A Business-Driven Approach to Employee Inspiration

Human resources is experiencing a massive shift. For years, organizations have relied on a single annual engagement or inspiration survey to collect feedback from employees. Yet, after all these years, 81% of companies running engagement programs aren’t enhancing or maximizing them.

Today’s HR leaders are held accountable for driving business results. CEOs are looking for every way to use employees strategically, and in the age of word-of-mouth and viral marketing, the CMO now also cares about what employees are saying about their organization. These new expectations present a huge opportunity for HR, but many HR leaders are struggling with how to meet these expectations and what changes they need to make to keep up with the business.

In this blog post we will review the reasons why a many employee surveys lead to unsuccessful results and the alternative business-drive approach.

Measurement is not enough

Organizations have been measuring engagement and inspiration through annual or biennial surveys for years, and it has become the standard employee measurement process for the majority of global firms. However, the current system is not producing a world of highly fulfilled and productive workers.

So why aren’t engagement levels improving and what impact is this having on organizations globally?

A wealth of data links employee engagement levels and business outcomes. Research by Harter, Schmidt, and Hayes (2002) and Winkler, Konig, and Kleinmann (2012) suggests that business unit-level engagement and engagement is predictive of future customer experience metrics, productivity, and financial performance. The U.S. economy may suffer as much as $550 billion of lost productivity annually due to poor workplace experiences.

Another obvious cost is replacing employees that have left the organization. The cost of replacing an employee can range from 20% of annual salary for a mid-level manager all the way past 200% for a CEO or senior leader. And yet, we know that inspired employees are 87% less likely to leave the organization than their uninspired peers and business units with higher aggregate engagement levels show substantially lower turnover than business units with lower engagement and inspiration levels.

These statistics speak loud and clear. Despite these findings, however, employee voice is rarely used as a critical tool in decision making for leaders. We believe this is due to three significant disconnects.

Reason #1: Disconnect between targets and real change

Firstly, employee feedback is often only collected through the annual engagement survey, which is often more focused on executive presentations, hitting targets, and comparing metrics than on actually improving organizational inspiration, behavior or engagement.

Furthermore, many executives don’t know which employee experience targets to aim for. Often, organizations fixate on how their engagement scores compare to high performing competitors or how they compare to last years survey results.

Reason #2: Disconnect between feedback data and business results

The inherent challenge of linking annual engagement survey data to business metrics like revenue, productivity, and profits only compounds the focus on targets over change.

According to Deloitte’s 2017 Global Human Capital Trends report, nearly 80% of executives rated employee experience as important, but only 22% judged their own companies as excellent at building a differentiated employee experience. Connecting employee feedback data to business outcomes is possible but challenging, and the listening mechanisms used by organizations greatly impact their ability to do this.

Reason #3: Disconnect between employee surveys and employees

The single annual engagement survey, for example, doesn’t measure employees’ views at times that are relevant to them. This, combined with often lengthy messaging and communication around the survey event, means that these surveys are perceived as driving the agenda of the organization as opposed to driving the experience of the employees.

These disconnects result in an industry standard that doesn’t generate the results it should. And yet, too few companies move beyond the standard. The primary reason for this is confusion about meaningful alternatives and how to better measure and manage the employee experience.

The Business-Driven Approach

The movement to prioritize employee experience is well underway. The good news is that operational data about employees are becoming more and more accessible. Ultimately, the data mapping between operational and experience data could provide the missing link to connect employee experiences and business decisions.

Measure employee experience, not just inspiration

While inspiration is indeed a foundational construct within employee experience management, traditional surveys (when used in isolation) are not sufficient to measure the entire employee experience.

Focusing more broadly on the employee experience allows organizations to gather data not only about engagement and its drivers, but about the entire employee lifecycle. Crucially, this approach puts a heavier emphasis on the perspectives and experiences of the employees themselves; a critical issue that impacts the likelihood that employees will provide candid and actionable feedback.

We all naturally have unique needs and experiences in the workplace. However, we also each go through similar events throughout our employment that are heavily influenced by organizational policies and practices. Such as, the first day, the performance review, ongoing training, getting promoted, customer-facing issues, etc. All of which matter at work and be measured to identify areas of improvement. Such experiences create inspired, happy, and productive employees.

Great organizations want their employees to have consistent, valuable experiences at critical moments like these. Experience data collected at these moments can bolster an organization’s ability to create consistent and valuable experiences.

Measuring the employee experience

The placement of the various employee listening mechanisms can be mapped alongside the typical employee journey. However, no organization launches or should launch all of these concurrently. It’s important to first understand the needs to collect the employee experience (i.e., culture, competence and infrastructure) and then employ each additional measurement once the required support has been established.

Sources:

Marrs, S. and Dr. Granger. (2017). The new business-driven approach to employee experience. TLNT. Retrieved from https://www.tlnt.com/the-new-business-driven-approach-to-employee-experience/

Harter, J. K., Schmidt, F. L., & Hayes, T. L. (2002). Business-unit-level relationship between employee satisfaction, employee engagement, and business outcomes: a meta-analysis.

Winkler, S., König, C. J., & Kleinmann, M. (2012). New insights into an old debate: Investigating the temporal sequence of commitment and performance at the business unit level. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 85(3), 503-522.