The term "Great Resignation" was coined in March 2021 to describe what some thought was a temporary economic blip. Nowadays, it's looking a lot less temporary. Lockdown and a lengthy period of remote working provided white-collar workers with an unprecedented opportunity to reassess their lives and relationships with their jobs and realize that they wanted more. According to a recent workforce survey by PwC, one in five employees say they're likely to switch employers this year. While the top reason employees leave is still salary, job fulfilment and finding meaning in their work is a very close second.
Now more than ever, companies cannot afford to take employee satisfaction and loyalty for granted. Organizations need to pay a lot more attention to the experience their employees have at work if they want to retain the intellectual capital and experience locked up in their heads.
This blog is the second of three about Total Experience (TX), which Gartner has flagged as one of its top strategic technology trends for 2022. In the first blog in this series, we looked at Customer Experience. This time we're looking at Employee Experience and how it can make the difference between good and great and even between success and failure.
Primarily we're talking about creating employee engagement, which Forbes author Kevin Kruss defines as "the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals." Some organizations confuse "engaged" with "happy." Someone could come to work each day and be perfectly happy chatting to their friends at the coffee machine and still only be coming to work for the paycheck. It's not about providing pool tables or free snacks (although snacks never hurt); it's about creating an experience that makes your employees feel they're doing meaningful work for an organization whose values align with their own. It's about the kind of job satisfaction that makes people work harder without being asked because they're emotionally invested in achieving the organization's goals.
In part, improving the employee experience means looking at how you run your business. For example:
Finding fulfillment in pointless, repetitive tasks or rekeying information from one system to another is hard.
Poorly designed customer touchpoints can put an undue load on front-line staff and severely impact their levels of engagement. It's not easy to remain motivated if your job is dealing with people who've spent 30 minutes on hold waiting to speak to the next call center representative or been frustrated by an ineffective chatbot.
Business processes must increasingly cater to hybrid teams composed of staff who want to work from home and those who want to work from the office. Companies need to cater to both and have tools and processes that enable them to collaborate effectively as a coherent team.
BusinessOptix helps organizations create operational efficiencies across a variety of employee-facing processes. We provide a single platform to align your operating model and mission, empowering more optimal utilization of your ecosystem's people, processes, and technologies. This will drive greater automation, efficiencies, and better, more fulfilling uses of your employees' time.
However, finding meaning in work increasingly goes beyond just making the day-to-day work less tedious. Employees, especially millennials, Gen X and Gen Z, want to work for companies whose values match their own. These values are increasingly around ESG-related issues such as sustainability and social justice. Unfortunately, these are smart people (which is why you hired them), so it's not enough to slap together a catchy-sounding purpose statement and list of values. These people want to know your company's actions match its rhetoric, so your purpose and those values must be lived, measured, and reported. As an article by Sloan Review MIT puts it, "to remain credible and trustworthy, leaders need to shift the conversation from fuzzy purpose bromides to more tangible and concrete statements about the impact their companies are having on society."
In fact, because corporate purpose statements sound increasingly hollow to employees searching for real meaning in their work, companies are starting to replace them with more tangible impact statements. To quote Sloan Review MIT again, "…if corporate purpose is to be more than window dressing and deliver on the promise of an engaged, motivated workforce and more loyal customers, companies must develop a capacity that is still lagging for most. They must be able to accurately assess the results of executing their purpose-driven strategy, particularly when that strategy extends to making a positive social and environmental impact."
As discussed in a recent blog, BusinessOptix enables organizations to associate ESG metrics to a process in the same way they currently associate the number of resources it requires and the systems it uses. Using BusinessOptix's simulation module, you can assess how a change in a process step will affect carbon emissions or other ESG-related measurements, accelerating your transition to a zero-carbon future state. We also make ESG compliance reporting more manageable and transparent, enabling you to demonstrate to your employees that you're producing results, not just empty words.
Employees are savvier than ever and feel more personally empowered than ever. You can't take their loyalty for granted. BusinessOptix can help you build business processes that create a superior employee experience and higher levels of employee engagement, and it enables an organization to demonstrate that it is walking the talk on its purpose and values. Improving your Employee Experience using BusinessOptix, will help ensure your employees are as committed to your company's success as you are.
References
https://www.businessoptix.com/blog/mapping-your-path-to-net-zero
https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/workforce/hopes-and-fears-2022.html
https://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Beyond-purpose-statements