Simpplr partnered with Ragan Communications to explore this theme in our 3 Approaches to the Strengthening Employee Experience eBook. We see that the workplace is in a time of change and that it may never return to the way it was before. The new remote reality has been proclaimed as something that will not go away. Rather than having employers fighting their workforce to be compliant and make rigid decisions regarding them, they should understand what employees need to succeed in their work environment—no matter where that environment is.
By recognizing the employee experience as a human experience and empowering their employees, companies reap the reward of an engaged and loyal worker. If not, the employee will move on to somewhere else that will certainly provide those elements. However, employee turnover costs businesses more to acquire a replacement than retain an existing one. And there are further warnings of impending loss of employees due to a deficient workplace experience.
In our eBook, we cited a statistic found in Gallup’s State of the American Workplace Report. The percentage of employees who believe it is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” could find a job as good as the one they currently do have is 63%. There is another astounding statistic that Gallup also found. For the first year in more than a decade, the percentage of engaged workers in the U.S. declined in 2021. “Just over one-third of employees (34%) were engaged, and 16% were actively disengaged in their work and workplace.”
The responsibility now falls to companies and organizations to retain employees and strengthen the employee experience to maintain workers and contain associated costs. At Simpplr, we know that internal communications (IC) are essential to improving worker engagements and overall employee experience.
Takeaways From the 3 Approaches
We believe there are three main approaches to strengthening your company’s employee experience.
- You need to establish metrics. Using employee experience KPIs to measure health metrics, impact metrics, and business outcomes is a necessity, and you must measure them regularly. There is a long-standing mantra in tech: “If it isn’t measured, it doesn’t exist.” By performing these motions of measurement, you can attach real numbers to metrics and establish a return on the investment into your IC platform or software and your employees.
- Personal check-ins need to dig deeper. By examining engagement data, you are listening to employees, but it must go deeper. To understand what they are really facing and what they need, personal calls between managers and employees must take place regularly.
- Engagement pulse surveys must translate feedback into action. You can have all the data you want from surveys and polls, but they are useless if you don’t use them to formulate a plan of action. In other words, you can only manage what you measure.
Moving Forward
The whole story of the Great Resignation or Reshuffle is not finished. But neither are the effects of our proposed approaches to strengthening your company’s employee experience. It’s also important to understand that employee experience is also a human experience. Read the entire eBook, 3 Approaches for Strengthening Employee Experience, for tips, insights, and advice on how to best serve your company and your employees.
