Forward-thinking companies are cognizant of this fact and are moving away from traditional HR models to one that creates a compelling and personalized employee experience. In the same way in which businesses strive to deliver a superior customer experience to attract, engage and retain brand-loyal customers, more organizations are adopting a similar approach to find ways to make the employee experience easier, rewarding, more transparent, and professionally fulfilling.
Jeanne Meister noted that the evolution of people management will see HR leaders applying a consumer and a digital lens to the HR function, creating new ways of recruiting, working, learning, and engaging employees. Using the same method that marketers employ to get inside the mind of the consumer, HR professionals can engage with their employees to understand what drives a fulfilling employee experience within their unique organization.
Taking the pulse of your organization
In order to build a rewarding employee experience, you need to understand what matters to your people. What benefits do they most value? Do they prefer 360-degree performance reviews or objective-based evaluations? Would they like more consistent feedback from their managers? Do they prefer bagels or muffins at morning meetings? Dark roast or medium in the kitchen? All of the details—from the strategic to the seemingly irrelevant—when viewed as a whole, paint a picture of the employee and their ideal employee experience.
Indeed, employee feedback is an invaluable tool for building a more people-centric culture and engaged employee journey. Continuous feedback plays a critical role in defining an employee's work experience and helping people feel more valued at work. And it’s even more important for millennial employees who expect feedback even more than previous generations.
But once you have feedback from your people, what do you do with it? According to Human Resources Today, people analytics ranks among the top ten human capital trends for 2017. Deep analytics provide information on morale, achievements, and productivity to gain a deeper understanding of performance at all levels in an organization. By viewing company-wide data at-a-glance from a personalized dashboard and drilling down to analyze teams and individual contributors, managers can better understand what drives employee engagement and fulfilling employee experiences.
Positive employee experience = engagement
Striving to consciously design a compelling employee experience for the full lifecycle of an employee is a surefire way to drive engagement. And it is no secret that high employee engagement correlates to enhanced productivity and performance. According to Gallup, engaged teams show 17% higher productivity, 21% greater profitability, and 10% higher customer ratings, plus significantly less absenteeism and employee turnover. Who wouldn’t want these improvements in their business? And apparently, companies are taking notice. According to a new report from The Workforce Institute at Kronos, savvy organizations are curating the employee experience by strengthening relationships between their workers and managers, leveraging data to improve engagement and lower attrition, and demanding more from their technology solutions.
Here at Rise People, we’re on a mission to put the people back into people management. And we’re thrilled to be helping companies create personalized and rewarding employee experiences for their people.