Sure, you ultimately call the shots, but does it truly make sense to make key decisions without solid input from the people who work for you, the people who do the work? You’ll likely agree it doesn’t. After all, in today’s still-evolving business environment, it’s more important than ever to take your employees’ temperature, that is, to learn how your people feel about their work and the organization.
Why? Well, doing so can help you gauge the quality of the employee experience, which is key to productivity, as well as your ability to recruit and retain top talent. With that said, here’s what you should know about measuring your employee experience.
Just What is “Employee Experience”?
Essentially, this is a crystallization of everything an employee has seen, experienced, and perceived during their organizational tenure.
Why is Employee Experience Important?
Due in part to the pandemic, which turned most business models on their heads, employees have become more selective relative to where and how they wish to work. For example, a fat paycheck no longer guarantees that you will snag, or keep, the talent you desire. Employees generally, and increasingly, want to be happy at work. And it behooves you to see to it, since such employees are up to 20 percent more productive. That’s a challenge, though, since 64 percent of employees don’t feel their employer even has a strong culture, one way or the other.
Further, unhappy employees tend to miss work more often than those who are happy. They’re absent more often and take 15 more sick days than the average employee, a stat cited in the best-selling book “The Happiness Advantage.”
On a positive note, if you can up the happiness quotient at your organization, you’ll have employees who are more engaged. Engaged employees produce more, which leads to a better bottom line. Look at what a Gallup survey found: companies that have workforces that are highly engaged topped competitors, in earnings per share, by 147 percent. Now that should be an eye opener.
How Can the Employee Experienced be Improved?
The employee experience can be improved by improving the digital employee experience, which calls for you to go beyond the annual engagement survey – if you even duct one. A single survey can seem performative to employees if you don’t respond to results with changes. This means that you must hear from your people throughout their tenure with you and make workplace adjustments where needed.
The fact is that listening on an ongoing basis permits you to make key connections between what your people experience and your organization’s performance. Asking the right questions at the right time allows you to continually establish ways to bolster the employee experience.
Can Mercer Help?
Indeed, it can. The leading global consultant can use “employee listening” to evaluate and enhance the employee experience while gaining insights, empowering your organization, and unlocking performance.
Mercer’s breadth of expertise, after all, includes employee research that covers all facets of the employee experience, including team effectiveness, employee engagement, leadership, and organizational culture. Mercer excels at producing listening programs that combine the appropriate methodologies with content and agile technology to give you actionable results.
In summary, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of assessing and improving the employee experience, especially in today’s unstable business landscape. You simply must be able to lure and hang onto the talent you need, which isn’t possible if the employee experience is mediocre at best.
Improving the employee experience through active listening also allows you to draw important correlations between the experiences your people have at work and your organization’s performance.
We suggest that you enlist the assistance of Mercer to improve your employee experience – and your bottom line.
