The complexity of today’s world of work can make it feel like as soon as you overcome one employee experience challenge, another one rears its head. Staying focused on employee engagement through it all is crucial for your attraction and retention efforts.
The cost of low employee engagement is $450-500 billion per year. On the flip side, good company culture quadruples revenue. This goes to show just how much the way employees feel about their jobs really matters.
When you find yourself with an employee experience challenge, it’s important to explore what’s going on and look at ways to fix it. Otherwise, you risk not just losing employees, but increasing disengagement among those who remain.
So let’s explore the questions you should ask when facing an employee experience challenge.
What do you think is wrong?
If you feel your company has an employee engagement problem, it’s time to be honest with yourself. Consider what’s happening.
Has there been a change of leadership that’s left people feeling uncertain?
Have there been layoffs that have made people fearful for their jobs? Or perhaps their workload has changed as a result of the cuts and they’re struggling?
Could it be that they feel their work isn’t valued, or that their manager takes credit for what they do? A little thank you goes a long way—37% of employees feel recognition is important. But how many of them actually get the recognition they want or deserve?
Or, could it be that your employees are bored? The main reason a third of people leave their roles is boredom. Boredom can come from work feeling too repetitive, not having enough to do, or a lack of satisfaction/purpose.
It’s important to provide employees with regular training and career advancement opportunities. That way they can learn new skills to benefit them in the workplace and prevent boredom or another employee experience challenge.
What do employees really think?
You can’t make changes until you know what employees really think.
While an open-door policy sounds nice, the truth is that most employees will never use it. Even if they have a concern. They may be afraid of negative consequences, or simply lack the confidence to advocate for themselves.
Many employees have worked in places where “open-door” policies didn’t actually create a safe space for raising issues. Or they believe that HR is only there to protect the business, not support employees.
If they’ve had those experiences or hold those beliefs, why would they speak up about an employee experience challenge?
If you really want to know what’s going on, you need to actively reach out to employees and ask them. And provide a safe place for them to respond.
How can you collect honest feedback?
It doesn’t matter how open your culture is; there will be some opinions employees will feel more comfortable sharing anonymously. This is especially true if they’re female, a person of color, or early in their career.
The potential backlash for underrepresented talent in the workplace is huge, no matter how many times managers or colleagues seek to reassure them. We’ve all been there or heard a horror story.
It’s therefore important to find a way to collect honest feedback. The best way is with an anonymized feedback survey.
When employees can share their opinions anonymously, they don’t have to worry as much about anything they say coming back to bite them unless they share something identifiable, such as the team they work in.
How can you fix things?
Now that you know what’s happening, it’s time to look at how to fix the problem.
Change doesn’t happen overnight, which means you can’t resolve an employee experience challenge overnight.
But what you can do is demonstrate to employees that you’re listening.
This could be through asking in a survey what you could do better, sharing the results of the survey, and/or listing actions that you plan to take based on the survey.
There’s no magic fix for anything. But the sooner you analyze your survey results and take action, the sooner you can get your employee experience challenge sorted and get back on track.
How can you prevent this from happening again?
It’s all very well and good finding out what’s wrong. But does knowing what’s wrong really matter if you don’t take steps to prevent it from happening again?
Going around in circles with your employee experience challenge will lead to frustration and disengagement among employees. This will inevitably lead to them leaving, which means you risk losing your top performers.
Setting up ERGs where employees can connect with their colleagues can help to combat loneliness and boost belonging.
While this may sound like a small or trivial thing, it really can make a huge difference to an employee’s mental health, and therefore their productivity.
If you’d like to get the most from your ERGs—and your employees—Workrowd can help. Streamline marketing, management, and measurement for your groups so that they can drive real business impact. Contact us to find out more.
Conclusion
An employee experience challenge can be difficult to identify and fix, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to solve.
It requires listening to your employees’ concerns and taking active steps to address them so that they know you’re listening and value both their feedback and the time they spend working for you.
Get the feedback you need to solve your employee experience challenge
Workrowd can help you keep a pulse on your employee experience with automated feedback surveys and real-time analytics. Meaning you can adapt to any employee experience challenge before it spirals. Plus, you’ll get more time to solve issues and prevent further problems.
If you want to find out more, visit us online to get in touch and book your free demo.
