Workforce Experience: Why Companies Need to Rethink Their Strategies
Discover why it’s time to redesign the workforce experience to keep up with today’s evolving environment
Today’s workforce experience is changing, and now is the time for employers to keep up in order to understand how their teams feel and how to best meet their needs says, Melissa Arronte, employee experience practice lead, Medallia.
The workforce experience is changing, and it’s time for employers to keep up — to understand how their teams feel and to meet their needs best.
For one, new hiring models mean organizations are leveraging a mix of gig workers, consultants, and full-time employees. A new study on the state of U.S. hiring trends from business consulting firm Robert Half reveals that nearly half (46%) of managers plan on adding new permanent positions by the end of 2022. According to Robert Half’s findings, a similar portion of managers (45%) plan to lean into bringing on more contract talent. Companies with these different types of workers need to ensure they’re collecting employee feedback and insights across each segment to understand the nuances of various experiences. Doing so will shed light on the best ways to enable all workers to feel empowered and valued to optimize performance and reduce turnover across the board.
At the same time, thanks to the rapid rise of remote work, employers increasingly face more competition since more employees can find jobs without geographic limitations. Robert Half reports that around one-third (31%) of employers are loosening geographic requirements, and a similar amount (28%) are loosening education, skills, and experience requirements. As the barriers to switching companies decrease, the case for evaluating and elevating the employee experience and understanding drivers of retention and attrition becomes all the more urgent. Now more than ever, workers need to feel like they’re doing valuable work, or they’ll move on to the next opportunity. When people don’t feel valued, they’re more likely to churn or not perform, which is a significant issue that’s solvable and needs to be addressed, as avoiding it will only make things worse.
Why Companies Need to Rethink Their Employee Listening and Experience Strategies
For years, organizations across industries have relied on traditional annual engagement surveys to evaluate how well they meet employees’ needs. While these assessments are valuable for enterprise-wide strategic decision-making, they fail to provide the real-time insights organizations need to understand what’s important to their employees at any moment in time, adapt accordingly and drive retention. Too many organizations miss out on the countless opportunities to gather meaningful employee insights daily.
For example, an oil and gas company wanted to run an employee feedback survey about the organization’s IT systems. It’s certainly useful for organizations to learn more about the employee experience of working with IT systems, especially since these can impact engagement, satisfaction, and productivity. That said, the organization happened to launch this survey at the same time they made major announcements about layoffs and a new product launch. Employees were worried about having to reskill and the possibility of losing their jobs, but the company moved forward with its planned IT survey instead of giving workers the chance to express their feelings about these issues. Not surprisingly, they had a low response rate — because the survey was not relevant to most employees then — and, resulting in limited insights. Had employees been given a chance to share whatever was on their minds, the company would have undoubtedly uncovered much richer insights.
See More: 3 Ways a Next-Gen Intranet Can Supercharge Employee Experience
HR Technology and Best Practices to Address Workforce Experience Challenges
As illustrated with this oil and gas company example, organizations benefit from providing employees with the freedom to speak up about any topic at any time. Savvy brands are adding a new employee feedback collection method: quick and accessible anytime, always-on surveys integrated into the company’s key systems, such as the intranet, CRM systems, and other regular tools. Employees can share ideas and feedback without waiting for a quarterly or annual survey. Posing simple
quantitative and qualitative questions, such as, “Do you feel valued as an employee of a company’” and “What can our organization do to better support you in your role?” can lead to incredibly revealing findings. For example, a major U.S. bank with over 20,000 employees began leveraging these surveys, saw a 30% response rate, and reduced employee turnover by 40%.
Further, some great suggestions may come up within survey responses that companies can benefit from for further ideation, giving rise to another type of technology that can help — collaboration and crowdsourcing tools. Employers can use these platforms to create a space for employees to solve problems and propose solutions that can eventually become implemented, empowering employees, encouraging high performers to take the lead, and providing opportunities for employee recognition.
Outside of surveys and crowdsourcing platforms, employers can learn a lot about what their employees need without even asking a single question — by looking at internal sources, such as PTO and benefits usage, meeting attendance trends, performance reviews and customer feedback about employees, as well as external data sources, such as local unemployment trends, social media mentions and Glassdoor reviews. Employers may discover, for instance, that certain groups of employees are using up their PTO as soon as possible to search for a new job, while others are saving up because they plan to stick around for the long term.
Final Thoughts
By combining insights from real-time employee feedback surveys with employee signals from internal and external data sources, employers get a more holistic view of the overall workforce experience. Gaining these insights and acting upon them in the ways outlined here will help organizations drive stronger outcomes across the entire organization.
Today’s workers want to matter, participate in meaningful work and do something valuable. When employees come to work to make a difference but are met with obstacles, that leads to poor employee experience and turnover. Organizations have the power to enable workers to have a bigger role in shaping the environment in which they work by giving them tools that foster innovation and improve and change the culture.
Which best practices have you considered to standardize your workforce experience? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We’d love to know!
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