We’ve all heard the popular business slogan “the customer is always right,” a phrase that highlights essential customer-first cultures implemented in almost every organization. This is how most businesses approach their operations, prioritizing customer satisfaction and retention to drive profitability. But a lesser-known fact is that a great employee-first culture also drives success, and retaining quality employees you trust should be a top priority, too.
According to Gallup, companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their competitors by 147% in earnings per share. Yet while companies are quick to invest in sophisticated customer experience strategies, they’re still stumbling in the dark trying to determine what their employees want. We unearthed this in our recent employee experience report, which found that a third of business leaders feel they don’t understand what their employees want. As a result, understanding employee engagement across the life cycle came out as one of the priorities this year (29%), and a quarter (25%) felt this lack of understanding has led to a rise of unengaged employees’ leaving organizations. Any good company knows its customers inside out, but it seems that in many cases, they can’t say the same about their employees despite evidence showing that engaged employees are a prerequisite to profitability.
After riding the recent headline waves of the Great Resignation and quiet quitting, we are undergoing a step change. These workplace trends, spurred by the pandemic, have woken business leaders up to the harsh reality that their pool of engaged employees is decreasing. Now is the time to capitalize and shift gears. Recently, we’ve seen leaders such as Brené Brown, Simon Sinek, and Steven Bartlett taking center stage with unique takes on employee-first culture, shifting the narrative. They stress how overlooking the importance of having truly engaged employees can, in the long term, be detrimental to customer success, as employees are ultimately the ones who are customer-facing. As Sinek so neatly puts it, “customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” If the last decade was characterized by a focus on customer experience, the next will be focused on using the same principles to create a winning employee experience.
So Why Is Employee Experience Still an Afterthought?
In the modern business landscape, where the spotlight often shines brightly on customer experience, the value of a good employee experience tends to fade into the background despite evidence that engaged and satisfied employees are pivotal to an organization’s bottom line. Research from Gallup shows that having highly engaged workforces leads to 21% higher profitability, but many leaders remain trapped in a paradigm that ignores this critical connection in favor of attributing corporate performance to customer experience.
At first glance, the link between employee experience and profitability may not be immediately visible, whereas the logic behind optimal customer experience is more transparent and embedded in strategy. For years, businesses have leveraged metrics and analytics to optimize the customer experience, linking growth objectives to customer loyalty and retention. That legacy, plus an unhelpful misconception that the correlation between a superior employee experience and broader business objectives is less tangible and harder to quantify, has made it challenging to warrant investment and effort in the employee experience. But leaders are overlooking a significant opportunity. It isn’t harder to quantify the employee experience; leaders are (shortsightedly) choosing not to invest in it.
Employee experience directly affects the bottom line, impacting factors such as productivity, absenteeism, innovation, and recruitment costs. According to benchmark data from the Society for Human Resource Management, the cost of hiring a new employee can be up to four times the position’s salary. Not only do leaders choose to ignore the impact on financial health, but this misstep also lies in common assumptions that justify a lack of investment in employee experience. For example, some leaders attribute low engagement and retention rates to the current “Great Resignation” era, dismiss “quiet quitting” as a generational quirk, or hold the consensus that certain industries are destined to have low motivation and high turnover rates. Our employee experience report found that just 1 in 5 (22%) leaders this year have chosen to prioritize employee retention, ranking as their least important area of concern—a disheartening statistic given the current landscape of employee engagement and the importance of retaining talent. Change starts from the source, and by looking to improve the employee experience, employers can break the mold on low engagement and high turnover being seen as normal.
Borrowing the Customer Experience Blueprint
To create a winning employee experience, we must borrow the customer experience blueprint, defined by personalization and targeting, digital excellence, customer listening, and ring-fenced resources. The same concepts should be applied to the employee experience.
Through personalization and targeting strategies, companies seek to develop a comprehensive understanding of customer personas and tailor their offerings accordingly. By building brand loyalty that turns into brand affinity, companies increase returns and revenue. It seems a no-brainer that businesses should deploy personalized approaches to their staff to garner the very same outcomes of loyalty and brand affinity.
With a proven blueprint for customer experience success at our disposal, it’s time we channel these principles into revolutionizing the employee experience. This begins by making a compelling case for best-in-class employee experience, rallying leaders, and gauging their appetite for investment. To do this, we must work cross-departmentally to tell the right, compelling, data-driven story that speaks to different leaders. We can add emphasis by clearly spelling out the impact on return on investment (ROI) using industry benchmarks such as the World Economic Forum’s meta-analysis of 339 different Gallup studies, which confirmed favorable correlations between employee well-being, employee productivity, and performance across every industry and all regions.
Investment in Listening Activities
Business leaders invest heavily in customer listening strategies. They use an omnichannel approach to collect feedback and inform decision-making, leading to increased customer satisfaction. Through big data and analysis tools, businesses also have more information on consumer experiences and needs than ever before, helping them to form sophisticated business strategies. Why not deploy the same investment for getting more value from your employees?
To understand employee motivation and demotivation nuances, organizations should invest in listening activities. Work often becomes a system we need to fix, and we forget that our workforce is made up of individual people with needs in and outside their jobs. Recognizing that it’s no longer solely about financial incentives, businesses should delve deeper and understand the personas of their employees and what their unique journeys entail. This year, 1 in 3 leaders (29%) plan to better understand the ways employee engagement varies. Businesses are slowly realizing the importance of personal approaches based on individual needs and milestones, as well as the importance of tailored communications.
“Listening” to staff often means a half-hearted annual survey, the results of which can be written off by companies as people just being disgruntled. However, ignoring staff needs is detrimental not only to their well-being but also to the productivity of the company. Employers need to double down on feedback mechanisms that give employees more opportunities to tell them what they need. This involves fostering a culture in which employees are empowered to build feedback and ideation into their day.
Adapting in the Digital Workplace
The digital age has transformed the way people interact at work. Over two-thirds (69%) of employers surveyed in our report said the majority of interactions they have with employees are over a digital interface. Leaders have worked hard to tailor their digital offerings to meet customer needs, and now it’s time to do the same with employees.
Groundbreaking innovation in core consumer apps such as TikTok and X with multiple functions has amplified employees’ expectations of technology within their personal and work lives. Employees now expect a smooth, customized, multichannel digital experience, with two-thirds of IT, HR, and internal comms leaders (64%) stating their staff are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with old, clunky technology. To optimize employee engagement, organizations should streamline the digital experience and unite their employees on a single, smooth, frictionless platform.
With communication, retention, and engagement connected, employers must step up their efforts and distill their digital offering into a simpler, more effective user experience. The time has come to view employees as the first, most important customers. As the world of work transforms, those at the helm must adapt communication practices and strategies to reflect these changes. You can’t be truly “people first” if your employees are left in the dark ages. By embracing the employee experience with the same enthusiasm as the customer experience, businesses can cultivate engaged employees with a holistic people-first culture and, in turn, drive profitability and success into the future.
Having spent the last 7 years immersed in the employee experience space, Kaz Hassan, employee experience and future of work industry lead at Unily, has a reputation for being ahead of the latest trends and best practices on everything from digital transformation to internal communications. Over the course of his career, he has worked in varied roles, from change management at Arriva to rolling out more than 20 intranets as a consultant at Unily. He joined Unily in 2018 and is now a regular speaker at industry events, including presenting master classes and conferences around the world.
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