominently in our lives, at work and home, and organizations across all industries need digital skills to stay competitive.
Organizations have poured money into technology over the past few decades as a means for remaining competitive. However, technology is changing at a faster and faster pace and keeping up with “what’s next” means keeping skills sharp.
As an example, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is automating the tasks of knowledge workers and boosting productivity. Research conducted by ARK (an investment firm focused on innovative technologies) states that AI has potential to increase the output of knowledge workers by 140% by 2030.
Current knowledge in emerging technologies such as AI, machine learning, analytics, robotics and process automation, and cloud are scarce in many places and those with these skills are in hot demand.
3) Keeping the right talent
The impact of turnover includes decreased productivity, increased recruitment costs, time spent on onboarding and lost revenue. Turnover can cost an organization up to 2.5 times salary which, factors in administrative costs, training and lost productivity as replacement employees ramp up to speed. In medium to large firms, these numbers add up.
A tight labour market, high cost of employee turnover and the need for talented people with digital era skills have created the conditions for organizations to spend more time and energy on creating meaningful employee experiences.
The Financial Post recently reported that companies are looking to offset a growing labour shortage by keeping current employees from quitting. Some are turning to increased pay to keep people however employees want more flexibility as work and personal lives increasingly blend.
While pay is important, employees seek greater purpose and meaning along with flexibility in managing work and personal lives according to a survey by Citrix Systems. The survey revealed that 40% of office workers have left a job in the last year or are considering quitting.
A tight labour market, high cost of employee turnover and the need for talented people with digital era skills have created the conditions for leaders to spend more time and energy on creating meaningful experiences for their employees at work.
If you are leading a team or organization, here’s how can create a great employee experience:
1. Create a compelling vision
Translate your vision and embed goals and objectives with your teams to build resiliency and adaptability. According to the Gallup Organization only 35% of employees are engaged at work while 13% are actively disengaged. Engaged employees treat customers better, work harder and stay with you longer.
Engagement starts with leaders who articulate clear vision, purpose and goals and help employees adapt to constant change created by disruptive innovations and other factors. Employees who are engaged by their work and have a good understanding of where you’re headed go beyond expectations and find meaning in their roles.
2. Remove friction from your system
Make it easy for employees to do their jobs by removing pain points in company processes and managing knowledge through technology that is modern and easy to use.
Your organization is a system of interconnected moving parts that must continuously evolve and change. The best organizations have clearly documented processes and procedures that are designed to be flexible and efficient and make use of collaborative technologies such as MS Teams, Slack and Asana as examples.
Adaptable organizations have a clearly defined and documented set of processes that are organized around delivering value to customers or end users.
3. Create an inclusive culture
Explore and understand the changing role of leadership in organizations and why leaders who create inclusive cultures are more successful. When employees feel like they have a voice at work they share their opinions and ideas more freely with others, which results in better collaboration, more innovation, and improved productivity.
When employees feel valued for their uniqueness and have a sense of belonging, they are more team-oriented, have a stronger sense of well-being, increased effort and are more likely to stay with the company when presented with options.
4. Enable agile, collaborative teams
The idea of teamwork and collaboration has been around longer than Agile methodology but the principles and tools that organizations now have at their fingertips thanks to Agile greatly improve productivity.
We think of Agile as a way of creating 90-day worlds where teams constantly explore their goals and objectives and plan out meaningful activities in the form of sprints (time boxed bursts of work to achieve specific business outcomes).
Self-led, self-directed teams are 20% to 40% more productive than traditional teams that are following outdated management practices. Agile principles increase agility, create stronger connections to customers and help build dynamic, purpose led workplaces.
5. Adopt, measure and evolve
Measuring employee experience is different and more immediate than measuring employee engagement. Engagement surveys have value and organizations such as Gallup have quantified that higher engagement scores do correlate with higher performance over time.
Employee experience is tied to how teams function on a day-to-day basis. For example, if you enable agile principles and create a 90-day world, your teams will see performance improvements in as little at 4 to 6 weeks as feedback from your teams are directly related to how they are working allowing you to adjust and adapt sooner.
Employee experience strategies help your team take accountability and ownership over improving performance. This is done by documenting issues and challenges related to broken processes, technologies that don’t work or challenges with interpersonal collaboration and integration.
The goals with employee experience are to identify and track 3 to 5 performance indicators that are used to measure teamwork and collaboration to create a high performing workplace environment that is focused on improving your customer experiences.
At NimblShift, we are building products and services designed to help organizations optimize value from investment they make in people. We have designed NimblTeams for leaders to achieve optimal performance and deliver better results and NimblTracker which is designed to help organizations measure team effectiveness and correlate results with performance outcomes.
