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Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging

The benefits of launching a vendor diversity program

August is Black Business Month. As we celebrate this occasion and consider Black businesses that we can frequent, it might be time to revamp (or start) your vendor diversity program. Organizations need to look at the vendors they support to ensure that money earned gives back to businesses that need it most. So, how can we make that happen at work?

What Is Vendor Diversity?

As organizations grow, investing in up-and-coming startups and businesses is key.

Vendor diversity programs give companies a framework to follow when they decide who to support. Vendor diversity doesn’t force employees to use certain vendors. Instead, companies give guidance on how to diversify supply chains. By providing foundational information and resources, organizations can spend their money in more diverse places.

Instead of seeing championing vendor diversity as something you have to do, company leaders should see it as something they get to do.

Why Is Vendor Diversity Important?

Most large businesses wouldn’t be where they are today if open-minded companies or individuals hadn’t taken a chance on them during the early days. We can’t lose sight of the value of shopping and investing small.

We live in a world where Google gives us the top result, and that’s usually all the research we need to do.

Vendor diversity initiatives encourage us to think deeper, do more research, and potentially find an organization in our community or led by people from underrepresented backgrounds to support.

The Benefits of a Vendor Diversity Program

First, let’s cover some of the benefits of a vendor diversity program. These benefits can help you sell the goal of starting this program at your company.

Diverse Vendors Can Help You Find Solutions You Might Never Have Considered

Organizations run by people from underrepresented backgrounds typically start because their leaders saw a gap in the market that wasn’t satisfied by the big players.

Diverse teams are proven to boost innovation and financial results. Imagine what you could accomplish by investing in groups that understand that diversity is the building block of their organization.

If you are looking for creative solutions to problems you’ve been having, it’s best to work with a diverse group of vendors. Small companies have less red tape, so they can pivot and create solutions quicker than tried and true companies with hundreds of employees.

There are downsides to working with a small team, like lack of people power or money. On the other hand, these organizations are much more open to customer feedback and input. With your help, these companies can afford to make investments in what matters to customers.

Vendor Diversity Creates Awesome PR Opportunities

Vendor diversity creates some stellar opportunities to get your brand seen by more people. You are coming onboard when the company is small. These opportunities will only grow as their organization does.

Let’s face it, we all want to put our name next to giants in the industry. Companies like Walmart, Johnson & Johnson, and Google all have public supplier diversity or inclusion policies. By leaning into your supplier inclusion policy as a company, you can market your business as one that values competition and supports small companies.

Another PR opportunity you might have with small businesses is the opportunity to do case studies or get your logo featured on vendor websites. As their company grows, these early case studies can make all the difference to their company and yours. Your organization might even become the face of your vendor’s product or service.

Supply Chain Diversity Drives Competition in the Industry

We’ve become homogenous in the business world. Companies are constantly getting bought, sold, and dissolved. New industry players shake things up and provide some competition to older products on the market.

Your vendor might eventually join a bigger company, but not before disrupting the industry a bit. New industry players with the right funding can make other companies more willing to innovate or change their businesses practices.

Once you are done working with a newer vendor on the scene, you might be shocked at how the industry has changed. Companies need competition to drive them to innovate.

How to Encourage Employees to Diversify Vendors

So now that you know the benefits of vendor diversity, how do you make it a reality at your organization? Of course, understanding the perks and making it happen are two different things. Here are some basic principles that will make your program successful:

Make It Easy

Google is easy.

Typing “best t-shirt vendor” into Google takes a few seconds, and you get pages of results. The first page is full of ads (vendors who can obviously afford to put money into advertising.) After that, the search results highlight organizations that have put a lot of energy into ranking highly for this keyword.

You can quickly go to Google and get all the results you’ll ever need for any vendor you will ever want. A quick Google search doesn’t help you find the most diverse vendors, though. Google is based on SEO (search engine optimization.) The companies you are trying to find with a vendor diversity program may not understand this process.

So, how do you make it easier for employees? Create a database. You can use an internal tool like Google Sheets to start creating a shared database the entire company can use. As you find diverse vendors, add them to the database. You can even create a section for employees to review vendors they know and love.

Discuss the Benefits

Next, you’ll want to go over the benefits of prioritizing vendor diversity. Talk through the powerful innovation, PR, and competition benefits companies can realize when they invest in small organizations.

Think back to when your organization was starting. How did your company benefit from investments? How did your customers benefit from working with you? You probably have a story or two that you can share with anyone skeptical about vendor diversity.

Provide Incentives

Last but not least, you’ll want to provide incentives. Encourage people to put more thought into vendor diversity. Consider providing a bonus or award to the departments that focus most on vendor diversity. Everyone likes recognition for the work they put in.

If you notice any person putting a lot of effort into vendor diversity, consider giving them a shout-out in the next company meeting. Ask employees who do a good job at diversifying vendors to speak about their experience with company leaders.

Conclusion: Vendor Diversity Is Within Reach

Companies that care about vendor diversity can seek out companies that fit the criteria they are looking for. With a little patience and the right framework, you’ll find all the vendors you need to diversify your company’s supply chain. Vendor diversity might take a bit more work than using Google, but you won’t regret the time you take to look for the right businesses.

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Employee Engagement

10 employee engagement programs that drive real impact

As organizations grow, we have to find ways to optimize our workforce and improve engagement. Implementing different employee engagement programs is a wonderful way to reconnect with employees. Which programs are right for your organization? Today, we are going to share some ideas that might fit the bill.

1) Examine Your Company’s Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives

It’s easy for diversity and inclusion to never go beyond a statement or mantra. Taking action on diversity and moving your statements forward isn’t as challenging as it seems.

For example, if you want to do more with inclusion, start by creating goals based on your statements.

Once you’ve established goals, put some time on your calendar to revisit your KPIs every quarter. What’s going right? How can you improve or speed up your progress? What does your team think about the diversity-focused employee engagement programs you’ve put into place?

Because younger generations value diversity at work, examining your company’s progress in this area is crucial.

2) Give Employees Space to Innovate on Your Product(s)

Are you looking to encourage innovation and improvements on your organization’s products? You might want to host an innovation day at your company.

For example, take a look at this quick video that Arizona State University put together to announce one of their innovation days:

You might be wondering how to make this employee engagement program a reality at your company. Here are some steps you can follow:

  1. Identify the day you want to host your innovation event and what kind of innovations you want to see (e.g. product innovations vs. company innovations.)
  2. Put parameters around what you want to come out of the day. For example, do you want a solution ready to launch or just the thought work around the solution?
  3. Figure out who needs to be in each employee working group. For instance, you might want to split the company into groups of 10 and ensure that at least one software engineer is in each room.
  4. Give people advance notice, so they have time to come up with some interesting ideas to share with their group.
  5. Host the event (and make it an annual activity if it’s successful.)

3) Encourage Employees to Take a Look at Their Work/Life Balance

Many of your people are probably struggling with maintaining a healthy work/life balance, especially if they work from home.

Taking a look at work/life balance isn’t an employee engagement program by itself. We must create more definition around this goal to make sure our employees can maintain this balance.

You might buy your employees a journal and encourage them to write about work/life balance and discuss their findings with their managers.

Keeping up with work/life balance will ensure that employees take needed breaks and separate their careers from life when working remotely.

4) Host an Employee Care Package Exchange

Everyone loves a fun care package.

Many services send care packages, but that’s not always fun. As an employee engagement program option, you can pair employees together and give everyone $50-$75 to send a care package.

Care package programs can be exciting, especially if you have employees in different parts of the world. Encourage employees to find unique products to add to each package.

You can partner employees up several times a year to create a truly unique engagement program.

5) Make Sure Your Time Off Program Serves Your Staff

When is the last time you took a look at your time off program?

It’s easy to let these programs run themselves in the background, but you have to keep them top of mind.

Ask yourself these questions:

  • Are employees taking an adequate amount of time off?
  • Can I make these policies clearer? (For example, adding mandatory minimums to unlimited vacation policies.)
  • Are leaders modeling time off best practices?

Creating a time-off policy is only half the battle. Next, employees and leaders need to follow what you’ve described.

6) Change Your Community by Investing in Volunteerism

Volunteering can be a great way to engage employees.

Many community organizations could use your company’s support.

Give your employees time off to volunteer in the local community. Let community organizations join your company’s meetings to keep your employees updated on what they do. These small activities can lead to more engaged employees who are active in the community.

7) Build Exciting Employee Resource Groups

Employee resource groups, or ERGs, are very beneficial at work. ERGs bring together like-minded employees and help them find a group of friends at work.

If your employees aren’t finding friends easily, consider creating resource groups to bring employees together. Friendships built in these groups flourish because everyone has at least one thing in common.

8) Share the Love by Giving Public Praise

When people feel like they are doing a good job at work, engagement flourishes.

If your company hasn’t created a praise program, now is the time to think about it.

Consider how you will praise employees privately and publicly (if they enjoy receiving public feedback.)

You also want to consider how you give constructive criticism to employees. If workers know what to improve upon, they can feel like they are advancing at work.

9) Create a Stellar Employee Mentorship Program

Mentorship is an essential part of work life. It can be difficult to advance without the help of someone more senior in their career.

If you haven’t started a mentorship program at work yet, gather managers and establish a cross-departmental mentorship program.

Encourage employees to sign up for the mentorship program with a form you send to every team member. By investing in this program:

  • Mentors will get to work with people outside of their department.
  • Mentees will get someone to lean on besides their direct manager.

10) Ensure Every Employee Has Talked With Their Manager About Career Progression

Last but not least, make sure that employees are talking about career progression frequently. Managers should be chatting with employees about career progression at least once per quarter.

Did you know that 82% of employees would quit a job due to a lack of career progression?

If you haven’t already, consider creating career progression plans with all of your employees. After you create them, launch a program that encourages managers and staff to revisit their plans regularly.

Key Employee Engagement Program Takeaways

You can’t improve employee engagement overnight. But, programs like the ones we shared today can help you and your business get closer to the employee experience you want to build for your organization.

Do you need a home base for your employee engagement programs? Consider Workrowd! At Workrowd, we help you create employee communities that your staff will love to belong to. If you want to learn more about what we offer and if we are right for your company, email us at hello@workrowd.com.

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Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging

3 reasons to prioritize equity in your office reopenings

For many organizations, increased vaccine adoption means that returning to the office is on the horizon. If your organization is thinking about going back to some form of office life, it’s important to consider equity in your decision. Office reopenings shouldn’t be the reason employees consider resigning or searching for other work.

As an organization leader, now is the time to consider what employees are facing to make the right decision for your team members.

Office Reopening Concerns

Office reopenings have employees thinking about The Great Resignation and moving on from their current employment. What are some of the major concerns people have when it comes to getting back to the office? Here are some starters:

Working From Home Is Nice

Let’s face it: being able to work from home has some nice perks. Many people have gotten used to working at home in their own offices, and giving up that freedom isn’t easy for some employees.

Working from home allows employees to avoid things like water cooler chat, which will be a part of going back to work. After so long, there are many small things that could give employees anxiety about returning to the office.

COVID Fears

Contrary to popular belief, we are still dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. As the Delta variant has caused another surge in cases while vaccination rates are suffering in many places, it’s become increasingly clear that returning to the office won’t be as easy as we’d hoped.

While you may be keen to get back to the office, empathy for employees is essential during this time.

As an organization leader, you have to be aware of what Covid looks like in your city. Some states and countries have been harder hit than others. Take time to consider how you can ease fears and bring people back to the office with those feelings in mind.

The Future of Work Is Here

Another big concern is that organizations are trying to return to normal without thinking through the workplace they want to have. The future of work is here, and employees have a precise idea of what they will and won’t put up with.

As an organization leader, you may consider other work arrangements like a hybrid or permanent remote work setup. You’ll also want to consider what kind of bonding is required to do a job well. For instance, you might want to move to asynchronous communication for most of your time.

Overall, employees are calling on companies to be intentional about this return to the office.

What Role Does Equity Play At Work?

As organizations grow, equity becomes essential. Many organizations stop at equality, but that doesn’t really address the whole picture.

Image Attribution: Interaction Institute for Social Change | Artist: Angus Maguire

This image from the Interaction Institute for Social Change helps give more color to the term equity. Equity isn’t about giving the same resources to everyone. Instead, organizations that value equity realize that different groups need different resources to be on a level playing field.

Why You Should Prioritize Equity in Your Office Reopenings

As you are thinking through your office reopenings, you must consider the role of equity in how you choose to show up for your employees.

Office Reopenings Can Put Undue Stress on Employees

The current pandemic has hit employees differently.

When we think about the diversity of people who are employed, some of those individuals are bound to be dealing with things we can’t even begin to comprehend.

For example, you might have employees with weakened immune systems, social anxiety, and other (sometimes) invisible conditions on your roster.

According to the American Psychological Association, Americans aren’t sure about what life will look like once we return to the office. In fact, 49% said that adjusting back to in-person life made them uneasy.

Remote Work Can Improve Workplace Diversity

While remote work can cause some issues with face-to-face communication, there are many positives to working from home.

Remote work allowed some to go to work when they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to.

Based on the number of employees who have quit in the last few months, it’s clear that flexibility is required and other voices need to be heard when deciding to open up the office.

COVID Has Put a Lot of Things Outside of Our Control

Let’s be clear: many of your employees are struggling.

Covid has created a global pandemic that has taken more than a year of our lives (and there’s no sign that it’s stopping now.)

Vulnerable communities like women (especially women with children), people of color, and people with disabilities have been hard hit by the pandemic.

With so much out of our control, your staff wants to control what they can. Give them more equity in the decisions you are making around returning to work post-COVID.

What Companies Need to Consider With Office Reopenings

There are so many things employers should think about when it comes to getting back in the office. Here are just a few of them:

  • Do you have the resources to come back safely?
  • Are your office policies written and agreed upon by your employees?
  • Do you have any plans in case you need to close the office down again?
  • Do you need to go back to a fully in-office team? Can you mix it up and provide room for a hybrid workforce?
  • What is giving you the impression that you need to return to the office now? Are you jumping to conclusions?

It’s important to evaluate the reasons why we are doing what we are doing. Your staff are your people. It’s your job to take care of them and ensure their best interests are served when returning to the office.

Conclusion: Creating an Equitable Workforce When Reopening Offices

Getting back to the office is going to require a lot of work from human resources professionals. It’s challenging, because dealing with pandemic policies is probably not what any HR leader wants to do. Hopefully this article gives you some food for thought as you are thinking about reopening the office.

Equity starts by building bridges and encouraging open conversation. Employee communities can be the perfect place to have those conversations. Check out Workrowd and email us at hello@workrowd.com to see if we’d be right for your organization.

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Company Culture

Defining company culture must be a daily activity – here’s why

Defining company culture in an organization isn’t an easy task. It can be challenging to invest energy into a topic that feels grandiose or theoretical. It’s crucially important that you do so, though; company culture plays a larger role than you might think.

What Role Does Company Culture Play At Work?

Company culture is more than just a theoretical list of values or statements. Your company is creating a culture, even if you are not actively focused on it. Culture is about:

  • The feeling an employee has when working for your organization.
  • What behavior is accepted by employees and managers at work.
  • How conflict or disagreements are handled.

Culture touches so many aspects of life at your organization. Therefore, we must take a more active approach to defining our company’s culture.

5 Reasons to Invest in Company Culture Every Day

Investing in company culture every day might feel like a massive undertaking. So, why do we need to connect on our culture, values, and vision so often? Here are some of the reasons why:

1. It’s Easy to Lose Sight Of the Company Culture You’re Trying to Build

You’ve probably heard of the phrase “out of sight, out of mind.” Company culture is a hard concept for some people to grasp. It only becomes more challenging if you aren’t spending an adequate amount of time defining and perfecting your organization’s culture.

A recent company culture story that made headlines was about the merger of Kraft and Heinz and what it did for the company culture of both organizations. Unfortunately, as companies grow, merge, and get acquired, it’s so easy to lose sight of the company culture you’re trying to build.

In the article about Kraft Heinz, a Kraft employee talked about life pre-merger. Kraft was treating its employees well with a lot of opportunities for advancement. As Kraft was acquired, the culture it had built as an individual organization was slowly eroded.

If you are not careful, it’s easy for something similar to happen to your team.

2. Culture Consistency Builds Brand and Company Loyalty

There is a brain hack called spaced repetition that dramatically improves the way your brain stores information. It works by going over the same information in a spaced, but repetitive fashion. Most people choose an hour every day to go over flashcards if they want to make the biggest impact with this method.

As an organization, you have to spend more time than once per year going over your organization’s core values and culture. Defining company culture should be a daily activity so that employees begin to understand the culture and what appropriate behavior looks like.

Put another way, you can’t act like culture doesn’t matter 300+ days out of the year. Employees need consistency to model great workplace behavior.

As you showcase your company’s culture, employees begin to understand that it’s more than just lip service on your organization’s career site. Culture becomes tangible, and it makes employees want to improve their loyalty to your organization.

As your customers become aware of your culture, you can draw new and existing customers to your brand.

3. Understanding Company Culture Helps You Make Better Decisions

Company culture isn’t just for employees. Managers and company leaders also need to understand the culture you are trying to build. Decision-making takes up a ton of mental energy for leaders who can spend hours of their time each week making decisions. When you have a clear culture, decision-making becomes effortless.

You would be surprised at the number of employers who struggle with decision-making:

Only 20 percent of respondents say their organizations excel at decision making.

McKinsey & Company

Imagine how much better leaders would be at making decisions if they had clarity about the company’s culture, mission, vision, and values. In a world where clear decision-making is critical, we need leaders who understand our organization and can step up to the plate.

4. Culture Issues Are Easier to Fix When Detected Early

Cultural misalignment at work can cause a wide array of issues for employees. If one employee gets out of alignment, they have the ability to cause employee dissatisfaction, turnover, and a negative public image for your organization.

If you let cultural issues go undetected, you are letting employees that go against your culture connect with employees and customers.

On the other hand, maybe you are creating a toxic company culture. If you go months without addressing culture, you could be perpetuating this negative experience for a long time. Addressing culture often helps you spot these issues before they get out of hand.

5. Company Culture Defines Your Organization’s Very Existence

Company culture isn’t a pie in the sky thought experiment. It’s the makeup of your entire organization’s existence. Culture isn’t always easy to spot, but it’s being created every day.

Regular culture maintenance is a necessary part of organizational growth.

We care for our culture because we care for our people.

Daily Organizational Culture Tweaks

Now that you know why you should define company culture daily, let’s walk through a few activities to help you make this a reality.

  • Highlight employees contributing to your company’s culture every morning inside your company’s communities.
  • Check-in with employees daily to let them know you are thinking of them and see if they have any issues.
  • Play a short get-to-know-you game during every daily standup meeting you have.
  • Give your employees flexibility in how they choose to work every day.
  • Encourage everyone to take daily breaks or naps to improve focus and get off the computer for a while.

You may be struggling with the thought of defining company culture every day, but this doesn’t have to be difficult. Start by defining the culture you are trying to create at work. Then, based on that, come up with a few activities you can do daily, weekly, and monthly to keep that culture top of mind for your employees.

Defining Company Culture Should Happen All the Time

Company culture isn’t something you define once and then put on a shelf. Leaders need to find ways to connect with employees. We have to address culture daily.

Without this extra step, it’s easy for employees or leaders to go back to their old ways. If you want employees to follow your culture, you have to keep it top of mind.

Are you looking for a way to improve company culture at your organization? Read our article about how employee communities drive positive company culture. If you are ready to invest in employee communities, reach out to us at hello@workrowd.com to see if our tool can serve your organization’s needs.

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Company Culture

7 strategies for building an inclusive culture in 2021

Creating an inclusive culture continues to be important, especially for employees who belong to the millennial and Gen Z generations. It’s becoming increasingly clear that inclusivity has a positive effect on an organization’s bottom line, but what strategies can organizations use to take diversity to the next level? Today, we are discussing the inclusive culture strategies your organization can use to improve in 2021 (and beyond.)

What Does It Mean to Build an Inclusive Culture?

Having an inclusive culture is about more than hiring diverse employees. Inclusivity goes beyond the mere presence of minority groups.

Inclusive cultures celebrate and empower minority workers with well-paying jobs, fair and equal promotion opportunities, and the feeling that they belong at the organization.

Culture matters. Company leaders can’t expect to retain underrepresented hires without deeply committing to their culture and how they treat diverse groups.

7 Inclusive Culture Strategies Your Company Can Utilize

Going beyond hiring diverse employees takes time and energy. It’s not an overnight success, especially for organizations with a small number of minority employees at the outset. Accordingly, here are seven strategies you can start with to improve the culture at your organization.

1. Go Beyond Black/White Thinking

First, we have to move past black and white thinking when it comes to diversity and inclusion at work. Many organizations depend too heavily on having one single diverse population represented. It’s important to go beyond black/white thinking or male/female thinking.

Hiring a lot of black employees or several women doesn’t necessarily make your organization diverse or inclusive.

Inclusivity is more than black/white. There are other ways to create an inclusive workplace for different groups of people. For instance, diversity exists across:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Race
  • Ethnicity
  • Religion
  • Sexual Orientation
  • Educational Attainment

Consider these different dimensions of diversity as you are looking at candidates and interviewing. Keep all of your organization’s types of diversity in mind as you are planning holidays, creating social media content, and developing employee resource groups.

2. Celebrate Employee Differences

You might hire employees from diverse backgrounds, but are those employees able to be themselves? Do they spend more time assimilating than bringing their unique experiences to the table?

You’d be surprised how many people don’t feel comfortable being themselves at work. Speaker and writer Jodi-Ann Burey recently gave a fantastic TED Talk about the myth of bringing your full, authentic self to work that summarizes many of the issues diverse groups face around opening up at work.

Your employees might celebrate different holidays, wear different clothing to work, or choose to bring someone you wouldn’t expect to the company family day.

Are you able to accept and celebrate all the different ways your employees might choose to show up at work? Creating an inclusive culture allows you to celebrate and learn from your employees’ different cultural and personal beliefs.

3. Ensure Buy-In From All Directions

Typically, organizations consider buy-in from leaders and managers, but top-down buy-in won’t cut it when it comes to inclusivity.

Employees interact with a wide array of people every single day. For example, customers, colleagues, managers, and even investors might interact with your employees.

If managers are the only people who have expressed buy-in, you might open diverse employees up to many micro and macro-aggressions at work.

4. Define & Check-In on Goals, Not Quotas

For many organizations wanting to invest in inclusion, their first thought is to set quotas for the hiring process. For example, they may choose to set a quota for the number of minority candidates who turn in resumes or the number of interviews held.

Quotas without the work of actually hiring more diverse candidates are just a waste of the candidate’s time and your own. Candidates want to feel like they have a shot at joining your organization, not like a quota checkbox.

Get specific about what a diverse and inclusive organization would look like. Create SMART goals around diversifying your organization and creating an inclusive culture at work. Go beyond quota filling to create the best company culture.

5. Focus on Creating Training Moments Year-Round

Are you spending your time creating one diversity and inclusion training per year? While this is a great gesture and start to improving D&I at your organization, it’s easy for your initiatives to get swept under the rug if you are only addressing the situation once per year.

Instead, you can create smaller monthly or quarterly trainings for employees to keep your diversity work top of mind. Consider hosting town halls about diversity at work, sharing details about diverse holidays, and celebrating heritage/recognition months as they come up.

Connecting with employees about diversity topics throughout the year will make everyone more educated on related topics.

6. Learn From Other Organizations Who Value Diversity & Inclusion (D&I)

One of the best parts about HR work is that you can learn from others. Other human resources professionals are dealing with (or have dealt with) all the issues you are currently facing at work. You can lean on other HR professionals to learn from their mistakes and successes.

By connecting with others, you can implement their strategies to create a more inclusive culture at your organization.

One way you can do this is by joining a network like the Global ERG Network. This cross-company community is a fantastic opportunity for employee ERG leaders to access best practice templates and toolkits, monthly learning events, and 24/7 networking and knowledge sharing with peers.

7. Think About the Outward Work

Many organizations start claiming their inclusion success too early, but never claiming it at all isn’t the answer either.

Potential candidates need to see the work that you are doing to improve diversity and inclusion at your organization.

Here are some ways to do inclusion work outwardly:

  • Plan social media campaigns about diverse holidays.
  • Spotlight diverse employees in brochures and company publications.
  • Feature diverse faces in your company’s marketing material.
  • Donate to and partner with diverse organizations.
  • Publicly support causes and political legislation that uplift diverse groups.

Creating an Inclusive Culture Takes Time

You won’t be able to transform your culture overnight. There are no quick fixes when it comes to inclusivity. By following these steps, you will slowly win over your organization and make inclusivity the standard.

If you are looking to create a more inclusive culture through employee networks, we’re the perfect partner. Email us at hello@workrowd.com to see if we’re the right fit for your organization.

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Company Culture

5 ways to help your office culture rebound after the pandemic

Employees have gone through a lot in the last year. As companies begin to get back into the office, you might have a culture problem. Transitions back to life as usual can’t happen overnight. We must give our employees ample time to get used to the commute, water cooler conversation, and dressing up for the office again. If your employees are struggling with office life, there are several things you can do to improve your office culture. 

What Impact Did The Pandemic Have on Office Culture?

So, what impact did the pandemic have on office culture?

When we think about traditional workplace culture, a lot of our memories start with the office. From general water cooler conversations to lunch with our colleagues, we spent a lot of time in the office pre-pandemic.

In early 2020, many companies shifted their work completely. Companies pivoted to working from home, and more silos formed as we went to virtual communication like Slack and Zoom meetings.

Companies had to learn to restructure communication and benefits that were tied to the office (e.g. free lunches.) The pandemic truly changed the way that we worked. Some companies plan to stay remote forever.

With all the rapid changes we had to make, it’s no wonder the pandemic impacted office culture.

5 Ways to Help Your Office Culture Rebound After the Pandemic

It’s easy to understand why the pandemic has changed office culture in the last year. Knowing this, how do we deal with the fallout of the pandemic when it comes to office culture? Well, you can start with these five activities:

Set Proper Expectations About Office Culture as Employees Return to Work

Before anyone steps foot back in the office, you have to start by setting proper expectations about what office life will look like as employees return to work.

Set expectations about:

  • Mask guidelines
  • Social distancing protocols
  • Cleaning frequency
  • Testing
  • Office gatherings and events

Write all of these policies down and put them in a place where every employee can see them. As employees go back to the office, ask them to acknowledge your office guidelines before returning to work.

Ease Back Into Office Life

Many employees have been working from home for more than a year. Getting back into the grind of daily office life isn’t going to be easy for people.

In fact, some people are choosing to quit their job instead of going back to work. The thought of a mass exodus of employees is pretty scary, especially because filling empty positions is so difficult right now.

Don’t ask employees to flip the switch automatically. Come up with a plan that slowly gets people back in the office.

For example, you might choose to create a hybrid work plan where employees can choose to come in the number of days they want. Many employers have even decided to utilize a desk sharing model where employees reserve a desk if they are in the office.

We have to understand how badly we need employees in a physical office. Is it worth the commute and upset employees to require their physical presence? Or is there another option where we give employees the ability to work from an office if it works for them (e.g. downsizing the office or using coworking spaces)?

Consider Ways to Bring Back Pre-Pandemic Traditions Safely

What did the office look like pre-pandemic? Did you offer free lunch or workout Wednesdays? For many employees, the best part of office life was the perks they got for being there.

Are you bringing employees back to the office without thinking about the benefits of returning? If so, it’s time to plan this part of office life.

To make things safer, you’ll likely need to change some aspects of those pre-pandemic traditions. For example, lunches might need to be individually packaged, and workout Wednesdays will need to be socially distanced.

Going back to the office after the pandemic doesn’t mean you need to start from scratch on office traditions. Ease back into holding these traditions regularly to rebound office culture quickly.

Set Up Employees With Weekly Office Buddies

If your company is like most with turnover and hiring new employees, it’s likely that many team members haven’t had the chance to get to know one another.

If you are looking for a way to rebound office culture, start small by assigning weekly office buddies. Encourage office buddies to connect over a meal or a joint project one day during the week. You can even set weekly ice breakers to get the conversation flowing.

Here are some ice breaker questions to get you started:

  • What was the last thing that made you smile/laugh/feel excited?
  • Where do you want to be in life or your career five years from now?
  • What is your favorite thing to do outside of work? How did you get started with that hobby?
  • What’s the next destination on your travel bucket list? Why do you want to go there?
  • If you could change one thing about your favorite book/movie/television show, what would it be and why?
  • What is your favorite place in the city? How did you find out about the place?
  • If you could create a super job featuring all of your favorite work activities, what would that job be?

Ask For and Utilize Employee Feedback

Last but not least, one of the best ways to rebound office culture is to talk to your staff and get their opinion. Gathering and utilizing employee feedback is one of the best ways to understand what your team needs from you.

Create a confidential survey using a tool like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey. Ask all your burning office culture questions and request that employees fill out the survey.

After receiving all your responses, synthesize the information for employees and tell them what you will do about it. Employees can get tired of surveys quickly, especially if they don’t feel that managers are hearing them. Ensure that you close the feedback loop and make any necessary adjustments.

Conclusion

Getting back into the office is going to be challenging for even the most seasoned employees. As an organization leader, it’s your duty to guide employees to speak up for what they need and advocate for your organization at the same time. It’s a tricky balancing act, but it can be done when you make sure to keep active listening top of mind.

If you are looking for more information on hybrid workforces, check out our free hybrid workforce engagement guide. Reach out to us at hello@workrowd.com to see if building employee communities with Workrowd is the best way to engage your employees in and out of the office.

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Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging

The purpose of employee resource groups in the workplace

Employee resource groups or ERGs play a massive role in the company culture of many medium- to large-sized organizations. Over the last year, several large companies like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Justworks have decided to pay ERG leaders additional salaries. You may be wondering about the purpose of employee resource groups, so we’re here today to share why these company groups are so vital.

What Is an Employee Resource Group?

An employee resource group (also called an employee affinity group) is a collection of employees who support and learn from each other. These groups form for different minority groups to come together and connect about workplace issues.

You may see ERGs form to support women, people of color, people with disabilities, working parents, LGBTQIA employees, and so much more. As your company grows, your ERGs can become more diverse and helpful to your employees.

What Is the Purpose of Employee Resource Groups?

ERGs provide so much to the modern workplace. Let’s go through a list of how these groups contribute to companies across the world.

ERGs Provide a Sense of Community for Employees

As your team grows, it can become difficult for new employees to feel connected to your organization.

Did you know that 40% of workers say they feel isolated at work? In companies without ERGs, boosting this number can fall squarely on HR and people managers. 

Companies with ERGs can use these groups as resources. HR leaders can help connect employees who feel disconnected by encouraging them to join ERGs that fit their needs.

In the end, you could reap some amazing belongingness benefits, like a 167% increase in your employee Net Promoter Score.

ERGs Encourage Cross-Departmental Relationship Building

When you are building a large company, silos between departments are bound to form. Marketing will hang out with marketing, sales with sales, and so on down the line. It’s much easier to make friends with someone who understands what you do and speaks the same language. Departmental silos aren’t great for organizations that need each department to communicate seamlessly to get work done.

Employee resource groups are department neutral. It’s all about bringing people together, no matter their background. So, for example, your marketing personnel will end up with friends across the company.

The next time you have a huge project that requires employees from different departments, members of your ERGs will be excited to team up with work friends they probably don’t get to see daily.

ERGs Help Your Employees Feel Heard and Valued

Employee resource groups are a fantastic source of information. Your employees might feel small or lost in the crowd. ERGs create smaller sections of your company where more voices can be heard.

You can:

  • Survey your ERGs for suggestions
  • Hold town halls
  • Have productive meetings with ERG leaders on changes you can make to improve their experience

If you engage your ERGs and show them you value their opinions, you can get a lot done while showing employees across the company how much you appreciate them. You won’t have time to do this on a one-to-one basis, so employee affinity groups help you do this efficiently.

ERGs Can Help You and Your Team Solve Problems Quickly

Once employees feel united and confident in what they need at work, they can help you solve ERG-related issues more quickly.

For example, maybe the parents in your organization feel like they constantly have to choose between going home to be with their families and advancing their careers due to the number of after-work activities your company runs.

In a world without ERGs, parents might have silently thought about this or even shared it with a work friend. Silos of working parents at your organization might have discussed this issue, but they wouldn’t have done anything significant with the information.

This lack of organization might have led some of your best employees to seek work at other companies or stew in their resentment about their lack of career advancement.

The scenario we shared is not unimaginable. According to Pew Research, 27% of working parents shared that being a mother or father stopped them from advancing in their careers.

So, what happens with an employee resource group? Working parents would be able to come together and share their thoughts about how being a parent has affected their job. At the very least, they would feel less alone. Plus, they may even be able to come to HR and suggest changing some of the policies for after-work activities.

Employee affinity groups give your employees more power. Some organization leaders may fear this ability to connect and organize. Innovative organizations realize that ERGs give you the opportunity to fix workplace issues before they spiral into resentment or turnover. Giving up a bit of power is priceless when you recognize the effect these groups can have on retention and engagement.

ERGs Help You Hold Events That Bring Your Company Together

Workplace events can be challenging to plan, especially if you put all of the events on your company’s HR leader or event planner. Employee resource groups can help you plan events to celebrate Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and PRIDE Month. 

If you want to plan educational and fun events for these months or holidays anyway, why not give the budget to ERGs to help you plan and create these events? It’s the perfect way to let ERG members know that you value them and their experiences at your company.

There Is a Significant Purpose Behind Employee Resource Groups

There is a reason that organizations like LinkedIn are finding value in employee resource groups. These groups can drive employee engagement and provide a sense of belonging that many companies are missing.

As your organization grows its employee database, think about ways that you can bring your employees together and help build diversity and inclusion within your company.

Are you looking to leverage the power of employee resource groups at your organization? Look no further than Workrowd. If you want to empower ERG leaders with shared learning, you can check out the Global ERG Network. Connect with us at hello@workrowd.com to see if we’re right for your organization.

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Learning & Development

Employee-led learning & why a bottom-up approach works

Employee-led learning has a lot of potential benefits; is your organization taking advantage of them? From catering to different learning styles to lowering the burden on human resources and learning and development departments, this alternate approach to the more traditional, top-down processes can revolutionize how your organization reaches its training goals. Why limit these benefits to just training, though? Employee-led learning can help with engagement, retention, and more, but how about empowering your team members to grow a wholly employee-led culture?

We’ve said it before, and we’ll definitely say it again: the transition to hybrid work represents an incredibly exciting opportunity to transform the way workplaces work for people. Rather than returning to ‘business as usual’, we can instead imagine a new way of doing that delivers a world-class employee experience to every worker, no matter where they’re based. Shifting more of our processes to be employee-led rather than top-down can help us get there, and quickly, too. In the following sections, we’ll outline what’s been demonstrated so far around the outcomes of employee-led learning, then discuss ways to encourage more employee-led efforts throughout your organization.

How employee-led learning can help you achieve your training goals

Way back in 2017, McKinsey estimated that 375 million workers (14% of the global workforce) would have to change their occupations or acquire new skills prior to 2030 due to advances in technology and automation. In the early, pre-pandemic days of 2020, they further reported that 87% of executives were already experiencing skills gaps or expected to within a few years. Unfortunately, at that time fewer than half of the respondents had a plan to address the problem, and the pandemic has only accelerated the issue.

During the pandemic, employees had to adapt to a lot of new changes virtually overnight. While some companies engaged in extensive training to ensure that everyone was up-to-speed, many employees had to self-train on a number of fronts. Although live walkthroughs can help, employees who had to use new software every day in order to complete job functions that previously occurred in person had to learn as they went along in most cases. Essentially, remote working has been hailed as “an overwhelming success for employers”, and much of the learning process was employee-led as workers retreated to their homes and sorted out the logistics on their own. We already know this can work, and with asynchronous working expected to become the norm post-pandemic, live, company-wide, in-person training is really no longer viable. That’s where employee-led learning comes in.

As a final point, the recruiting firm Hays surveyed 23,000 respondents and found that while many are certainly seeking specific knowledge and expertise, the top skills employers are looking for are soft skills. This was true as far back as 2018, though. When LinkedIn Learning published their 2018 Workplace Learning Trends Report, their findings showed that the most in-demand skills were leadership, communication, collaboration, and only then role-specific skills. Unsurprisingly, training for these soft skills was the most important focus for talent development efforts as well.

From the employee side, the data also showed that 68% of employees prefer to learn at work, 58% of them prefer to learn at their own pace, and 49% prefer to learn at the point of need. In other words, employees want to learn, and they want to be able to direct their own learning so that they can learn what they need when they need it. This makes sense given that 94% of employees say they would stay with an employer longer if the company invested in their career, but their main reason for not learning as much as they’d like is that they don’t have the time. Converting to an employee-led learning approach meets all of these employee needs and empowers team members to work on difficult topics like soft skills in an environment in which, and at a time when they feel comfortable.

How to integrate more employee-led initiatives into your post-pandemic workplace

Now that we’ve explored why employee-led learning makes sense, all that’s left is to find the right systems to enable it at your organization, right? That may be the best choice for you at this point however, why not consider taking things a step or two further? Why should learning have all the employee-led fun? Below, we’ve listed a handful of other ways you can integrate employee-led efforts into your employee experience.

  • Employee resource groups/affinity networks. ERGs are one of the most obvious employee-led efforts you can integrate into your strategy. This employee-led approach dates all the way back to the 1960s, and can confer a wide array of benefits. ERGs are typically part of an organization’s diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy, but affinity networks in general can be expanded to encompass many different employee needs and interests. By empowering employees to form groups around identities, interests, or needs that are important to them, you can deliver a more tailored employee experience that meets more employees’ needs without increasing your overhead. Employee-led communities can help better support working parents, assist with mental health needs, or just provide social and/or recreational opportunities with colleagues, so they can create a great deal of value across the organization.
  • Innovation. Companies like Google understand that if you give your employees space to innovate, your organization will ultimately come out on top. Their ‘20-percent time’ policy, in which employees are allotted 20% of their workweek to focus on projects they believe will benefit Google, has spawned such advances as Google News, AdSense, and Gmail. Innovation is crucial to staying on the cutting edge of any industry, and if you’ve hired well, you likely have an untapped brain trust languishing amongst your employee ranks. Make the most of that resource! In addition to employee-led learning, employee-led innovation efforts can supercharge your company’s products and services and help you succeed in the long-term. If Google’s approach seems like too much to start off with, consider giving employees one day per month to work on bottom up innovation projects with their colleagues. Still too daunting? Even running hackathons once or twice per year for employee-led innovations can make a radical difference in whether your company remains a leader, or falls behind.
  • Social impact. As we recently discussed on this blog, social impact is extremely important to employees, and even more so after the pandemic. Why should you invest time and money in top-down fundraising or service activities though, when many employees may not be interested in the cause you chose? Instead, empowering employee-led impact efforts can ensure higher levels of team buy-in alongside greater payoff in terms of engagement and retention as employees get to support organizations whose work they are truly passionate about. Plus, your company will benefit from a significantly stronger employer brand boost as employees post and talk about the great charity work they get to do as part of their jobs.
  • COVID-19 safety. Returning to the office in whole or in part represents uncharted territory for every company. Why not involve your employees in your planning and execution to ensure your return is a success? Taking an employee-led approach to COVID-19 safety entails asking employees their opinions on when and how to return, integrating them into the work of deciding on processes and policies, and having volunteers ready to help out on the ground as employees come back on site. You’ll need employee buy-in to make this effort a success either way; you might as well involve them in all aspects of the process to lighten some of the burden on you.

Employee-led learning has been around for years, and it’s because it offers a flexible framework within which every team member is given the tools they need to succeed. As we envision a whole new world of work though, why wouldn’t we apply this intuitive framework to more initiatives such as diversity, equity, and inclusion; innovation; social impact; and more? It can be daunting to imagine putting more power in the hands of employees, but it can also be liberating as it frees you up to spend your time on more pressing matters. If you’re interested in exploring the employee-led approach but would like to start off with some guardrails, we invite you to check out Workrowd’s platform. We’ve got a central hub for all the initiatives employees can get involved in, but we’ve also included straightforward administrator settings and on-demand analytics so you can always monitor how things are going. If you’d like to learn more, drop us a line at hello@workrowd.com; we’d love to hear from you.

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Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging

Starting an ERG – how to build a strong foundation

Starting an ERG can be daunting if it’s your company’s first resource group. Even if your organization already has a handful of groups, if there’s no documented process for starting a new one, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Luckily, a lot of brave ERG leaders have come before you and paved the way for more companies to launch these crucial initiatives. If your organization is exploring the idea of starting an ERG for the first time, we want to congratulate you on this exciting step. There’s a reason why virtually every Fortune 500 company currently offers employee resource groups: they’re a crucial component of an effective diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategy. By learning more about starting an ERG, you’re demonstrating a commitment to advancing DEI at your organization, which will pay off for both your people and your bottom line.

Employee resource groups, commonly referred to as ERGs, are employee-led collectives of colleagues oriented around shared identities, needs, interests, or other commonalities. Most frequently, you’ll see these associations organized around attributes like race or gender, but they can also support groups like parents and caregivers, veterans, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ community members, and more. Whether you already have a sense of which ERGs you want to launch first, or if you’re still at the stage of figuring out what sort of ERG(s) to begin with, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll lay out some of the foundational steps to starting an ERG to help you get acclimated and set your group(s) up for success. Don’t forget that the Global ERG Network is here as a resource for you as well, with free templates and events available on our website in addition to the members only content and sessions we provide.

Useful data points to help you make your case for starting an ERG

As with any business effort, you will likely be asked to make your case as to why starting an ERG is a worthwhile decision for your company. The impact of ERGs can vary widely depending on how the groups are run and what their goals are, so there’s not currently a massive body of evidence around the direct effect of employee resource groups on companies’ bottom lines. Luckily, we know simply from human psychology that effective ERGs are key drivers of diversity, equity, and inclusion; engagement; retention; and more, so we can look to statistics from these areas to make the business case for starting an ERG.

On a more foundational level though, we can see why ERGs make good sense for employees’ wellbeing. Throughout life, people seek out groups of peers who share similar interests, needs, identities, backgrounds, and more. Consider afterschool activities, university clubs, and community groups as examples. Translating these communities into the workplace can only confer benefits as people feel more included and empowered to bring their full selves and full array of talents to the table. In the absence of these safe, inclusive spaces, employees from underrepresented communities have no support system in the face of daily episodes of exclusion. As these episodes mount, employees often internalize them as trauma, preventing them from doing their best work. Epigenetic coach Rajkumari Neogy states, ‘Every single time [employees are excluded], interrupt[ed], or dismiss[ed] in some way, you are shutting down the part of their brain that is making you money.” Inclusion should be a top priority for every executive, and starting an ERG (or several) is a direct route to increasing inclusion for underrepresented employees.

What’s more, ERGs are key recruitment and retention mechanisms, and not just for minority talent either. A survey found that 70% of respondents would be more likely to apply for a job at a company that offered ERGs, and 50% said they would remain at a company that had ERGs rather than leaving for one that didn’t. This is crucial as diverse companies see 2.3 times higher cash flow than their competitors. Diverse companies are also 70% more likely to capture new markets. The financial case is clear. Employee resource groups increase diversity and inclusion, which in turn boosts revenue. Starting an ERG should be a no-brainer, but if you need more justification, check out our post on diversity and inclusion statistics here, or send us a note at hello@workrowd.com and we’ll be happy to share more information.

starting an ERG
5 foundational steps to set you up for success when starting an ERG

Now you should have a solid basis for why starting an ERG makes sense for your company, so that you can make a strong case to your company’s leadership. The next step is to look at your implementation plan, because while the ‘why’ is important, your colleagues are likely going to want to know about the ‘how’, too. Below we‘ve listed the first five steps you should take when looking towards starting an ERG. If you think we left anything out, let us know in the comments!

  1. Poll your colleagues. ERGs are typically employee-led, so it’s crucial that you engage your colleagues from day zero. ERGs are not something that should be launched at employees, but instead something that must be launched with employees. If you decide what group(s) you’re launching without engaging employees first, you’re already setting your ERG up for a reduced likelihood of success. Talk to employees. Put together a survey with a list of potential ERGs to find out how many people would be interested in joining each one. Don’t deliver the news that you’re starting an ERG from the top down, but position it as a whole company initiative, where anyone and everyone can get involved.
  2. Identify your employee champions. Once you understand which ERGs have the most interest and how many you want to begin with, find your evangelists. Your fledgling ERGs need employee buy-in to get off the ground, and the best way to cultivate interest is to have promotion efforts come from fellow employees rather than from HR or the executive team. You may already have a culture champion or two in mind, or you may want to make an announcement that you’re looking for launch team volunteers. Alternatively, you can include a request for volunteers in your survey from step one to find people who are interested. A key point here though is to make sure that you’re only involving true volunteers. Don’t pressure your employees from underrepresented backgrounds to take on the emotional labor of starting an ERG if they’re not interested. It is not their responsibility. It is your responsibility to remember that they already have a lot on their plates and you cannot and should not ask more of them than what they are genuinely interested in doing.
  3. Get executive buy-in with a committed sponsor. Even if you’ve already made your case to the executive team and gotten their endorsement, you still need to take one more step to ensure they remain engaged and prioritize the success of your ERG: secure an executive sponsor. Executive sponsors deliver several points of value to your ERG: 1. They advocate for your needs with the executive team and ensure you have access to the resources you need; 2. They offer a networking benefit to members through direct access to a very senior-level colleague; 3. They build credibility for your ERG throughout the rest of the organization. Things to look for in a sponsor include an interest in the focus of your community, the ability to commit time each quarter to supporting your efforts, and a genuine belief in the value of your ERG. An engaged executive sponsor can make a huge difference in the level of success your ERG achieves, so choose wisely.
  4. Share the news. You’ve laid the groundwork, now it’s time to let everyone know that you’re starting an ERG! One of the goals of employee resource groups is to increase inclusion, so make sure that you’re spreading the word in inclusive ways and reaching everyone. You should distribute the message through as many channels as possible, and encourage those interested to join. It can help to explain a bit about the high-level goals of your group and the type of programming you may offer in order to convince people why they should become members. Don’t forget to leverage the champions you identified in step two to amplify your message. Consider putting together a Google form or similar tool for collecting interest so you know how you’re doing and where you might need to focus your recruitment efforts more intently. Additionally, this will start to build your email list for easy follow-up with your members.
  5. Draw up your group charter. Now you’ve got your group(s) identified, your informal employee leaders in place, your executive sponsor on board, and the beginnings of a member list; it’s time to formalize. Assembling a group charter is a crucial step to ensure that your group survives employees and executives coming in and out. Your charter is where you codify your leadership committee structure and members, identify your short, medium, and long-term goals, detail how you will track and manage your group, outline the transition plan if and when leaders leave, and more. It’s important to have these objectives and expectations established from the outset, so you’re not scrambling when something changes.

Starting an ERG can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. If you’d like templates, toolkits, activity guides, and more, we encourage you to check out Workrowd’s ecosystem. For those looking to streamline their ERG marketing, management, and measurement in-house, our user-friendly platform makes it easy to fulfill all three of these objectives under one roof. Our platform offers a central hub for all your ERGs to promote transparency and connection for every employee no matter where they work, plus straightforward administrator settings for easy oversight. What’s more, Workrowd comes equipped with templates and activity guides to support your employee leaders to succeed, as well as automated surveys and real-time analytics so you always know how each ERG is performing.

You can also take a look at our cross-company learning community, the Global ERG Network (GEN). GEN aims to prevent employee leaders from having to constantly reinvent the wheel by providing best practice templates and toolkits, monthly virtual events, and 24/7 networking and knowledge-sharing with peers. It’s a turnkey solution for offering employees more support on important diversity, equity, and inclusion issues, and is suitable for organizations at any stage of building their ERGs. Our member base is growing rapidly, so there’s no reason to wait; visit https://www.globalergnet.com today for more information.

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Hybrid/Remote

How to empower employees to make hybrid working a success

After more than a year of mandatory remote working, reopening offices is now an option for many organizations. The good news is that four out of five companies plan to offer employees some degree of flexibility around how frequently they have to be on site. While this is a great decision in terms of employee experience, the downside is that the transition to hybrid workplaces may be even messier than the whirlwind switch to home offices. New legal concerns seem to crop up each day, different teams want different policies, and many of the traditional pillars of culture and engagement are now off the table. Luckily, there’s one approach that any company can take to overcome these obstacles and thrive in the era of hybrid work. By learning how to empower employees, organizations can tackle challenges not just from the top down, but from the bottom up as well, drastically increasing their likelihood of success.

Figuring out how to empower employees may sound daunting, but it can actually be achieved in a handful of very straightforward ways. What’s more, now is the perfect time to transition to a more employee-driven culture, given that you’ll have to establish new cultural norms anyway as team members return to the office in various configurations. A number of your employees may be meeting for the first time, and many will have to re-meet each other after being apart for more than a year. Plus, your entire employee population is changed since the beginning of 2020. We’ve all been through a lot, some more than others, and you cannot expect people to just show up in the office and pick back up as if nothing happened. In other words, resuming ‘business as usual’ isn’t an option no matter how you cut it, so you might as well seize this opportunity to figure out how to empower employees for maximum benefit.

What does it mean to empower employees

The traditional workplace model is not designed to empower employees. In fact, many aspects are designed to actively disempower employees. Consider factories where workers are assigned to do a small task over and over, or are charged with churning out a certain number of products in a certain timeframe in order to retain their jobs. These workplaces are structured to keep employees anxious and isolated so that they won’t protest their treatment or substandard conditions. In part, this is what contributed to the rise of the Labor Movement in the U.S.

While the days of factories full of violations may seem long gone, we have seen similar dynamics exposed in office work as part of the transition to remote working. Recent studies show that at least 20% of companies are using software to monitor employees as they work from home. Even today, many organizations operate in an extremely top-down manner, where employees are not trusted or given autonomy to do their best work. These issues can occur at any level of the organization, from the C-suite on down to line managers, and they create an environment where employees are actively disempowered.

Employee empowerment means equipping every team member with the tools and resources they need to succeed, and having the confidence that they will get their work done in a timely manner and to a high standard. The results speak for themselves. Empowered employees are 67% more likely to put in extra effort on the job. What’s more, 70% of employees rank empowerment as being important to their ability to remain engaged and productive. In fact, highly empowered employees show engagement levels in the 79th percentile, while disempowered employees fall into the 24th percentile. Empowerment means setting your employees up to learn, grow, and make a difference at your company. Wouldn’t you rather get the most out of your talent, rather than limiting them while also wasting time and money on making sure they don’t break out of their cubes?

How to empower employees as we navigate the new world of hybrid work

Now that you know why it’s in your company’s best interest to empower your team members rather than micromanage them, it’s time to talk about how to empower employees. What are the actual steps you can take as you look towards reopening offices? Below we’ve listed some of the top strategies for empowering employees and transforming your culture from the inside out:

  1. Solicit input early and often. Employees who feel that their voice is heard are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to do their best work. If your boss never asked for your input and dismissed any feedback you tried to provide, would you feel like you were able to make a difference in your organization? Soliciting feedback from employees as frequently as possible, and actually taking their suggestions into account is crucial to empowering your workforce. Returning to the workplace presents a key opportunity to ask for employees’ input on what they’re comfortable with, what they would prefer, and how the company can help. Once you’ve made a decision, be sure to also explain why, including how employee feedback may have factored into the process.
  2. Offer ample opportunities for growth. If you’re not providing ways for employees to grow and learn, they won’t feel they’re able to reach their full potential with your organization. With the transition to a hybrid workplace, this includes offering trainings on how to stay at your best while your team is distributed and other relevant topics. As you settle in, ensure that your learning opportunities are accessible to all team members, no matter where they work. This way, every employee will feel valued and empowered to utilize and expand upon the full extent of their skills.
  3. Empower managers and teach them how to empower others. Managing people is hard. Managing people through a pandemic, then into a whole new world of work is even harder. Make sure your managers have the tools to succeed. This means teaching them how to ensure that things are equitable across their team, especially if some employees are on-site while others remain at home. Have them discuss how team members prefer to receive feedback, both positive and negative, and train them in the best ways of having these crucial conversations. Emphasize that they should be empowering their employees, and mirroring strategies used in their own trainings to spread this dynamic throughout the organization.
  4. Create dedicated spaces for serendipitous connections. Employees can’t live up to their full potential if they’re stuck alone in their home offices with no way to interact with colleagues outside of meetings and beyond their own teams. Now that you can no longer rely on passing interactions in the hallway and/or the ability to drop by someone’s desk, you need to make a concerted effort to develop company culture in a space that’s accessible to all employees. This inevitably means going digital, but it has to be in a separate space than where your team members are getting hit with infinite stressors. Create a digital water cooler, and consider orienting it around employee communities so your people can drive key outcomes for you on issues like social impact, innovation, diversity, equity, and inclusion and more at the same time that they’re building key relationships. Empowering your employees to drive culture and engagement from the ground up will pay off in spades across loyalty, productivity, employer branding, and more.
  5. Back off. Let your employees do their jobs. Don’t try to set up elaborate monitoring and oversight schemes to make sure they’re doing their work. Establish strong relationships between managers and team members where there’s a clear and regular reporting structure, and ensure lines of communication are open at all times. Then, trust your employees to get the job done. Nothing facilitates disempowerment faster than showing employees you either don’t think they can do their job, or don’t believe that they will without hand-holding. Adopt an ‘innocent until proven guilty’ mentality where you assume employees will deliver until they demonstrate otherwise, and you’ll find that the majority will meet and even exceed your expectations. Those who don’t might not be players you want on your team anyway, so it’s better to find out the easy way than to try to force a fit where none exists.

Most workplaces were intentionally designed to disempower employees, but we’ve got a golden opportunity right now to change the game. Learning how to empower employees and designing your post-pandemic workplace around that ideal can do wonders for your team members, your company culture, and your bottom line. If you’re looking for tools to assist you in this effort, look no further than Workrowd, a dedicated employee empowerment platform. Enable your team members to connect seamlessly across business units, and spin up new events and programs that drive business outcomes. Drop us a line at hello@workrowd.com if you’d like to learn more.