Category: Employee Experience

Starting a new job can be scary and overwhelming. There are so many people to meet and get to know. Hopefully, as employees grow with your company, they’ll meet people they like and enjoy spending time with. Having friends at work can significantly impact your team, so we’re here to help you support your employees in building these key connections.

Gallup’s Q12 Survey and Having Friends at Work

When you think about connecting your employees, you have to understand how important it is. For example, Gallup, a leading company in employee engagement, talks a lot about the importance of friends at work. As a result, having friends at work made it into their Q12 employee engagement survey.

Question 10 of their survey reads, “I have a best friend at work.”

Gallup shares:

Globally, three in 10 employees strongly agree that they have a best friend at work. By moving that ratio to six in 10, organizations could realize 28% fewer safety incidents, 5% higher customer engagement scores and 10% higher profit.

Gallup

How to Encourage Friendships at Work

So, now that you understand why you should encourage friendships, let’s talk about how to make it happen for your staff members. Being a friendship matchmaker can feel awkward, but so is trying to make friends with colleagues on one’s own. Your employees would love some direction from management to help them build these relationships.

1. Introduce Potential Hires to Employees Early

First, you want to introduce candidates to their potential colleagues as early as you can. There are a couple of ways to make this happen for your employees:

• Highlight your team on your company’s career page.
• Bring in employees throughout the interview process.
• Invite employees to join you at career fairs or recruitment events.

You want potential employees to be able to feel your company’s culture before they sign on with your organization. Potential workers may even make a friend before they start orientation.

2. Use a Cohort Model During Onboarding

Onboarding can be a lonely process, especially if you are doing it alone. The best companies use a cohort model to onboard new hires. Cohorts are groups of new hires who go through the process at the same time. With this form of onboarding, your employees can make friends instantly because they are all working together to get to know the organization.

3. Encourage Employees to Get To Know Colleagues Throughout Their Tenure

After onboarding is complete, you have to continue to nudge employees in the right direction. Encourage employees to take time to get to know their colleagues.

You could even create a monthly calendar reminder to nudge employees you manage to get to know their team members.

On top of that, create some interesting optional events that help employees make friends, like coworking hours or monthly meet and greets.

4. Create Communal Spaces at Your Office

If you’re trying to create office friendships, what does your office look like? Is it closed off and dark? Are there spaces for employees to gather without getting in the way of their teammates? Your office space needs to be conducive to friendships if you want them to form.

• Create larger spaces where groups of employees can gather.
• Add light in by painting the walls a bright color and keeping windows uncovered so the communal spaces are pleasant to be in.
• Soundproof the offices or areas where people gather, so workers don’t feel bad about the noise they might make.

5. Create Employee Resource Groups for Cross-Departmental Connections

Employee resource groups are a great cross-departmental experience for workers. People who participate in ERGs get to meet new and exciting people they may never have heard of due to departmental silos.

If you want to expand the friendship possibilities at work, creating an ERG is the perfect project for your business. Are you unsure of how to market, manage, and measure these programs? Check out Workrowd to see if we can help you host your company’s employee resource groups.

6. Include ‘Get To Know You’ Time During Meetings

Meetings are an essential part of internal communications for companies. Unfortunately, many organizations have established meeting agendas that get straight to the point. Ultimately, this misses a huge opportunity: get to know you time.

Meetings are more effective when everyone around the table trusts each other. Some organizations are missing this core component, but they don’t have to stay that way.

Start each meeting with a 5- to 10-minute ‘get to know you’ game. These quick games can help employees get to know different organization members and find employees they might have something in common with.

7. Introduce Employees You Think Would Like Each Other

Are you finding you need to be a bit more hands-on with employee friendships? Sometimes the best thing you can do is to make an introduction.

As a company leader, you know a lot of people in the organization. You probably have a couple of people in mind who should meet each other. Don’t be afraid to broker the connection.

Create a group chat with the employees who need to meet each other. Write a simple message like:

“Hi {Employee A},

I was talking with {Employee B} about {whatever you were talking about}. It reminded me of a conversation we had not too long ago about this exact topic. I thought you might like one more person in the company to talk to about this. I think you two will get along well!“

A simple introduction should do the trick, and it will open up some incredible workplace friendships based on a shared experience, trait, or like/dislike.

8. Showcase the Friendships You’ve Made at Work

Last but not least, model what great workplace relationships look like. Share the details of your favorite workplace friendships and encourage employees to find friendships that matter to them.

Encourage other workplace leaders to share their friendship stories with their direct reports and colleagues as well.

As more leaders begin talking about workplace friendships, having friends at work will become even easier for your organization.

Conclusion: Help Your Team Members Develop Workplace Friendships

Your team members deserve to have fantastic workplace friendships. One of the hardest parts about being an adult is making friends. Work gives people a chance to meet and bond with others. As a company leader, it’s your job to help facilitate these connections so that employees can genuinely say they have a best friend at work.

Are you interested in seeing if Workrowd can help you create workplace friendships? Send us an email at hello@workrowd.com to learn more.

As your team grows, it’s important to think about how workers perceive your organization. Setting employee experience goals helps you improve retention, which is essential for the true growth of your organization.

Today, we want to go over the basics of employee experience and how to set up goals to measure it at your company.

Looking for some actionable ways to improve the employee experience? Check out our article that shares five easy strategies your organization can use.

What Is Employee Experience?

First, let’s cover the basics. What is employee experience exactly? Employee experience is the way that your team members perceive your organization and their role in it.

In an ideal world, your team members would have a positive employee experience, meaning they are happy at work, feel included, and can do great things while working with your organization.

Unfortunately, many team members don’t get a positive experience. According to HR Daily Advisor, “only 17% of respondents say their employer offers an “exceptional” experience.”

Organizations have a long way to go before more employees rate their experience highly.

7 Employee Experience Goal Setting Tips

So, now that you know what employee experience is and where most organizations stand, how do you ensure your organization does well? First, you’ll want to create some employee experience goals.

1. Get Clear on Why Employee Experience Matters to Your Organization

Before you start setting goals, you need to get clear on why employee experience matters. There are many initiatives that you might choose to focus on as an HR leader. Why are you choosing to improve the employee experience?

Getting clear on your ‘why’ will help you justify the costs of these initiatives to other leaders on your team. Understanding what goals you need to set and going after those initiatives takes money and time. The positive effect of those goals might not be seen for a quarter or two. You need a great plan in place to justify the costs of this endeavor.

So, why should organizations care about employee experience? Simple: it improves retention.

2. Take Stock of the Current Employee Experience

Before you can set any goals, you need to know what’s currently happening in your company. Therefore, we encourage you to set aside some time to work on the following activities:

• Send out an employee experience or engagement survey like Gallup’s Q12 survey.
• Perform exit interviews for any employee leaving your organization.
• Chat with new hires about how they perceive the employee experience.
• Connect with other leaders to uncover any gaps they’ve noticed in your company’s employee experience.

After you’ve done some analysis, you should better understand where your team currently stands. With this information, you have a baseline, and you can work to improve things from there.

3. Work With Employees to Define Their Ideal Experience

Next, you’ll want to move into working with current employees to understand their ideal experience.

If they could work at a perfect organization, what would their relationship with the company look like?

Do you want to make this even more helpful? Consider surveying your organization by department and as one unit. Different departments might have unique ways of working. When understanding an ideal employee experience, it might be worth it to understand each department’s unique challenges and triumphs.

4. Connect With Company Leaders to Define Their Ideal Experience

After you chat with employees, you should do the same with company leaders. Leaders must have an ideal experience as the head of a department or team.

Company leaders have a big picture understanding of the organization’s weaknesses and strengths. The best part about company leaders is they can give you a better understanding of the current state of your organization and help you set more realistic goals.

5. Combine the Two and Make It All Actionable

After you speak with employees and leaders, it’s time to combine both ideal experiences to create something actionable for your company.

You can work using the SMART goals method, which encourages you to create goals that are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-Bound

The aspects of this method you’ll need to pay close attention to are attainable and time-bound. Employee experience change doesn’t happen overnight. So you need to break down your larger experience goals into smaller, attainable chunks that have set deadlines.

For example, instead of saying, “I want to be the best employer in my geographic area,” you could say, “I want to be recognized in my area with a Best Places To Work award by the end of 2024.”

Taking a few moments to dig deeper and research your goals will make them better for HR and company leaders.

6. Present Your Latest Employee Experience Goals and How You Plan to Achieve Them

Once you have a set of goals, it’s time to share them. Let your team know what they are and what your plans are for achieving them.

If you need some help explaining your goals, you could bring in some of the bigger picture items you were brainstorming.

To follow the example we gave above, “We want to be the best employer in town, so we want to win the city’s Best Places To Work award by the end of 2024, and we’ll do this by…”

Your team needs to know your game plan so they can follow your lead and accomplish the goals you set. The more detailed your goals are, the easier they are to follow.

7. Follow Up to Ensure That Employee Experience Goals Are Being Met

It’s easy to let goals collect dust after you’ve shared them. A famous quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry states, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” Your team needs to make a plan and follow through on it.

You can do this by setting up milestones for your goals and adding designated goal check-in dates on your calendar. Be sure to keep your team up to date on progress and encourage them to check in with you and keep you honest.

Conclusion: Set Your Company’s Employee Experience Today

Employee experience takes time to turn around, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start today. Use this article as a jumping-off point to discuss how you will improve your organization’s experience at work.

Are you ready to use Workrowd when planning your organization’s employee experience? Reach out to us at hello@workrowd.com to see if we’re right for your team.

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.

Now that we’ve been in the clutches of the pandemic for more than a year, it’s clear that the need to develop and deliver a world-class digital employee experience is here to stay. The employee experience extends from pre-hiring all the way through off-boarding, so there’s a lot to consider. If you want to ensure your company’s reputation as an employer of choice, you’ll need to do your best to reduce friction at every point in the employee journey. While that may sound like an overwhelming mandate, there are many tools out there to assist you.

For better or worse though, tools can only take you so far. Building a top-notch digital employee experience requires the right balance of automated processes, self-service options, and human elements. For instance, it’s important to provide ample information to help employees easily answer their own questions about benefits, but it’s also key to have someone available to support them in selecting the right plan for their circumstances. The ultimate goal is to streamline processes and make employees’ lives as easy as possible, while at the same time keeping costs down and freeing up People team members to focus on the tricky parts of work life that really require human support/intervention. Read on for our top tips to build a digital employee experience that delights and drives impact.

Why the digital employee experience is more important now than ever

We’ve all been through a lot over the past year. Many have lost loved ones, lost jobs, and almost all of us have lost our way of life. Mental health issues have skyrocketed; between 2019 and 2020, reported symptoms of anxiety have more than tripled, and depression symptoms have almost quadrupled. Questions about the vaccine, new strains, and what a safe return to the office could even look like abound. In order to remain engaged and productive amidst ongoing homeschooling and other household challenges. employees need to be able to easily access the information they need, communicate with colleagues, and clearly understand their objectives.

Moreover, as the economy rebounds, employers looking to attract and retain the best talent will need to offer something better than what employees can get by going to work for the competitor. Without exciting office perks, free food, and the other usual hallmarks of ‘great’ employee experiences to fall back on, companies will need to identify new ways of outshining similar job offers. Additionally, many employees have learned a lot more about what is important to them in their work lives over the course of the pandemic, so employers have new expectations to contend with as well. All of this makes optimizing the digital employee experience one of, if not the most important thing companies can do in 2021.

Five areas to focus on to upgrade your digital employee experience

There are innumerable different ways to approach building a great digital employee experience, so it can be difficult to know where to start. Accordingly, we’ve assembled some of our top recommendations to help you frame your thinking:

1. Focus on flexibility. In a recent Deloitte study of 1,000 white-collar professionals, virtually all respondents noted that workplace flexibility was a priority for them. Two significant shifts have made building flexibility into your policies one of the most crucial things you can do to elevate your employee experience, digital or otherwise: shifting household responsibilities including child and elderly caregiving, and the forced transition to remote work which gave employees a taste of what flexibility has to offer them. Translate this to your digital employee experience by ensuring that employees have all of the tools they need to work from a variety of locations and at a variety of times.
2. Prioritize accessibility. In order to build an enviable digital employee experience, it’s crucial to prioritize accessibility over gatekeeping. Employees shouldn’t have to constantly ask around in order to collect the documents and information they need to do their job well. Ensure that every team has a clear information management system so that employees know where to go to access relevant files, and be as transparent as possible with broader company and benefits information. According to a McKinsey report pre-pandemic, employees spend nearly two hours every day searching for information. Do your digital employee experience a favor by making sure employees can access the systems and information they need, when they need them.
3. Set expectations. While remote working certainly came with benefits for many employees, including eliminating their commutes, it also contributed to pressure to be working all the time. This is unhealthy and unproductive for any employee experience, so clarify to your employees when they should be available digitally, and when it’s good to be ‘off the clock’. Similarly, clear is kind; without as much contact with colleagues and superiors, employees can wind up in the dark about their objectives and deliverables. Identify digital tools to guard against this, whether they’re check-in-related or designed for project management. Eliminate as much ambiguity from people’s workdays as possible, both for their mental wellbeing, and to protect the company from paying for needless or inaccurate work.
4. Connect colleagues. Seamless social connectivity is crucial to differentiating your digital employee experience from those of your competitors. Nearly 40% of workers report a worsening sense of isolation in 2021, which impacts everything from productivity to retention. Offering a digital space for employees to connect more casually, particularly around issues not related to their core job responsibilities is a key element to keeping your team engaged and collaborating successfully. Planning digital events is great, but it’s also important to empower your team to make those informal connections themselves via a dedicated “virtual water cooler” setting.
5. Stay consistent. Don’t give employees more to worry about than they already have. Inconsistence breeds anxiety, so do everything possible to encourage consistency across your digital channels at all times. Ensure employees know what systems are to be used for which functions, what use cases apply for each communication channel, and promptly share any changes with employees at all levels of the organization.

Designing and delivering a top-notch digital employee experience in today’s day and age is both difficult and easier than ever. There are myriad tools at your disposal to help you meet and exceed the recommendations above on behalf of your team. Of course we’re biased, but if you’re looking for a great way to satisfy item four in particular, Workrowd can help. Our digital employee experience platform serves both people and profit and is designed to empower every employee to build a work life they love. Come visit us at workrowd.com to learn more, or send us a note at hello@workrowd.com. We’d love to see how we can help you help your people, especially as we continue to weather the waves of the pandemic.

Historically, employers have considered paid time off to be a necessary evil; hours for which they have to pay employees without reaping any of the benefits of their time. They strictly monitor and track employees’ days off, and dangle additional paid time off as a reward for loyalty as employees’ tenure with the company lengthens. If team members live far away from friends or family, want to take time for a big life event such as a wedding, or if they enjoy traveling, they’re stuck nickel-and-diming their days to minimize the amount of unpaid time they have to take.

Increasingly, startups and other small and mid-sized businesses have been moving towards an unlimited or flexible paid time off policy in which there is no set amount of PTO per year. Under this model, employees are trusted to manage their own time and are allowed to take as many days off as they would like as long as they meet their responsibilities and their manager signs off on it. Few companies however, have mandatory minimums regarding the amount of time off that employees have to take. While it may initially seem counterintuitive, in reality, requiring employees to take a set number of days off per year is one of the best things you can do for your team’s wellbeing.

Why our current approaches to PTO no longer cut it

With the pandemic shutting down travel and forcing many to work from home, paid time off has become a bit of a fiction during 2020. With nowhere to go, and many managers modeling an always-on culture, studies have shown that the workday has elongated by three entire hours. Even once travel and office working resumes, the majority of employees still won’t see a break for some time as everyone will not be able to take time off at once. Vacation days are accruing, but the ability to use them continues to recede further and further into the distance.

Employees feeling that they couldn’t take vacation was already a problem at organizations with ‘unlimited’ paid time off policies. While many business owners may initially view this policy as ripe for abuse by enterprising employees, a study by Namely found that employees at companies with ‘unlimited’ vacation policies actually took an average of just 13 days off per year, compared with those at companies with more standard paid time off policies, who took 15. Additionally, these policies have the benefit to the company of not having to pay out unused days at the end of an employee’s tenure. Perhaps most troubling though, is the fact that culture can make all the difference between employees taking time off when they need, or feeling that they’re unable to take any time off and running headlong towards burnout.

How & why mandating time off can help

Taking time off is crucial to employee engagement and wellbeing. Among employees who take a week or more of vacation per year, 70% say they’re driven to contribute to their organization’s success, compared to 55% who don’t regularly take a week of vacation. Similarly, 63% of employees who take at least a week off say they feel a sense of belonging at their company, as opposed to 43% of those who don’t take time off. Unfortunately, 40% of workers reported feeling that they wouldn’t be able to advance in their careers if they requested time off from their managers, and more than half of employees felt uneasy about asking for time off during the holiday season.

Beyond these stats, or perhaps behind them, there’s the issue of burnout. We’ve written repeatedly about the adverse effects of stress in the workplace, so we won’t go into them here, but suffice it to say that burned out employees are not productive employees. Your team isn’t at their best when they’re exhausted and disengaged. The pandemic has made many feel even more strongly that they can’t justify a break, even though they may need it now more than ever, which is why employers need to step in and begin mandating a minimum amount of vacation time per year. If you want your employees to be at their best, you need to make it clear that taking time off to recharge isn’t just encouraged, but required. You don’t have to reach for the stars here; just mandating that employees take a week off per year will yield significant benefits, as demonstrated by the statistics we mentioned above.

While this effort starts with putting a revised paid time off policy in place, adjusting your company culture and ensuring that managers are modeling taking vacation is what will make or break it. With a minimum required vacation policy, employees won’t have to worry as much about asking for time off, and they’ll feel happier to work for your company knowing that you prioritize their wellbeing enough to write it into policy. If you’re looking for other ways to show your employees that you care and boost your company culture, check out Workrowd, the all-in-one solution for managing employee engagement and company culture across both on-site and remote workers. You can reach us directly at hello@workrowd.com.

As the pandemic drags on, delivering a top-notch employee experience has become both more difficult and more important than ever before. Employee needs have shifted and intensified, and the uncertainty has made it even more challenging to design an effective employee experience strategy. While many organizations have looked towards large-scale policy changes and benefits overhauls, there are actually quite a few small changes that can do wonders for your employee experience during this critical time.

It’s important not to let your employee experience decline amidst all the turmoil. According to a Pew research Center survey, more than one-third of Americans have experienced clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression, or both since the pandemic began. Given that workplace stress costs U.S. businesses as much as $300 billion and is responsible for 120,000 deaths each year, this is not a statistic to be taken lightly. Aside from just being the right thing to do for employees, companies have a financial imperative to help support the mental health of their workers throughout the duration of this crisis.

Key areas to focus on to boost your employee experience

Employee needs will obviously vary by organization and individual, so the best thing you can do is to ask your people how you can support them. Broadly speaking though, a large number of employee needs fall into the three buckets outlined below. Solving for these issues is a great place to start when looking to adapt and improve your employee experience strategy today and on through the next phases of the global pandemic.

• Making employees feel valued. At this difficult time when many employees are compromising other aspects of their life (health, childcare, etc.) to fulfill their work responsibilities, the worst thing an employer can possibly do is to make their workers feel that they don’t matter. Employees who don’t feel valued are unlikely to see any reason to give their all at work, and will be significantly more likely to leave if they have the opportunity.
• Making employees feel safe. Taking every precaution possible to protect the health of your employees is a crucial component of delivering a positive employee experience at all times, but especially in the current climate. That means letting workers who can work from home do so, taking every safety measure possible for those workers who have to be onsite, and responding promptly to complaints and requests. This plays into the issue of value mentioned above; if safety isn’t shown to be a top priority, employers will have a hard time convincing their employees to come in and give their all while constantly worrying they may get hurt and/or sick.
• Making employees feel connected. Last but certainly not least, employees need to feel connected, both via effective systems and tools, and to community through bonding with their colleagues. Carve out dedicated time for people to socialize, and make sure everyone has the tools and training they need to stay up-to-speed with their teams. While all three of these areas are crucial to focus on, connection is one of the easiest to overlook. Don’t leave your employees isolated and struggling during a time that’s already so difficult.

3 low-cost ways to put these ideas into action

There are myriad ways to target the three areas listed above, but we’ve included a few of our no or low-cost favorites below to get you started. Remember that the most important thing is to do what’s right for your workforce and to involve employees early and often.

1. With people working from so many different locations, it can be a great time to get creative with your employee recognition efforts. If you previously did yearly employee awards, it may be worthwhile to increase their frequency to quarterly, or even monthly, to let employees know you notice their hard work and appreciate them. Awards can simply involve a certificate and ‘bragging rights’, or can include a day off or a gift card.
2. Aside from allowing all employees who have the ability to work remotely to do so, communication is critical. Remind your employees frequently what steps the company is taking to keep them safe, and update them as things change. If you have the budget, consider having masks and/or hand sanitizers made with the company logo for distribution to employees.
3. While the Zoom fatigue is real at this point, that doesn’t mean it’s time to ease up on the employee events. Double down on helping your employees feel connected to their work and their colleagues. Try hosting a talent show where team members pre-record a performance, then everyone gathers to watch the submissions and vote. Additionally, never underestimate the value of your employee resource groups to keep folx invested.

As the pandemic continues to drag on much longer than any of us hoped, you can’t let your employee experience strategy fall by the wayside. It’s crucial that companies remain vigilant in providing a stellar environment for employees regardless of whether they work onsite or remotely. Hopefully this post gave you some helpful ideas, but if you’re looking for more, check out Workrowd’s platform. We’ve packed it chockfull of best practice resources, streamlined tools, and transparent access for everyone in your organization. Visit us at workrowd.com.

Prior to the pandemic, employers had a multitude of objections and apprehensions about remote work. While it may seem as though this type of flexibility has only become a real option in recent years amidst advances in digital technology, remote work in its current form has actually been around since the 1970s. In fact by 1987, even before the invention of Wi-Fi, the number of telecommuters in the U.S. had reached as high as 1.5 million.

With the myriad digital tools now at our disposal, and after many companies successfully shifted to an all-remote workforce essentially overnight, employers no longer have a case for objecting to work flexibility. Concerns about connectivity, productivity, security, etc., have all been proven to be largely unfounded, and the risks associated with denying employees the right to remote work with no valid justification are high. Accordingly, if you don’t want to watch your employee engagement, retention, and overall employer brand plummet, you’ll need to put systems in place to ensure your employees can comfortably and successfully work from home, even after COVID-19 is no longer a threat.

The Pros and Cons of Remote Work

Enabling employees to work remotely has both positives and negatives for the company as well as for its workers. Some of the benefits include:

• Employers can source the absolute top players from a global pool rather than being constrained to recruiting from only the talent in their immediate vicinity
• Remote working can drastically decrease employer overhead e.g. through reducing the amount of office space that’s needed, and potentially lowering salary demands
• Employees gain more time and a better work/life balance from not having to commute

On the other hand, remote work can also create some new challenges:

• Employees working from home while many of their colleagues work onsite can quickly become isolated
• Communication can become more difficult and less effective when some employees are only connecting with teammates at predetermined times and from behind a screen
• Some employees may indeed be less productive working from somewhere other than the office, particularly if their home environment has a large number of distractions

Luckily, there is a wide array of tools that can help counter the negative potential impacts of remote work. With so many options though, your search process can rapidly become unwieldy. Read on for our take on how to make HR tech work for you and your team during these new and challenging times.

How to make HR tech work for you

As with any other digital tool, HR tech should work for you, not the other way around. Historically, HR software has been all-consuming and clunky, focused on providing complex functionality to HR professionals with minimal regard for employees. Increasingly though, HR tech is migrating towards a focus on empowering employees to self-serve to a large extent, mirroring consumer tools in their usability, and equipping People teams with much needed data and transparency. Just as HR tech has evolved to meet new needs in the market, HR tech purchasers also need to evolve their approach in order to ensure they get the functionalities they really need.

As opposed to other department-specific tools, such as those for sales teams, accountants, marketers, etc. which have limited user groups, HR technology products need to serve everyone in the company. Accordingly, any procurement process should involve a cross-departmental vetting team in order to maximize the chance of success. In addition, training should be thorough and ongoing, rather than something that’s provided one-time, after which employees are left to fend for themselves.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, ensure that the tools you’re purchasing actually solve the problems your organization is facing. Too many times, buyers are either talked into believing that they need the newest, shiniest tool, or settle for something that doesn’t quite meet their needs with the expectation that the vendor will customize it for them or they’ll just be able to make it work. Ultimately though, neither of these represent effective routes to building a top-notch employee experience.

Begin with a needs assessment, ensuring that employees’ voices are deeply incorporated into the process from the outset. Armed with a list of what’s needed, arrange product demos with providers that appear to have relevant offerings, but don’t get caught up in their marketing pitches. Refer to your needs list frequently to stay on track. If a provider offers to customize something for you, triple confirm that they have the ability to actually do so, and what the timeframe will be for completing the work.

There are a multitude of sellers out there, so there’s no need to settle for less than what you want. Ensure that the tool you select not only meets your needs, but also conforms to your security requirements and fits within your budget. Present the final contenders to employee focus groups to assist in your final decision.

Implementation is a whole separate can of worms, but in the age of COVID-19, it’s more imperative than ever that your HR tech works in the way that you need it to. If you’re looking to help counter the negative aspects of remote working that we mentioned above, we hope you’ll give Workrowd a look. We help streamline your employee communications, provide added transparency and tracking for HR, and keep your workers connected whether they’re onsite or remote. Visit us at workrowd.com.

Managing people is difficult. Tasking some employees with the job of monitoring, motivating, inspiring, evaluating, and disciplining others in addition to fulfilling their other job responsibilities is a lot to ask. People are complex creatures with diverse sets of values and ideas, and managers are expected to understand and cater to each individual in order to get the best out of every team member. Given all of this, the fact that 58% of managers report that they received no management training at all is shocking. Do your whole company a favor and set your managers up for success with dedicated training and support. For those just starting out, we’ve combed the research and assembled a list of three questions managers should ask employees in order to engage their team members.

The High Cost of Bad Managers

Bad bosses cost the U.S. $360 billion per year. This may seem like an outrageous sum, but when you consider that three out of every four employees report that their boss is the worst and most stressful part of their job, and that 65% of employees say they would choose a better boss over a pay raise, it’s easy to see how that level of dissatisfaction could lead to some significant losses. Bad managers contribute to a whole slew of negative business outcomes including employee disengagement, decreased productivity, absenteeism, and critically, serious retention problems. According to a SHRM study from last year, 60% of people who had recently left a job say they did so because of their manager.

How can we turn the tide on such a massive problem in our workforce? Ultimately, as opposed to many of the systemic societal issues employees and companies are facing right now, the issue of bad managers can be broken down to the smallest unit: individuals. Change starts with folx in management positions being willing to learn and make adjustments in order to do better by their direct reports. Companies can help facilitate this with trainings, coaches, and digital learning resources, but ultimately, if the individual doesn’t want to or isn’t ready for change, none of these offerings will make a difference. Once managers decide they want to take that crucial first step though, there are some baseline criteria they can follow to ensure they’re empowering their employees rather than the opposite.

How Managers Can Make Change in the Short-term

The journey towards becoming a better manager is a marathon, not a sprint. There’s no denying that managing people is hard, which is why it bears repeating here. Adapting to new employees, constantly learning about and seeking to improve oneself, and just trying to stay sane through all of it can be a real struggle. To help with this, we’ve trawled the research and assembled a list of three simple questions to help managers make a positive change in their relationships with their team members starting this week. Encourage managers to ask the following questions during their check-ins with employees (and ensure they’re having regular check-ins with employees to begin with!):

1. What went well this past week?

Ask your employees about their successes, and truly listen to their answers. Acknowledge them for the accomplishments they mention. Recognition helps build employees’ self-esteem and engagement, and kicks the conversation off on a positive note. The key here is to make sure you’re really paying attention and providing genuine praise so the employee feels both heard and appreciated. You may be surprised by the results of simply making the time and headspace to truly check in with them.

2. Are you facing any roadblocks?/What are you struggling with?

Let your employees know that you’re there to support them, and that if they’re having problems, they should feel comfortable to freely express them to you. Many issues that ultimately become dire could have been averted if they had been addressed earlier. Encourage employees to share any areas where they’re feeling underresourced or otherwise unequipped, and assist with solutions to the best of your ability. Knowing that you have their back will do wonders for your relationship, and will greatly improve the employee’s work experience.

3. What can I do to be a better manager?

Ask your employees how you can improve, and be genuinely open to hearing their responses. Inviting and accepting feedback can be disarming in a way that opens doors that would have otherwise remained closed. The key here is actually being willing to work on the areas employees identify for you. Record their comments, and let them know how you plan to address them. Then actually follow through on your commitments.

With the bar so low for managers today, there is ample low hanging fruit to be picked in efforts to improve. Simply providing this list of questions managers should ask employees can make a noticeable difference. Consider offering leadership training for your managers if you have the budget, and if not, try to at least assemble a repository of free resources for them to consult. Better yet, organize your managers into cohorts to study the materials and practice the recommendations together. If you’re interested in an easy way to organize and manage employee support groups, check out Workrowd. We’ve got everything you need to streamline your professional development experience and help your team keep each other accountable. As always, we’re at hello@workrowd.com.

It’s safe to say at this point that 2020 hasn’t quite gone to plan. Entire ways of life have been upended, businesses have been forced to close, and virtually no one has escaped unscathed. Nearly half a million people have lost their lives, and tens of millions have lost their livelihoods. Now talk has turned to ‘reopening’, in all its many guises. States that failed to effectively mitigate community spread in the first place are now dealing with the consequences of their actions in the form of spiking cases. Even many regions that did shut down are now seeing rising infection rates. Yet many businesses are plowing full-force towards ‘reopening’ and getting back to ‘normal’. This contradiction has placed HR departments in a precarious position.

Over the course of this crisis, HR has been saddled with an array of challenging and oftentimes contradictory directives. This remains the case now, as they are tasked with designing plans to simultaneously deny social distancing recommendations by bringing workers back to the office while still somehow preventing infection within the ranks. We now have a decent sense of the steps we can take to limit spread, however the risk is still very real, as is the obligation to respect individual employees’ circumstances and needs.

In the context of these facts, it becomes readily apparent that resuming ‘business as usual’ is not an option. The question we now have to confront is: was ‘business as usual’ ever serving us well in the first place? There’s a strong argument to be made in the negative. ADP announced in mid-2019 that only 16% of employees were fully engaged. Around the same time, a CNBC poll noted that a full third of U.S. workers seriously considered quitting their jobs during the preceding three months. If the ‘normal’ we’re all dying (quite literally in some cases) to return to was so great, then why were employees so unhappy?

For better or worse, the physical aspects of ‘normal’, such as clustered seating, mask-free meetings, etc., will not be returning for some time. Perhaps then, as we sort through what our workplaces will look like during the next stage of the pre-vaccine world, we should take some time to consider the facets of work that could stay the same but really shouldn’t. A number of employers took the pandemic as an opportunity to step up for their employees in a way they hadn’t previously, opting to pay hourly workers even if they couldn’t be on-site, providing ample flexibility to support working parents, and more. Can we carry this mentality of actually respecting employees as humans with wants and needs through into what must be the ‘new normal’, rather than resuming the status quo of unhappy, disengaged employees laboring for uncaring organizations?

We like to think the answer is yes, but it will take some work. While some companies have revolutionized their relationship with employees for the better in recent months, others have caused theirs to further deteriorate. In those cases, the trauma and fear will be all the more intense as employees return to potentially unsafe working conditions for companies that have demonstrated undeniably that they do not care about them or their well-being. These organizations will inevitably see the damaging results of this across productivity, engagement, and retention, but for their peers who made the effort, this moment holds a golden opportunity to make real strides towards building a happier, more engaged workforce.

Two key skills HR can help leaders and managers to cultivate during this difficult time as we move towards reopening are empathy and respect: empathy to understand employees’ unique situations and needs, and respect to be willing to support them through it. We do not yet know the full extent of how the mental and emotional trauma of the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns will manifest for employees and their families, so we must remain agile and responsive to their needs. Whether that comes in the form of a flexible return to the office strategy that allows employees to determine when they’re comfortable/able to come back; training around empathy, mental health, and resilience to help employees bounce back and stay well; and/or adapting your benefits package to the new circumstances, it will go a long way towards helping your company, and your individual employees, come out on top.

We know that People teams are juggling more than ever right now, between the pandemic, racial injustice, and shifting business priorities amidst economic uncertainty, not the least of which includes reopening. You don’t have to go it alone. If it would help to have a partner in the effort to develop support systems within your employee population, as well as offering training around the critical issues of today, we hope you’ll reach out. We’re always available at hello@workrowd.com and look forward to helping you build a stronger, more employee-centric ‘normal’ that drives business results.