Three Costly Employee-Experience Mistakes
Regardless of where you sit in the employee experience cycle—attracting, hiring, onboarding, developing or departure—the topic of employee experience should be at the forefront of your mind. Yes, capabilities and mindset are important to the success of your organization, but without a positive, meaningful experience, productivity, brand image, corporate growth and retention suffer. So, what else does the term employee experience mean when looked at through the lens of your team? Gallup says “it encompasses everything from major milestones and personal relationships to technology use and the physical work environment. It’s the big picture that ties together all of your efforts to attract, engage and develop your employees.”
Over the years, I’ve heard many stories from around the world about why employees leave their organizations, and while things have changed in the workplace, these employee needs remain the same: learning and growth, belonging and relationships and transparency. We’re in a tight labor market, and thanks to technology and the birth of the "freelance" working revolution, there are now many ways to earn a good income beyond having a “traditional” full-time job. Below are three specific problems that impact an employee’s experience. I spoke with Erica Volini, the U.S. human capital leader for Deloitte Consulting, to add to the conversation.
No strategy for internal mobility
Your employees want to feel challenged and inspired, and learning is a way for them to do that. A lack of enthusiasm and cynicism has been linked to burnout, and when employees feel valued and utilize their strengths, they are less likely to burn out. Learning can take place on many levels, but essentially, we want learning to support creativity, problem-solving, communication, or emotional intelligence. Learning and development sit at the foundation of internal mobility.
Rachel Montañez: What can companies do to improve internal mobility?
Erica Volini: So, one area would be visibility: Visibility to opportunities. It's incredibly hard to promote internal mobility when people don't know what the opportunities are outside their own function, or own geography, or own area in the business. Internal mobility is about moving across [divisions]. So, you need systems that provide viability across those divisions and therefore across multiple technologies, and that's where it becomes very difficult infrastructure-wise for companies in separate geos or separate business units.
The other part is that we often find, around internal mobility, that the process is highly manual. It requires a lot of forms to be completed with a lot of approvals and, as a result, it dis-incentives employees, because it feels like it's complex. That’s the infrastructure side.
I would say the bigger barrier is on the behavioral side. In our 2019 trends report, we found that 46 percent of organizations say their managers don’t support internal mobility, largely because managers are measured on their own operational performance, so as a manager, would you want to lose someone who’s a great talent? We need to think about what performance measures you are putting into place for managers to see internal mobility as part of their job.
Making work a place and not a purpose
Tom Rath says, “Work is a purpose, not a place.” In the Deloitte report, only 53% of respondents felt their organizations were effective or very effective at creating meaningful work.
Meaning and purpose have similar connotations and definitions. We tend to benchmark meaning based on what others in our industry are doing, but we all have our own definition of meaning. I encourage you to take a deeper approach.
Montañez: How can companies make work more of a purpose instead of a place?
Volini: There are three key areas. One is providing a sense of belonging. So, answering the question, do workers have a place in the organization? It is paramount today because there is a lot of technology coming in, and everyone is out there saying that the robots are taking all the jobs. That's a big question that workers are asking.
The second is in the area of esteem, right? This idea questions: How do I have value for my work? How is my work valued, and how do I feel that value?
The third part is helping workers reach their fullest, holistic potential.
Putting money before wellness
As someone who speaks on career burnout and coaches’ clients who either want to prevent it or are feeling stressed or burnt out, I see organizations putting money before wellness in two distinct ways:
1) When organizations expect their workers to work long hours, or they form cultures that don’t support work-life harmony.
2) When financial incentives are the primary way of signifying value.
Money as a reward is not sufficient. Organizations also need to offer flexibility, personalized learning and development opportunities and a commitment to well-being. In fact, Deloitte found that nearly one-quarter (23%) do not feel they know what rewards their employees’ value.
The task of creating employee experiences that pay dividends is one that will take some work, as it is about shifting mindsets and rethinking cultures, but let’s not forget that with our new generation of Millennials, which I am one, and those part of Generation-Z, the purpose of work has been redefined.
This article was first published on Forbes.