Categories
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging

3 reasons why it’s important to celebrate Pride at work

As you look around at all the rainbows popping up this month, you may be wondering why so many companies embrace this occasion and show up to support the LGBTQIA+ community, at least on a superficial level. It’s a good question, especially when there are myriad other issues that companies don’t endorse in nearly as public of a manner. There are many factors behind this dynamic, some of which are grounded in deep, systemic issues within our society, and others of which vary from company to company. Ultimately though, regardless of their reasons, every organization should recognize and champion their employees from underrepresented communities every day of the year and especially during these designated months of visibility. LGBTQIA+ folx continue to be persecuted each and every day around the world, so the more companies that openly celebrate Pride at work, the better.

Making the decision to celebrate Pride at work isn’t just good for the LGBTQIA+ community, though. While many big name companies have already made their stances known, there are many more who may still be unsure whether or not they should speak out and/or plan events for their employees. For those organizations in the latter camp, we strongly encourage you to do so. Taking steps to celebrate Pride at work, even in a small way, can pay off in droves for your employees and your brand alike. Here we’ve assembled our top three reasons why you should celebrate Pride at work.

What it looks like to celebrate Pride at work

Despite the bright colors of the Pride flag, celebrating Pride at work doesn’t have to be a flashy undertaking. You don’t have to ask people to wear rainbow clothing or hold an over-the-top event. If you’re looking to celebrate Pride at work, you can focus on more understated, but meaningful acts, such as educating team members about why and how to use pronouns, and updating your company email signature template to encourage people to specify which pronouns they use. You can also spotlight team members who identify as part of the LGBTQIA+ community, not for their affiliation, but for all their achievements and interests regardless of that piece of their identity. Highlighting the incredible diversity of talents among those who identify as LGBTQIA+ can help shift the focus away from tokenization and towards true inclusion.

All that said, if you do want to hold an event, there is a multitude of ways to engage. From organizing a contingent from your company to attend a local Pride event together, to holding your own celebration in-house with rainbow treats and activities to help individuals learn about the LGBTQIA+ community and so much more. As always, don’t hesitate to consult your colleagues to get their input on the subject, and if you have employee resource groups, be sure to bring them into the conversation as well given their key role in driving workplace inclusion. Consider hosting a screening of an LGBTQIA+ show or movie with a discussion afterwards as an easy way to get both remote and on-site employees involved.

Another, sometimes overlooked opportunity is to focus on social impact. Pride month can be a great time to develop a partnership with a local (or national) nonprofit focused on supporting the LGBTQIA+ community whether through advocacy, direct service, or other approaches. Scheduling volunteer shifts, organizing fundraisers or supplies drives, and/or simply assisting employees to connect with charities they may be interested in can go a long way towards raising awareness and helping LGBTQIA+ people in need during Pride month. Whether you decide to go with a big event with a lot of fanfare, or a more understated approach, celebrating Pride at work can make a big difference for your employees, including in the ways outlined below.

3 reasons why you should make it a priority to celebrate Pride at work

While some businesses simply may not be inclined to address any issues that don’t directly relate to their core business services, and that’s their prerogative, there are actually quite a few potential benefits companies can gain from standing up for the LGBTQIA+ community. As with anything though, your efforts have to be authentic and go beyond making empty statements in order for you to reap the benefits. For instance, some companies have been accused of ‘rainbow washing’ for trying to capitalize on the financial goodwill from changing their logo to a rainbow version while allowing environments that are exclusive or outright discriminatory towards LGBTQIA+ community members to proliferate inside their organizations. Below are some reasons you might want to skip the ‘rainbow washing’ and take true steps to celebrate Pride at work in support of the LGBTQIA+ community:

  1. It drives inclusion. Approximately 4.5% of the U.S. population identifies as part of the LGBTQIA+ community. Odds are, depending on the size of your company, you likely have employees who identify with this community currently working for you. You may not know it though because nearly half of all LGBTQIA+ employees are not out at work. One in five LGBTQIA+ folx has experienced discrimination when applying for jobs, and 70% have been sexually harassed while at work. These are dire statistics that make it all the more important for your company to step up and take a firm stand in support of LGBTQIA+ rights. Going beyond the rainbow logo to actually celebrate Pride at work in a real way can be a step in the right direction towards encouraging everyone, LGBTQIA+ or not, to bring their whole selves to work at your company. Making space for different voices and lived experiences can go a long way towards building inclusion for every employee.
  2. It’s good for your customer and employer brand. A 2021 study found that 86% of the general population believes that companies should speak out publicly on social issues. If your company isn’t aligned with consumer and employee expectations, it will be difficult for your brand or your team to thrive. Buyers want to know that your company stands in solidarity with them and their friends and family, employees want to know that you have their backs no matter their identity, and on top of all of this, using your power to fight for those who are powerless is simply the right thing to do. In other words, stay silent or continue to actively oppress underrepresented communities at your own peril. On the flip side, many companies have seen far-reaching financial and exposure benefits due to their decision to celebrate Pride at work. The choice is yours.
  3. It’s important for recruiting top talent. As we stand on the precipice of the anticipated ‘turnover tsunami’, star players are going to have more opportunities than ever. You’ll have to make an incredibly strong case as to why they should choose your company. If you can’t demonstrate legitimate ways in which you support employees and help drive broader social progress, you’re going to lose out on talent to companies that do. Of course, the organizations with the best and brightest, the most cohesive teams, and those truly dedicated to driving the company’s success are the ones that will see their profits flourish, so it’s incumbent upon you to take the necessary steps to come out on top.

As attitudes and ideals continue to shift, it’s increasingly to companies’ benefit to take a bold and authentic stand on making the world a better place. This includes seizing the opportunity to celebrate Pride at work as a way to build inclusion, support broader social change, and ensure your employees know that you value and appreciate them for who they are, not just what they do for you. If you’re looking for ways to build inclusion on a daily basis, and not just during Pride month, we invite you to check out Workrowd, the employee experience platform that serves both people and profit. You can also drop us a note at hello@workrowd.com to learn more about how integrating an employee-led approach into your culture and engagement efforts can help you meet and exceed your goals. Happy Pride!

Categories
Company Culture

Corporate social impact is a priority for 2021 – here’s why

Corporate social impact has been a topic of discussion for decades now, but as with diversity, equity, and inclusion, there’s been a lot more talk than action in many circles. As we remain at crisis levels across climate change, nuclear weapons, and COVID-19, and with the wealth gap widening for 70% of the global population, there is certainly no lack of work to be done. It’s time that companies stop simply paying lip service and instead empower their teams to drive real change around corporate social impact and environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG).

Developing an effective corporate social impact program isn’t just good for the world at large, though. Increasing your company’s work in this area can greatly improve your bottom line through attracting and retaining top talent, driving positive employee outcomes such as higher engagement and productivity, and boosting sales by establishing a compelling and socially-oriented brand. Your corporate social impact strategy can also be integrated with your diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, helping accelerate your progress on these two crucial initiatives. Read on to learn why corporate social impact is more important than ever and what you can do about it.

Why corporate social impact is more important today than ever before

Corporate social impact has long been considered a ‘nice to have’ rather than a ‘need to have’. In today’s world though, as both consumers and job seekers become increasingly concerned with what companies do and what they stand for, failing to prioritize important societal issues can be costly. In business, the axiom of ‘nice guys finish last’ no longer applies. Take a company like Patagonia, for instance. Patagonia has a strong environmental focus, and encourages employees to pursue their passions and work towards a cleaner, greener planet. As a result, they have just a 4% turnover rate as compared to the average in their sector of 12-13%. Similarly, when they took a strong stance discouraging people from buying Patagonia clothing they don’t need and being transparent about the true environmental cost of their products, they saw sales increase by 30%.

Consumers and employees both want to support companies that mirror their ideals. In fact, more than 70% of buyers overall and more than 80% of younger generations prefer to purchase from companies that align with their values. The key takeaway here is that if you and your competitor offer a similar product but your competitor speaks out about causes that matter to consumers while you remain silent, your bottom line will suffer the consequences. If you’re concerned that taking steps to make your company more socially and environmentally responsible will be costly and not worth the investment, consider that younger generations increasingly support companies raising prices in order to prioritize people and planet, and their buying power will only expand in the coming years and decades.

Similarly, your organization’s corporate social impact is important to employees as well. Two-thirds of jobseekers consider a company’s stance and work on social and environmental issues when researching potential employers. Moreover, 55% would take a pay cut if it meant working for a more socially responsible company. Younger generations are even more concerned with the corporate social impact of the companies they affiliate themselves with, so as the workforce continues to shift, this issue will only become more crucial as part of your talent recruitment and retention strategy.

What steps to take in 2021 to increase your corporate social impact

Now that you’ve read a bit about why corporate social impact is so important, what can you do about it? Luckily, there are some relatively straightforward ways to boost your efforts without breaking the bank. We’ve outlined a few high-level strategies below, but as we always say, your first step should be to consult your employees. We can pretty much guarantee they’ll have some great ideas for you, but if you need some tips, check out this list:

  1. Take a look at your supply chain. A crucial first step in examining your company’s impact on the world beyond the people you directly employ and the revenue you generate is to check out what you’re endorsing across the entirety of your supply chain. If you say that you want to be an upstanding global citizen, you need to determine where you’re actually doing more harm than good. Are your products derived from sustainable sources? Are you working with vendors who align with your values and goals? At every point in your supply chain, seek to minimize your carbon footprint, engage with underrepresented sellers, purchase sustainable and local supplies, and whatever else makes sense with your values and broader ESG goals.
  2. Empower your employees to advocate for what they believe in. Those monolithic days of service most companies run aren’t serving anyone. One-off engagements are rarely worthwhile for resource-strapped nonprofits, many employees won’t be passionate about the chosen cause, and often all it does is generate a few forced photos for the Careers page. Instead, consider enabling employees to drive smaller impact efforts around the causes that are actually important to them. Equip them with tools to be able to organize volunteer shifts with their colleagues, launch fundraising challenges, and consider offering matching funds to ensure employees know you support them. You’ll be able to do more good through these smaller scale campaigns, and you’ll reap vastly more benefit from this tailored approach to employee programming.
  3. Form community partnerships that align with your values. That said, it is also important to have some sense of company-wide identity and investment. Consult your core product or services as well as your values to determine what causes are most relevant for your company. Next, research organizations that target these issues. Forming strategic partnerships with nonprofits and NGOs will boost your employer and customer brands, give you additional publicity, and support important work that’s aligned with your offerings. For instance, if you’re a financial institution, it might make sense to partner with a financial literacy organization. If you’re focused on transportation, you can connect with entities working to reduce carbon emissions, or to increase mobility for underserved communities. Bring employees to the table for these conversations, and you’ll be bound to come up with some great potential partnerships to pursue. Reach out to the identified organizations, and make sure that however you decide to collaborate is truly mutually beneficial. If the partnership is only helpful for your company, current and prospective employees and consumers will see through it quickly, greatly reducing the business benefits of your efforts.

Corporate social impact is a crucial topic in today’s world, with increasing effects on companies’ bottom lines. Make sure that your company comes out on top by prioritizing your corporate social responsibility and environmental, social, and governance efforts. Feel free to make use of the high-level tips above, and don’t forget to empower your employees to get involved early and often. If you’re looking for an easy way to equip employees with the tools to make a difference, and which also provides analytics and oversight for you, come check out Workrowd or drop us a line at hello@workrowd.com. We’d love to learn more about you and help you do the most good for your business, your community, and the planet.

Categories
Employee Experience

5 easy ways to improve your employee experience in 2021

As it becomes increasingly clear that we simply won’t be returning to the ‘normal’ of old, many companies are beginning to search for new ways to improve their employee experience. The pandemic has tested employers on many fronts, and the impending ‘turnover tsunami’ is painful proof that not every organization rose to the occasion. For those looking to make up lost ground, or simply stay ahead of the many upcoming curves, we wanted to pull together a list of low-lift solutions that can make a big impact for your employees. Plus, since we’ve got a flexible software platform designed to help companies of all sizes improve their employee experience, it only made sense to orient those solutions around Workrowd’s functionality.

That said, we know that not everyone has Workrowd at their disposal (yet!), so these ideas can all be implemented without the help of the platform, albeit with a bit more prep on the frontend and ongoing legwork. Don’t let that dissuade you, though; investing in ways to improve your employee experience is one of the best things you can do as team members start to return to the office, or settle into non-pandemic remote working for the long haul. Many of these ideas came up in conversations with Workrowd users or prospective users, so trust that there are a lot of brilliant minds behind the ideas on this page. Read on to learn why it’s so crucial to improve your employee experience, and check out our top strategies for doing so.

Why it’s more important than ever to improve your employee experience this year

Delivering a quality employee experience is crucial to ensuring your organization can recruit and retain top talent, the biggest factor in contributing to your company’s success. According to Deloitte, 80% of HR and business leaders say that employee experience is “important” or “very important” to them. Of these respondents however, only 22% feel that their organization is “excellent” at creating a differentiated employee experience. This is especially critical at a time when employees have an array of options available to them.

More than 80% of employers are already hiring or plan to hire during 2021. What’s more, 76% of companies believe that the demand for talent in 2021 will near or exceed pre-pandemic levels, which is good news given that more than 60% of full-time U.S. workers plan to look for a new job this year. What’s more, 3 million women have left the workforce since the pandemic began, and it’s unclear how many will return in 2021, or at all. As if these compounding elements weren’t enough to stress how important it is to improve your employee experience, the gig economy grew by 33% during the pandemic, providing yet another bucket of opportunities you could lose your top talent to as part of the ‘turnover tsunami’.

Beyond the recruitment and retention piece though, you also need the talent you have to be productive and engaged while they’re at work in order for your organization to be successful. Unfortunately, in addition to the aforementioned ‘turnover tsunami’, experts are also predicting a ‘mental health tsunami’ as we begin to emerge from the clutches of pandemic lockdowns. According to the American Psychiatric Association, employees living with untreated depression experience a 35% reduction in productivity, at a cost to the U.S. economy of $210.5 billion. Ensuring that support for your team members’ mental health is a part of your efforts to improve your employee experience will go a long way towards helping both your people and your bottom line thrive as the economy bounces back from the prolonged, pandemic-induced downturn.

Our top 5 ways to improve the employee experience in 2021

Now you know why you should invest in improving your employee experience, so how do you do it? There are many strategies you can pursue, but the most important thing you can do is to start talking to your employees. As with any effort to develop a product or experience consumers love, you have to begin by listening to the intended buyers themselves. Your current and prospective employees are the customers of your employee experience. If it’s not one they find attractive, you’re going to struggle in the impending war for talent. Additionally, this post doesn’t address compensation and benefits, but this is another make or break element of a world-class employee experience, so make sure your packages make the cut.

Once you’ve collected employee input via both surveys and conversations, here are some programs you might want to consider launching or increasing your investment in as part of your employee experience revamp:

  1. Professional development. According to LinkedIn’s 2019 Workforce Learning Report, 94% of employees say they would stay with a company longer if it invested in helping them learn. Professional development can come in a number of different forms, and focus on a number of different topics. While self-study environments can be great for some, others learn better in groups. Plus, by enabling employees to learn together, you can double your potential benefits as you’ll be strengthening relationships between colleagues at the same time that you’re upskilling your workforce. One easy and inexpensive way to get started is to support employees to launch professional development groups such as Toastmasters at your company. Fear of public speaking can restrict wages by 10%, and inhibit promotion to management by 15%, so there’s really no downside to helping your employees improve their presentation skills.
  2. Employee resource groups. In case we haven’t said it enough yet on this blog, we’ll do it again: employee resource groups are a massively underutilized tool. Every organization that has grown to the point where everyone doesn’t personally know each other should offer employee resource groups. These associations are not just crucial for driving diversity, equity, and inclusion, but they can do a lot to surface and solve unreported employee needs before they start hurting your business. Employee resource groups don’t have to be difficult to start, either. In fact, the Global ERG Network makes it extraordinarily easy to get them up and running with best practice templates and toolkits, monthly virtual events, and 24/7 networking and knowledge sharing with peers. There’s no reason to not start or ramp up your employee resource groups this year.
  3. Social impact programming. Approximately three-quarters of the working population believes that companies must advocate and work on social issues. This represents a dramatic rise in recent years, and it does not appear to be slowing. Helping your employees to feel that they’re part of something larger than themselves and be proud to represent a company doing good work in the world is a key way to improve your employee experience. Rather than running one of those monolithic days of service that no one really likes though, empower employees to champion the causes that are important to them. Colleagues will learn about each other, they’ll appreciate that your company is supporting important efforts, they’ll build new skills as part of their charity work, and the positive branding opportunities for your organization won’t hurt either.
  4. Wellness initiatives. As mentioned above, we’re standing on the precipice of a widespread mental health crisis. If you don’t take steps to get out ahead of it, your employees and your bottom line will suffer the consequences. Wellness initiatives can include things like yoga and meditation courses, but they can also encompass things like childcare to help working parents manage their many responsibilities, inclusive access to therapy and mental health services, and an environment that encourages people to ask for help when they need it. Making it clear that it’s okay to not be okay will help ensure your employee experience fosters an environment where team members can move beyond just surviving, to truly thrive within your organization.
  5. Intrapreneurship. Last but certainly not least, give your employees the ability to change the game at your company. Many employees want the opportunity to use their whole skillset, beyond just the elements they utilize in their day-to-day jobs. Making time and space for intrapreneurship, where employees get to innovate on new ways of doing things, new products or services, and new approaches to the industry, can do wonders for both your employee experience and your company’s prospects in the market. Consider organizing a hackathon to start off with, start an employee innovation group, or you could even go so far as launching an internal incubator. Intrapreneurship has done wonders for companies like Google and 3M, so what’s stopping you?

Improving your employee experience should be a key focus for your company during the second half of 2021, no matter where you’re starting off from today. Not only will it help you succeed in recruiting and retaining top talent, but the impact on your employees will drive increased productivity, engagement, and more. If you’re interested in pursuing any of the ideas listed above, drop us a line at hello@workrowd.com. We’d love to chat about ways to support you in your efforts, whether it’s sending over some free resources or discussing how Workrowd’s platform can help you launch, manage, and measure the impact of your programming. You can learn more on our website, but whether you decide to chat with us or not, we encourage you to reimagine how you’re approaching your employee experience in order to provide the most benefit to employees as we begin to process the full extent of the pandemic’s effects. Your colleagues and your bottom line will thank you for it.

Categories
Hybrid/Remote

4 ways to build workplace culture without a workplace

In a turn of events that could never have been predicted in March of 2020, more than 80% of employers now plan to allow their team members to work from home at least part of the time in perpetuity. While this is great news for most employees, 92% of whom want to work remotely anywhere from 1-3 days per month all the way up to 5 days per week, it represents a significant change from the old ways of doing things. Prior to the pandemic, 75% of workers had never worked from home so workplace culture revolved around the office. Accordingly, the question now becomes, how do you build workplace culture where there is no physical workplace?

Ultimately, the reality is that workplace culture was never actually about the office to begin with, so many of the same tactics that worked in the old world of work will work in the new one. The problem is that many organizations were looking to build workplace culture through ineffective mechanisms in the past, and having employees organically building real culture in the office is the only thing that saved them. Now that that safety net has been removed, companies will have to do a better job of actually taking the necessary steps to drive an authentic workplace culture, rather than simply defaulting to superficial efforts. In this article we’ve outlined some of the key strategies companies can employ to ensure a great employee experience no matter where team members work.

Why culture matters even more for remote workers

The pandemic has drastically altered circumstances for most employees, so for this post we looked back to 2019 for statistics on the aspects of remote work that are most challenging for employees who are not in the office. According to Buffer’s State of Remote Work 2019, the biggest challenge remote workers face is unplugging after work. Approximately 22% of respondents cited this as being a struggle, and a lot of this ties into culture. If there is an expectation to be ‘always on’, employee wellbeing and the bottom line will suffer. Findings suggest that the expectation to be working 24/7 makes workers 40% less productive, and 1/3 less engaged.

The next biggest bucket of what remote workers struggle with, at 19%, is loneliness. Loneliness has been estimated to shorten a person’s lifespan by 15 years, the same as smoking an entire pack of cigarettes every day. If your company culture only exists in the office for those team members who happen to be in that day, you’re risking severe health outcomes for your workforce. It’s crucial for the wellbeing of your hybrid and remote employees that you strive to transition your culture to support sufficient interactions to keep every worker socially engaged.

The last bucket is collaborating and/or communicating at 17%. While some of this comes down to what tools your company equips employees with and how they use them, it also draws back to your workplace culture in many respects. If your culture doesn’t prioritize collaboration/communication and discourages open and honest conversations, your remote workers will likely fall behind on projects as they’re kept out of the loop. Similarly, without strong connections between departments, your business units won’t be able to work as parts of a cohesive whole, especially with workers scattered across the globe, significantly limiting your company’s prospects of success.

4 keys to driving workplace culture no matter where employees work

Driving workplace culture without a workplace may seem like a counterintuitive concept for those accustomed to relying on happy hours and holiday parties to boost engagement. Luckily, culture actually has very little to do with events and much more to do with how your company treats employees and how employees treat one another. Below are four key tips for ensuring your workplace culture thrives in, out, and beyond the workplace, to support all employees.

  1. Prioritize respect. Respect is a crucial component of workplace culture even if none of your employees work from home. Building respect into your all of your interactions and initiatives ensures that every employee will feel valued and appreciated. Nothing kills a workplace culture faster than people not feeling respected. This can come in many forms including respecting employees’ time by not sending unnecessary requests after hours, respecting employees’ effort by acknowledging them for a job well done, and respecting employees’ backgrounds and opinions by striving to build an inclusive environment. Train managers on respect to ensure this crucial component of a healthy workplace culture is modeled from the top, and incorporate it into your communication strategy by being transparent and consistent with employees at every opportunity.
  2. Make space for whole people. Recognizing that your employees aren’t just drones there to do your company’s bidding will go a long way towards helping build a workplace culture that works for all employees, regardless of location or workspace. This includes ensuring employees are supported in their lives outside of work so they don’t have to spend business hours feeling anxious about things like healthcare, childcare, etc. Design your benefits package to meet employee needs so they can focus fully on their work during their scheduled hours. On that note, don’t expect employees to work around the clock, or saddle them with unmanageable responsibilities. Creating the conditions for employees to burn out is a surefire way to set your workplace culture up to fail, so be sure to manage expectations about when employees should be working and when it’s not urgent to answer right away. Enabling employees to make time for the other things in their lives will ensure they can give their all when they’re working and will help your culture soar.
  3. Invest in making your values a reality. In addition to the items above, it’s also crucially important to practice what you preach. Without being in the office, it’s easy for employees to become disconnected from your company’s core values and lose attachment to the organization as a whole. It’s critical that you work to infuse your values throughout all projects and processes. Your company values are what binds your employees together as a team so if ‘everyone’s voice matters’ is one of your values, make sure that calls and meetings aren’t disadvantaging remote workers. If one meeting attendee is remote, consider requiring that the entire meeting be held virtually. Ensuring that your values are carried out in everything that you do will guarantee that your workplace culture translates seamlessly between all offices, whether home or corporate.
  4. Keep employees connected. Last but certainly not least, employees are the driving force behind your workplace culture, whether or not they work in an office. If you don’t take steps to keep your employees engaged and connected with each other, your culture will be nonexistent at best, damagingly negative at worst. It’s crucial to give employees a dedicated way to stay connected and build camaraderie separate from all the work stress. Without a ‘water cooler’ space that spans across in-office and remote employees, your workplace culture won’t have a space to exist. Ensure that employees have a convenient way to build genuine connections with each other including exploring digital tools that can help.

Building a positive workplace culture is difficult enough as it is, and the transition to hybrid and remote work has only exacerbated those challenges. Rather than try to make up ground later on, it’s important that you prioritize your workplace culture from day one of your hybrid work setup. If you’re looking for tools to help ensure that you can fulfill the steps listed above and develop a thriving workplace culture for all employees whether on-site or remote, we hope you’ll give Workrowd a look. We’ve got a full suite of tools to build and support company culture for every employee, no matter their setup or schedule. Drop us a line at hello@workrowd.com.

Categories
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging

The benefits of ERGs and how to best leverage them

Employee resource groups (ERGs) have long been a mainstay of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. These employee-led collectives are organized around elements of identity, whether race, gender, military status, etc., and are designed to help better support their members in the workplace. More than 90% of Fortune 500 companies have employee resource groups, highlighting the clear value of these associations. That said, it’s one thing to know ERGs are valuable, while it’s another completely to figure out how to build them effectively at your company. It’s important to first know the benefits of ERGs and what you’re looking to get out of them in order to chart a clear map for success.

Although every company will be different, there are some important steps that all organizations can take to position themselves to capitalize on the full benefits of ERGs. This is also why we built the Global ERG Network, in order to help every company move forward faster on diversity, equity, and inclusion by optimizing their ERGs, BRGs, and Diversity Councils. Read on to learn more about how to build your ERGs so they’re primed for maximum impact, ensuring your team can enjoy all the many benefits of ERGs and affinity groups.

What we currently know about the benefits of ERGs

While the hard research on ERGs is a bit slim (for now), it’s easy to see how they can impact your organization by simply looking to fundamental human psychology. The largest bucket above the most basic needs on Maslow’s Hierarchy is ‘belongingness and love needs’. Everyone wants to feel that they have a community, no matter whether it’s at work or out in their personal lives. For employees from underrepresented backgrounds though, they may be the only person with that identity on their team, making it easy to feel alone and potentially even excluded. Having the opportunity to connect with others who share similar backgrounds across the organization through an ERG can make a big difference towards helping them feel at home in the company.

This increase in interpersonal inclusion and belonging is certainly one of the key benefits of ERGs, but there are also a number of positive outcomes from the company standpoint as well. For instance, by building community and spearheading events and programming, ERGs can help to drive employee engagement, a chronic challenge for most companies. In addition, they can increase retention by adding the prospect of losing this community to the list of reasons why employees would stay. ERGs can help companies to recruit more top talent from underrepresented backgrounds by clearly demonstrating that people who share their identity make up a significant and valued part of the company.

Last but certainly not least, we know that the benefits of ERGs extend into the realms of professional development and innovation as well. ERGs can provide much needed career support and development opportunities to members, ensuring that employees who might not have access to the same chances to advance receive an additional boost through dedicated programming. Similarly, they can drive business innovation by offering crucial insight into business plans and new opportunities. For instance, an ERG catering to people with disabilities might help ensure a new product is accessible before launch, or a Latinx ERG might help their company enter into a primarily Spanish-speaking market where they previously had no presence. The potential benefits of ERGs are many, but as with most efforts, what your company gains will ultimately come down to what you put into it.

How to ensure your ERGs succeed and confer the maximum benefit

Now that you know about the potential benefits of ERGs, how do you go about ensuring that you obtain them for your company? At a high level, it really comes down to just three key steps:

  1. Ensure your ERGs are built on strong foundations. Don’t leave your ERGs up to chance. Create a template charter for all of your ERGs so that they start off on the right foot. As part of the charter process, your founding ERG leadership team should establish their mission, vision, and values; set out short, medium, and long-term goals; decide on meeting schedules and the types of events or initiatives the group will hold or participate in; and develop a transition plan so that when a founding team member leaves, the entire group doesn’t fall apart. In addition, they should also create any membership requirements and/or expectations. By developing a clear plan from day one, it will be much easier for your ERGs to stay on track and ensure they’re driving real impact.
  2. Give them the tools and power to drive change. ERGs that aren’t empowered to act within their companies often end up being merely social organizations that arrange happy hours and other one-off gatherings. While there is certainly still value in events like these, if you truly want your ERGs to deliver on business outcomes, it’s crucial that you give them the tools and power to succeed. On the tools front, ERG leaders are at extremely high risk of burnout, so don’t make their job any more difficult or time-consuming than it has to be. Ensure they have access to a streamlined way to manage and track the success of their group, whether it’s through a dedicated system like Workrowd or an internal system that doesn’t require them to fumble across multiple different spaces. This will also help with member engagement and increase visibility for employees looking to join new groups. Similarly, make sure they have the authority to actually do things. If you don’t allow your ERGs to schedule meetings during work hours, advertise through work channels, or otherwise take up space, you severely cripple their ability to drive impact. Give your ERGs the power to do what they need to do, then support them on their road to success.
  3. Involve them in your business decisions. Don’t forget to leverage your ERGs when it comes to actual business efforts, too. As mentioned above, ERGs can be crucial tools to promote cultural competency and innovation in your business. ERGs help encourage diversity across your organization, and companies that report high levels of diversity are 70% more likely to have captured a new market in the past year. Firms with higher ethnic and racial diversity also report two times more innovation revenue. While some of this will come naturally from having more diverse teams throughout your organization, inviting ERG members to assist on strategic initiatives to ensure a wider diversity of perspectives is essential if you want to unlock the full benefits of ERGs.

Making the most of your ERGs is critical if you want your diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts to drive real outcomes in 2021. In order to access the full benefits of ERGs, take steps to prioritize the tips listed above, and make sure you’re not sidelining these powerful collectives. Having thriving ERGs is a great way to boost your employer brand, so if you’re looking for new ways to recruit and retain top talent, look no further than employee resource groups. The Global ERG Network has best practice templates and toolkits if you need them, and we encourage you to explore what other external resources might be available to you. Lastly, if you want to equip your ERGs with a full suite of tools to manage, monitor, and measure their success, drop by our site and check out Workrowd. We’ve got everything you need to supercharge your ERGs and then some.

Categories
Employee Retention

Corporate alumni networks – 3 reasons to start one today

Experts are warning of a ‘turnover tsunami’ poised to hit the U.S. in the coming months as businesses reopen and the economy rebounds. As part of this shakeup, employers will lose a wealth of institutional knowledge, but may have the opportunity to acquire some new skills they found it difficult to recruit for prior to and during the pandemic. One thing that’s for certain is that many employers will have to say farewell to some star players. This goodbye doesn’t have to be forever, though. The opportunity to rehire some of these individuals may present itself down the line, especially if the company invests in a corporate alumni network.

Just as community and communication are absolutely critical for current employees, keeping former employees connected to colleagues and company news is similarly important. Corporate alumni networks are the easiest way to achieve this, and you may even find that employees have already built one or more informal communities that you can tap into to get started. Read on to learn more about the benefits of corporate alumni networks and the first steps you should consider when looking to start one.

3 reasons why starting a corporate alumni network is one of the best decisions you can make this year

Recruiting top talent is an expensive endeavor. Estimates suggest that the cost to hire a new employee can stretch from the mid-four-figures all the way up into the tens of thousands of dollars. Accordingly, it can be quite a blow when a star player chooses to leave your organization after all the time and money you’ve invested in bringing and keeping them there. As mentioned above though, all of that work doesn’t have to go to waste. You can leverage a corporate alumni network to keep your top performers in the company loop so that when it’s time to make their next move, you’re the first place they think of going.

If former employees maintain strong relationships with current staff, and frequently see exciting updates about your company’s progress, they’ll be much more likely to tire of being on the outside looking in and want to return to the team. In other words, corporate alumni networks are a great way to build FOMO, or a fear of missing out among those who have left, in order to passively encourage them to return. Approximately 15% of employees say they’ve boomeranged back to a former employer, and 40% say they would consider it. This number is heavily skewed towards younger generations, with 46% of Millennials saying they would consider boomeranging back to a company they previously worked for, while just 33% of Gen X-ers and 29% of Baby Boomers reportedly said the same.

Bringing back top talent after they’ve been with another employer for a period of time has numerous benefits. You already know they can be successful with your organization, so it greatly derisks the hiring process. Furthermore, while they may have been stars when they were initially with your company, they’ve now had the opportunity to learn new skills and systems, so they’ll be even better equipped this second time around. They’ll also likely need less training because they’ll already know how a lot of things work at your organization. Last but certainly not least, they’ll likely appreciate all the great things about your company culture more than ever after having seen what else is out there. While every situation will differ, from a high-level perspective there are almost no downsides to bringing former colleagues back onto the team. Running a corporate alumni network helps ensure that you keep in touch with these employees to help facilitate their return, no matter what they do next.

Another benefit of keeping former employees involved through a corporate alumni network is for employer branding purposes. More than 60% of GEN Z jobseekers prefer to hear about opportunities directly from a current or former employee. When looking to recruit from this demographic, the more employee ambassadors you have on the ground, the more successful you’ll be. Sharing positive company updates with former team members will ensure they keep your company in mind when speaking with potential jobseekers, and will set them up to make a strong pitch.

How to get started with building a corporate alumni network

While it can confer many benefits, launching a corporate alumni network doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, it can be pretty straightforward. Follow the steps below and you’ll be off to a great start:

  1. Update processes to collect the necessary data. In order to cultivate a robust corporate alumni network, you’ll need email addresses for employees after they’ve left the company. You may choose to ask employees for their email address as part of the off-boarding process, or you could even set up a system to provide employees alumni addresses as many universities do. In theory, you could also keep the email address the employee originally applied to your company with, however that may have changed in the time since they started. Regardless of which method you choose, having a way to contact employees after they’ve left is key to your corporate alumni network’s success.
  2. Ask employees about existing networks. Former employees may have already assembled somewhere whether over WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Slack, or elsewhere. Tap into these networks, and if it makes sense, explore potentially formalizing them. In other words, if there is already a solid base of alumni congregating on LinkedIn, then it probably doesn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel. Just put some power and time into ensuring consistent activity in the LinkedIn community, and you can ramp up much more quickly than if you started from scratch.
  3. Pick your platform. If there isn’t an existing community you can tap into, then you’ll need to decide where you want to host your network. The options above are a start, or there is even dedicated corporate alumni network software you can purchase. Workrowd can actually fulfill this use case as well, by simply having a private krowd where you invite past employees to join with their non-company email addresses. Whatever you choose, make sure that it’s flexible to meet your needs, and above all, user-friendly. If your platform is clunky or difficult to use, former employees won’t make the time to learn it.
  4. Identify your manager. Few communities actually run successfully on their own, so you’ll need to dedicate at least part of an employee’s time to managing and maintaining the corporate alumni network. This individual should be in charge of inviting new employees as they leave, making sure they get signed up, updating information and ensuring everything stays fresh, etc. Without someone whose job it is to keep the community running, these spaces can stall and grow stagnant quite quickly, so don’t overlook the importance of assigning someone this role.
  5. Invite former team members. Last but certainly not least, reach out to as many former team members as you have contact information for in order to start building up your network. While you may not be able to reach everyone, and not all of those whom you do reach will be interested if it’s a long time after they left, starting with a solid base of members will help set your corporate alumni network up for success.

Staying in touch with employees after they leave is an important piece of the talent management puzzle in today’s economy. If you’re not keeping star players connected to your company’s ecosystem, you’re wasting crucial dollars between the investment you made to bring them to the team in the first place combined with the money you could save by rehiring them down the line. If you’d like to explore Workrowd’s solution for a corporate alumni network that you can manage in the same place as your communities for current employees, drop us a line at hello@workrowd.com. We’d love to hear from you.

Categories
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging

From diversity, equity, and inclusion statement to action

Just as it’s important for organizations to have a mission statement that guides their work and decisions, it’s useful to have your company’s stance on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) written out for both internal and external parties to view. In today’s talent market where nearly 90% of job seekers say that diversity is important when evaluating prospective employers, it’s crucial to be clear and upfront about how your company approaches DEI. Solidifying a diversity, equity, and inclusion statement is just the first step however, in an essential, ongoing process to drive real impact on DEI within your organization.

With statement in hand, it’s time to move towards action. Words only go so far, and if your employees and recruits find out that your statement has no teeth behind it, your company culture and employer brand will suffer the consequences. Developing an effective DEI strategy can be challenging though, and the steps required will vary depending on where your company is starting from and where you want to go. Despite that, there are some broad commonalities, so we’ve assembled a list of 3 best practices every organization can utilize regardless of circumstances to help move their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts from statement to action.

How to craft an authentic diversity, equity, and inclusion statement

As with so many things that tie into a company’s employer brand, developing a strong diversity, equity, and inclusion statement starts off with examining your organizational culture. For instance, while it might make sense for a direct to consumer tech startup to use slang or other more casual language in their statement because that’s how their brand interfaces with employees and consumers, a law firm might take a more formal approach. Consider what makes sense based on your company’s norms, and don’t try to force it. Presenting an inauthentic diversity, equity, and inclusion statement has the potential to be more damaging than not posting one at all.

Next, take a look at your values. Hopefully if you’re here you already understand the far-reaching benefits of diversity and inclusion work, so perhaps DEI is already explicitly included in your values. If so, leverage that in your diversity, equity, and inclusion statement. Let everyone know that DEI is baked directly into your guiding principles and explain how that drives your approach to making sure everyone feels that they belong. Similarly, if one of your values deals with respect, consider noting that as part of your goal to respect everyone, you strive to be inclusive and respectful of all people, regardless of background or circumstances. Grounding your statement in your company values will ensure it is well aligned with your culture and operations, and will prevent it from ringing hollow.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, be sure to include your ‘why’. It’s great to say that you are inclusive of everyone, but people want to know what’s driving your focus on inclusion. Explaining your motivation also helps boost the level of authenticity your statement conveys, and makes it easier for people to feel connected with it. It may be related to your product ‘e.g. we build our products to democratize access to XYZ, so we’re committed to that same level of access and inclusion in everything we do’; it could be related to your people ‘e.g. the diverse perspectives of our employees are what keeps our company at the forefront of innovation, so we actively seek out and support people with an array of identities and lived experiences’; or it could just be that you want to be a part of creating a better world. If you don’t know your ‘why’, figuring that out should be your first step.

Once you’ve checked in on your culture, values, and ‘why’, it’s time to get writing. Don’t do it alone, though! In order for employees to truly buy into your diversity, equity, and inclusion statement, you have to practice what you preach and include them in the process of crafting it. Bringing your employees into the conversation will help ensure your statement is something that the whole company is committed to executing on, and leads nicely into our next section: translating your DEI statement into action.

3 key strategies for moving from diversity, equity, and inclusion statement to action

Diversity, equity, and inclusion statements are important for letting current and prospective employees and customers know your stance on these crucial topics. While writing one is a valuable first step though, it’s not enough to convince most people unless it’s backed up by real action. In order to help you transition from talking about DEI to actually succeeding at DEI, we’ve collected the following suggestions:

  1. Set measurable goals. While your diversity, equity, and inclusion statement should summarize your blue-sky vision, in order to come anywhere near achieving it you’ll need to set concrete goals. Moving the needle on DEI is a marathon, not a sprint, so it can help to start off with a medium to long-term goal, then break it down into more bite-sized pieces. Consider what you want to achieve during this year, or even this half of the year, and identify metrics to help measure your success. It’s also crucial that you don’t get discouraged and give up if progress isn’t coming as quickly as you would like. The only way you’ll ever reach your goal and deliver on your diversity, equity, and inclusion statement is if you keep putting in the work on an ongoing basis.
  2. Identify your employee champions. Succeeding at DEI is an example of an effort where it truly does ‘take a village’. DEI isn’t something that can be decreed or enforced from the top down; it has to be cultivated from the bottom up as well. While realistically, driving DEI should be the responsibility of everyone in the organization, it’s also useful to identify those employees who are particularly passionate about it so that you can empower them to share their enthusiasm with their colleagues. These people may already be spearheading efforts including leading employee resource groups or other networks, or you may need to look a bit harder or simply ask for volunteers. Having a ‘street team’ to be the eyes, ears, and voices of your DEI efforts on the ground can truly make the difference between initiatives that energize employees, and ones that fall flat.
  3. Invest. You wouldn’t expect to scrimp on your sales budget and still bring in massive deals, so you shouldn’t assume that approach will work with DEI, either. You have to invest early and often in DEI in terms of both time and money in order to be successful. Given that companies with gender diverse executive teams are 25% more likely to see above average profitability, and those with ethnically diverse teams are 36% more likely, the business case is strong to make and maintain these investments, even during downturns. It’s a classic case of ‘you have to spend money to make money,’ and this is clearly an investment that’s well worth making. From recruiting and retaining the best talent, to fostering a strong company culture, to maximizing employee productivity, diversity, equity, and inclusion work can pay off in spades, but you have to put in the effort first.

Writing a compelling diversity, equity, and inclusion statement for your company can seem daunting, but it’s certainly achievable, especially with the tips included in this post. When you’re ready to start putting your statement into action, give us a shout at hello@workrowd.com. We’ve got tools and templates to help you make the most of your efforts, and lessons learned at other companies we can share to help you supercharge your progress. If you’d prefer to be connected with other companies directly in a community dedicated specifically to DEI and employee resource groups, we encourage you to drop by the Global ERG Network website and take a look around. We’ve got best practice resources, monthly live events, 24/7 networking and knowledge sharing, and much more, some of which is free to the public, so check it out today!

Categories
Employee Engagement

5 engagement drivers crucial to business success in 2021

If there’s one thing we can all agree on about the COVID-19 crisis, it’s that it irrevocably changed the world of work. By digitalizing so many aspects of the workday virtually overnight, the pandemic also transformed employees’ needs and expectations. Pile on to this the amount of stress, grief, and trauma everyone has suffered over the past 12+ months, and we’re staring down a vastly different talent landscape than at this time last year. As the economy begins to rebound, employers will have to rise to the occasion and transform the way they drive engagement in order to attract and retain the best talent.

While there continue to be a multitude of different engagement drivers that impact the employee experience, there are a few key elements that are newly crucial in 2021. If you want to ensure that you’re meeting employee needs regardless of whether your team members are returning to the office, remaining remote, or doing a mix of both, you have to be prepared to address new concerns in the aftermath of the pandemic. Read on to learn more about engagement drivers and what you can do to ensure your team members remain engaged now and into the future.

What are engagement drivers and why are they so important

Engagement drivers are the key aspects of your workplace that make employees love working there. These can range from physical elements including having a comfortable workspace, to emotional elements including feeling respected and valued, to technological elements including having the tools and access needed to succeed. Engagement drivers, or the lack thereof, form a big part of why employees choose to stay with their organization year after year, or why they decide to move on to another employer. At their best, they provide a strong framework for a positive employee experience. At their worst though, they’re superficial incentives that are misaligned with employees’ actual wants and needs, draining both the business and team members alike.

For many years pre-pandemic, companies invested in fun perks such as gaming tables in the office, free food and drinks, and parties, believing that they were central to employee engagement. Unfortunately, if you subscribe to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you’ll find that these efforts barely scratch the surface of what actually motivates people. With so much emphasis on ineffective engagement drivers, it’s no surprise that employee engagement levels failed to exceed 35% at any point in the years leading up to 2020. When employers started actually paying attention to employees’ health and safety, need for remote work options, and more at the beginning of the pandemic, engagement shot up to 40% for the first time ever, only to drop back down to where it had been as companies began to shift focus back away from employee support and wellbeing. If your company wants to reap the far-reaching benefits of an engaged workforce across retention, productivity, and more, it’s important to invest in engagement drivers that actually make a difference.

What engagement drivers matter most to employees in 2021

With so much upheaval over the past year, employees’ approach to work and life has changed. People have changed. The world has changed. Accordingly, employers would be extremely shortsighted to not similarly change their approach to engagement. Here are the top broad areas companies should be targeting this year to ensure they’re investing in effective engagement drivers, rather than superficial and/or outdated ones:

  1. Autonomy and flexibility. Employees want to feel trusted and empowered by their employer, not monitored and micromanaged. Much has been written about the negative effects of surveilling employees, including its impact on engagement. Employers that assume their employees will slack off without the oversight provided by an office environment demonstrate that they would rather invest in tools to make their employees more robot-like, rather than investing in actual human beings. Similarly, employees have other things going on in their lives beyond just work. They want to know that they can live their lives in addition to and alongside being high-performing team members, which means they’ll be considerably more engaged if you provide them the flexibility to work where, when, and how is best for them. Focus on making the workplace fit the employee, rather than the other way around.
  2. Digitalization and accessibility. Orient your systems and processes around usability and ease of access, and watch your engagement numbers skyrocket. Employees want to be empowered to do their best work, and then be able to disconnect and enjoy their non-work time. They don’t want to be aggravated by a tangle of systems or constantly struggling to find the information they need. After the whirlwind of the past year, it may be time to step back and take a holistic look at your technology and collaboration ecosystem and ensure that it’s optimized to provide employees a positive experience. Do you have 4 different instant messaging apps employees have to check on an ongoing basis in addition to their email? This may be contributing to disengagement as stress compounds with each message that arrives.
  3. Equity and inclusion. In addition to the pandemic, the past year has seen a reckoning with diversity and inclusion on a scale that hasn’t been reached in decades. Today, three out of four jobseekers say that the diversity of a potential employer’s workforce is important to them when evaluating opportunities. It has been an emotionally exhausting year, even more so for folx from underrepresented backgrounds whose communities continue to bear the brunt of the dual epidemics of COVID-19 and institutional racism and violence. Employees don’t want to come to work and see and experience exclusion and microaggressions. They want to work for employers whose values align with their own. Investing in making your employees feel heard, welcomed, and valued is a crucial, and too often overlooked engagement driver.
  4. Connection and wellbeing. The past year has also brought the fragility of good health into stark relief. Watching young, healthy, able-bodied people succumb to the coronavirus in a matter of days has reminded us all that our health is not something to be taken for granted. Neither is the company of good friends and colleagues. Offering usable wellness benefits, making time and space for bonding with coworkers, and other efforts that promote connection and wellbeing will go a long way towards ensuring your employees want to work their hardest for your company.
  5. Rewards and recognition. Last but certainly not least, employees want to be acknowledged for the value they bring to the organization. Let them know you appreciate them through shout-outs, bonuses, and other incentives and you’ll be paid back in increasing engagement levels. Employees are working more hours than ever, all while juggling myriad personal responsibilities and challenges, so don’t let their work go unrecognized. Make sure that managers are acknowledging their team members for jobs well done, and if you can spare the cost of a gift card here and there, remember that that could make a big difference for an employee who may have experienced changes in household income or who just needs a pick-me-up. Recognition, when delivered in ways that matter to the individual employee, is a critical engagement driver that should be a key part of every company’s strategy.

Identifying engagement drivers and effectively targeting them has been an ongoing struggle for many employers. We can make 2021 the year that changes. By following the tips above and incorporating the right systems and tools, you can hone in on the most important engagement drivers for your workforce, and significantly improve your employee experience. If you’re considering bringing in software tools to assist you in this process, we encourage you to check out Workrowd, the all-in-one platform for managing employee engagement and company culture across both on-site and remote workers. As you’re researching, don’t forget to check out the Global ERG Network as well, and feel free to reach out to us at any time to learn more or just to chat at hello@workrowd.com.

Categories
Company Culture

How the culture of a company spurs the employee experience

As the U.S. begins to discuss reopening offices, it’s time to take stock of how your company culture has fared over the course of the pandemic so far. The culture of a company sets the tone for virtually everything that occurs both inside the organization with the employee experience, and outside the company with customer and employer brands. From the way that employees treat each other to the level of customer care that’s provided, company culture can be a make or break issue.

If your company wasn’t quite where it wanted to be on the culture front before and/or during the pandemic, returning to the office offers an exciting opportunity to reimagine how you approach culture building. The culture of a company is not something that can simply be decreed from the top down; your culture stems from your values, which need to be practiced every day, in every interaction. We know this may sound daunting, which is why we’ve assembled some quick tips to help you make the most of this moment to transform the culture of your company into one that everyone loves.

What is company culture and how does it impact business outcomes

The culture of a company powers a number of significant business outcomes including recruitment and retention, engagement, and productivity. Since company culture impacts employees’ experiences every single day, it’s absolutely crucial that organizations dedicate sufficient attention towards ensuring that it thrives. Ultimately though, unlike sales or marketing, it can be difficult to know just how to build a positive and productive company culture, or even what comprises it.

Company culture starts with your organization’s values. What do you, as an organization, believe in and why? Now that we’re entering a new phase of the pandemic, it may be time to reassess your values and determine whether they’re still aligned with how your company operates. For instance, if your organization has historically placed a high value on face-time, but you’re going to be transitioning to a hybrid model of working, it might be time to shift how you’re communicating that.

Similarly, your interaction norms should stem directly from your company values, and provide a structure for how employees should treat one another. As an example, one of your company’s values may relate to respect. As part of this, your interaction norms should place respect on the highest pillar, and encourage everyone to treat all others with dignity regardless of their role, background, or any other factor. 

Beyond values and interaction norms, the culture of a company stems from a wide variety of different components related to how employees and customers are treated including benefits and perks, team structures, learning and promotion opportunities, client support, and more. Due to the fact that it intertwines through so many different elements, approximately half of job seekers list company culture as being very important when considering potential employers, and nearly 90% say it’s at least somewhat important. Perhaps more worrisome is the fact that nearly half of job seekers also noted that company culture was the reason they were looking to leave their current employer. Employees who are unhappy with their company’s culture are 24% more likely to quit. Perhaps that’s why more than 90% of managers say that a candidate’s alignment with the culture of the company is more important that their skills or experience.

How you can leverage company culture to supercharge your employee experience

Based on the data above, it’s unsurprising that 88% of employees and 94% of executives believe that a strong company culture is key to business success. Accordingly, how can you take advantage of this crucial moment to elevate your company’s culture and ensure a world-class employee experience? We’ve collected some quick tips below, but as noted above, it really comes down to how you treat your employees. At this point in the COVID-19 crisis, people want to know they have job security, to feel like they have the autonomy to get their work done on their own terms, and to know they have the ability to take care of themselves and their families, financially, health-wise, time-wise, and beyond.

Ensuring you’re supporting employees from the organizational level, and training and equipping managers to support their teams at the individual level, is a guaranteed way to start your culture revamp on the right foot. From that point, the following strategies can also help enhance the culture of a company:

  • Communicate clearly and consistently. Transparency and consistency in all your communications provides a strong foundation for your company culture. Employees who don’t have to worry about what something meant or what they’re not being told are inherently happier and more productive by virtue of having these distractions eliminated. By ensuring everyone feels included and in the loop around what’s happening with the company, you’ll foster more openness and collaboration between employees, and more loyalty to your organization as well because team members know they’re valued.
  • Prioritize deeper needs over superficial perks. Among the mainstays of the old approaches to company culture and employee engagement are superficial office perks such as foosball tables and free beer. While these were never particularly effective to begin with, the rise of remote working combined with the level of burnout brought on by the pandemic has rendered them wholly obsolete. Employees want to know that their companies see them as whole people with needs both in and outside of the office, so things like expanding your paid family leave policy, offering coverage for more mental health services, and mandating time off for team members to recharge will do a lot more for your culture than keeping the communal trail mix well stocked.
  • Double down on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Nothing is more toxic to the culture of a company than enabling exclusion and microaggressions to flourish unchecked. The overwhelming majority of people are part of an underrepresented group in some aspect of their life whether it’s their gender, race, sexual orientation, caregiving role, veteran status, etc. This means that when you create or allow environments that are unwelcoming for some people, you’re making the overall culture unwelcoming for many knowing that they too might be made to feel less than simply for their background or circumstances. Make sure you’ve got an effective, long-term diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy in place, and infuse this work throughout all areas of your company’s operations.

Your company culture essentially dictates whether the employee experience will be positive or negative. While it’s important to streamline systems and processes and otherwise make employees’ day-to-day easier, if the culture of a company is poor, employees will inevitably have a poor experience working there. If you’re looking for ways to improve your company’s culture at this crucial time as more and more people are getting vaccinated, consider checking out Workrowd’s platform. We offer an all-in-one solution for managing employee engagement and company culture across both on-site and remote workers. You’ll gain access to a central hub for all your employee initiatives, best practice resources to support employee culture leaders, analytics, and much more.

If you’re specifically looking to ramp up your diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, Workrowd also powers the Global ERG Network. We’re working to build a comprehensive ecosystem to support company culture and employee engagement in order to meet the needs of today’s organizations. Drop us a note at hello@workrowd.com if you’d like to be part of the movement.

Categories
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging

5 tips to maximize the impact of employee affinity groups

Employee affinity groups may just be the most underrated element in your company’s employee engagement toolbox. Are you ready to change that? If so, you’ve come to the right place. Employee affinity groups can serve a multitude of purposes, and especially now during a time of such rapid and stressful change, they can help ensure that your efforts to support employees remain agile and responsive.

Employee affinity groups are collectives of colleagues organized around commonalities including interests, backgrounds, field, and demographics. Affinity groups can be focused on a range of topics such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (in this case they’re often called employee/business resource groups), social impact, career development, and wellness. Even if your company hasn’t formalized any official groups, there may be grassroots efforts that are active within your organization. If you’re interested in leveraging them to supercharge company culture and employee engagement this year, read on to learn our five top tips for maximizing the impact of employee affinity groups.

How affinity groups meet crucial needs and what that means for your business

Aristotle first noted that ‘humans are social animals,’ and the statement is no less true today than when it originated. Even among introverts, having positive social interactions and a reliable support system of relationships is critical for wellbeing. In fact, one study found that feeling lonely and socially isolated is as detrimental to a person’s health as smoking an entire pack of cigarettes per day. This need translates to the workplace as well. The average person will spend 90,000 hours of their lives working; that’s a full third of their time on Earth. With nearly 4,000 days of heavy smoking – over a full decade – at stake, do your employees and your business a favor by taking steps to encourage productive connections between team members.

On that note, the evidence is clear that building strong relationships between your employees can be a boon to your bottom line. Studies have shown that workers who lack colleague friendships are significantly more likely to be disengaged and to wind up leaving the company. Another study found that 70% of employees believe that having friends at work is the single biggest contributor to a happy work life. More than half of the respondents also reported that they would decline a higher-paying job opportunity if it meant they wouldn’t get along with their colleagues, presenting a challenge to companies looking to attract and retain top talent. Poor colleague relationships and exclusion in general contribute to lower productivity and a negative company culture, both of which result in reduced business success. Luckily, employee affinity groups can counter all of this.

Top tips for ensuring your affinity groups drive positive business outcomes

At their worst, employee affinity groups exist as social organizations that may ramp up or down in activity based on who is leading them at any given time. We use the term ‘worst’ here very lightly, as even social groups can have significant positive impacts on employee morale and wellbeing. At their best however, affinity groups provide crucial support, especially for employees from underrepresented backgrounds, drive business outcomes, and enhance employer brands. The tips below will help you ensure your groups fall in the latter category, rather than being purely social.

  1. Listen to employees. In order for employee affinity groups to reach their full potential, employers must follow workers’ lead. Determining what groups will be offered through a top-down process without employee buy-in will hinder your program from the very start. When initiatives are launched at employees rather than with them, things wind up feeling forced and inauthentic. Consulting employees from day one on the other hand, ensures employee investment from the very beginning, enabling you to build successful programs grounded in a strong base of employee support and participation.
  2. Provide formal support. Once you’ve empowered your employees to determine what affinity groups should be created and who will run them, it’s time to put your money where your mouth is. Support doesn’t have to come in the form of a large amount of money, or even be monetary at all though; just ensure that your employees have the tools and autonomy to accomplish their objectives. Ideally, give each leader a budget and an executive sponsor, equip them with group management and marketing tools, and ensure every employee knows that active participation is both allowed and encouraged.
  3. Integrate them into business efforts. Employee affinity groups have helped companies move into new markets, launch new lines, and ensure that their products and services are inclusive for all desired customer segments. If you don’t give your groups a seat at the table, you’re missing out on a wealth of input and ingenuity. Ensure you keep your various affinity groups in mind when mapping out strategies, and don’t hesitate to consult them where relevant. This will also make them feel recognized and valued, leading to increased employee engagement and productivity.
  4. Champion their accomplishments. Building on the recognition piece mentioned in the previous bullet, don’t let your affinity groups go unappreciated. Not only does this demotivate group leaders and members, but it prevents you from reaping the full extent of the employer branding benefits these groups can confer. Advertise your groups on your website, share their work internally, and don’t forget to tell potential recruits about them. Give your groups the attention and acknowledgement they deserve, and you’ll be rewarded in kind.
  5. Connect them to a wider ecosystem. Leading employee affinity groups can be tiring. There’s member recruitment and retention, initiative planning and management, marketing and communications, and more to think about, and that’s all work that often goes uncompensated on top of an employee’s core job responsibilities. Unsurprisingly, there’s a high degree of burnout associated with running an affinity group. Accordingly, it can help to connect both leaders and members to internal and external resources to help them succeed without running themselves ragged. Provide access to internal tools that can make the job of member management, promotion, etc. easier, along with outside resources like the Global ERG Network to further support them.

Employee affinity groups are critical tools in your employee engagement, company culture, and diversity and inclusion arsenals; don’t underestimate their value. If you’d like to learn more or explore opportunities to better support or expand your affinity group program, drop us a line at hello@workrowd.com. Our all-in-one platform for supporting employee affinity groups is simple to implement, and offers a wealth of tools and resources to help you drive impact.