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The employees are the heartbeat of what you do every single day. But make no mistake. Your employees are the keepers of the promise you make as a company. So always keep an eye on what are the elements of their day-to-day that have the greatest impact on how your customers perceive your company, your brand, your products, your services, and the overall values of the organization.
Employee experience (EX)
For me, employee experience is really around people, process, technology, and culture. And so the key elements there around employee experience, as I am talking about it, have to do with things such as what are the tools they use every day? How supported are they to do their job? Are they trained and enabled in the skills that they will need, not only today, but in the future? What about opportunities for career advancement? Are they aligned to the organization? Do they agree with their values? Is there C-suite accountability? Is there trust between the employee and the company? That’s where I think organizations have huge opportunity to really improve the experience of their employees.
Recognize a vicious cycle
Unfortunately, over the last 10 years, employee satisfaction, according to Gallup, has remained fairly flat and internationally, those numbers in some countries are actually going down. Mind you, these numbers are in the low 20% range, which means a majority of employees are dissatisfied at work. And that’s where you then start to see it has impact on an organization’s ability to grow.
If you start to see that employee satisfaction is declining or you see high levels of burnout, lots of things start happening. People start quitting their jobs and then you don’t have enough people to work, or they continue working at their jobs and they give poor service, which then means your customers don’t come back, which means the company doesn’t grow. You start to see it permeate in the decisions that a company may make, like they might start cutting costs or doing workforce reductions because growth is slowing down, but it’s slowing down because the employees aren’t happy. And then you let employees go and now, you need the remaining employees to do more with less, and it becomes this vicious cycle.
So if your healthcare worker is burnt out, they’ve worked three shifts back to back or three days straight, that’s not a great experience for the patient. And most definitely, it’s not an environment where those nurses or doctors or care workers are happy at what they’re doing every single day.
Address disconnects
So when I started to share this research that I had done over the course of about two years, I shared it with hundreds of executives from around the world, and one of the very first things that I heard was, “If it’s so obvious that employee experience is important, how do I know if it’s not going well?” Right? So I would ask back. “Tell me what your current environment looks like today. Are your employees happy? Are they engaged? Are they satisfied?” Most executives would say a resounding, “Yes.” And then I would say, “How do you know that?” That’s where you started to see the disconnect.
What they think was happening in the business may not be the reality of what was happening in the business. They think they’ve got a handle on what’s happening in their employee base or even in their culture, to use that word, but in reality, many don’t. And a lot of it is because they’re managing the business through a spreadsheet instead of managing the business in front of and with their employees. So sometimes, it’s in the basics. It’s not over-complicated.
How often do you communicate with your employees? How often do you get out of your office and go meet with and talk to your employees? How often do you have town halls where they can provide feedback to the executives or share learnings that they’re having collectively? Do you ask your employees what’s happening? Do they answer you? Do you listen to what they tell you? And then do you do something about it?
Shift your mindset
Because we’ve spent so much time focusing on customer and customer experience, an easy way to start to shift your mindset is to view your internal employees as customers, as well. They’re also shareholders in the success of the organization. It is two sides to the same coin of customer. And so, expanding your mind to think of them like a customer, as well, makes you quickly realize that you don’t treat them the same.
For example, would you ever require your customer to have five tabs open on their desktop and go to five different applications to place an order with you? I doubt any company would ever do that. But what do we do for our employees every day? We require them to go to multiple applications, go to multiple systems, manual processes, get up from their desk, get approval for this, get signed over here. It’s all disconnected. We would never, ever do that for our customers.
That quick example shows you that if you did treat your employees like they were customers, look at all the things you would have to reconcile. Just look at what you ask your customers to do and then look at what you ask your employees to do and if there’s a difference between the two, you have work to do.