Are you looking for strategies to improve the employee experience for your remote or hybrid workforce? Look no further. Get valuable and insightful guidance here!
Employee experience is the totality of an employee’s perceptions and feelings about their work. It includes all their interactions with their employer, from the initial application process to the day they leave the company. On the other hand, employee engagement measures how connected employees feel about their work and their organization. Engaged employees are more productive and less likely to leave their jobs.
Why is employee experience necessary?
Employee experience is becoming increasingly important as companies compete for top talents. Today, employees are looking for meaningful work and a good fit with their values. They want employers who invest in their development and offer growth opportunities. Employee experience is one way to show employees you care about them and their well-being.
Difference between Employee Experience and Employee Engagement
As we mentioned earlier, employee experience is the totality of an employee’s perceptions and feelings about their work, while employee engagement measures how connected employees feel to their work and organization.
Employee experience is essential because it can influence employees’ engagement levels. Employee engagement is critical because it directly impacts productivity and turnover rates.
Hence, if we talk about employee experience vs. employee engagement, improving employee experience can help you attract and retain top talent, which is essential for success in today’s competitive economy. Improving employee engagement induces loyalty and employee satisfaction among the employees, leading to a lower attrition rate.
Employee Engagement Vs. Satisfaction
Employee Satisfaction implies employees’ level to which they are enjoying their work/job. They may or may not be engaged with their careers in this situation. Any employee leaving late after office hours and coming to the office before office hours without much-improved activity still signifies high employee satisfaction levels.
On the other hand, Employee Engagement is related to motivating the employees to come to the office every day and helping the company succeed with their dedicated efforts.
One of the core differences between employee engagements vs. employee satisfaction is that the engaged employee remains satisfied with their jobs, but satisfied employees are not necessarily engaged.
How employee engagement relates to the employee experience:
Employee engagement and employee experience are related because engaged employees are more likely to have positive experiences at work. Conversely, employees who have negative experiences at work are less likely to be involved.
Some ways to improve employee experience include creating a positive work environment, investing in employees through training and development opportunities, listening to employees, and responding to their feedback. These are also some of the best ways to increase employee engagement.
Employee engagement and employee experience are essential for companies because they directly impact productivity and turnover rates. Employee engagement measures how connected employees feel to their work, while employee experience measures how employees feel about their work.
Improving employee engagement can lead to increased productivity and lower turnover rates, while improving employee experience can lead to higher levels of employee engagement.
How can you improve the employee experience?
There are many ways to improve employee experience, but some key steps include:
1. Development and training for skill enhancement
Invest in your employees by offering training and development opportunities. One of the top reasons people seek a new job is to learn new skills. Skilled employees can perform better and get high job satisfaction. A company that can follow a robust employee development plan for training and development facilities is likely to attract excellent employees.
2. Evolving as a positive work culture
Create a positive work environment that is supportive and encourages collaboration. Comfortable and productive spaces play a vital role in enhancing the employees’ experience. From temperature-regulated interiors to ergonomic furniture and well-positioned computer screens makes a considerable difference in the employee’s physical and emotional state. A disruption-free space allows your employees to perform best in their capacity.
3. Two-way communication
Listen to your employees and respond to their feedback. Employees who know that they are listened to by the companies and their immediate managers are more productive and engaged with their jobs and organization.
Celebrate successes and recognize employees for their contributions. A frequent acknowledgment of ‘good jobs’ makes the employee feel more valued and further motivates them to do great work. It is a proven way of boosting your employees’ confidence and helping them be more productive in their teams.
Organizations that do not acknowledge their employees often for their better performance are likely to lose the dedication and morale of their employees.
5. Well-Defined Procedures and Policies
Implementing realistic policies and communicating them through formal channels is extremely important. Make sure your policies and procedures are clear and easy to follow. These procedures and policies provide a detailed roadway map to employees to execute their day-to-day operations efficiently.
These policies include streamlining internal processes, guidance with decision making and adherence to the law and regulations.
6. Monetary and non-monetary benefits for employees
Salary is the second most crucial factor responsible for retaining the top talents in the industry. Show employees you value them by offering competitive pay and benefits. For HRs, competitive pay refers to the offering a salary of 10% (more or less) than the average market pay rate. Competitive compensation is not just about money. It is inclusive of other bonuses and benefits that employees seek.
7. Participation in Decision making
Allow employees to have a voice in decisions that affect them. It plays a pivotal role in building the employee’s trust, organizational development, productivity and innovation. The voice of employees in the decisions also boosts the self-confidence and job satisfaction among employees and makes them loyal to the organization.
8. Focus on Employee Engagement
Stay up-to-date on the latest trends in employee engagement and incorporate them into your strategy. Employee satisfaction and employee engagement go hand in hand. If the employees are not happy with the given salary, they will be less motivated, and this will be visible in their performances
The employee experience journey is the process that employees go through when interacting with their employer. It includes all the steps from the initial application process to the day they leave the company.
The employee experience journey aims to create a positive and memorable experience for employees that will encourage them to stay engaged and committed to their work. There are many ways to improve the employee experience journey. Still, some key steps include creating a positive work environment, investing in employees through training and development opportunities, listening to employees, and responding to their feedback.
These are also some of the best ways to increase employee engagement. By improving the employee experience journey, you can create a more productive and engaged workforce.
How does employee experience makes a difference?
Employee experience is crucial for organizations with thoughtful and committed employees. However, retention is the primary aim of engagement spending.
A report by Workhuman and IBM suggests employees with a high score on employee experience get over three times the return on assets and twice the return on sales as those in the bottom quartile.
Employee experience may be detected and perceived in ways unrelated to traditional management. When management specifies employee roles, employees understand how to make a difference in safety.
The Greatest Source of Engagement Is in Connections
Engaging is not a onetime event, a reward program, or a pleasant perk. While being engaged at work may feel fantastic, it isn’t a team-building exercise. It’s built daily through one’s job setting and interactions.
Managers are essential for employee engagement. Engagement comes first because it is critical to continual excellence. Even highly competent but unengaged employee may outperform their colleagues, yet they will never reach their full potential until they feel appreciated at work.
The manager accounts for 70% of the variance in employee engagement. Managers can provide the conversations, recognition, and feedback that drive employee engagement, resulting in a beautiful employee experience.
Conclusion
Employee experience and engagement are essential. The difficulty organizations face improving in each area, especially when considered against the backdrop of a worldwide pandemic and social and racial upheaval.
The financial bottom line will constantly improve when you get back to basics and put your people first. It’s up to leadership to demonstrate that engagement and experience are top objectives through words and actions.
Want to know how Engagedly can help you mange your remote employees better? Request us for a demo.
Employee engagement initiatives are one of the primary objectives of a CEO. The employees are a significant asset to an organization, and an effective CEO engagement plan can continuously motivate them to give their best.
As you move forward to the top rungs of the organizational ladder, your workload increases, and you have less time to connect with your employees. An effective CEO engagement plan is what you need to ensure employee engagement, making employees productive and more valuable to the company.
Leadership plays a critical role in employee engagement. One can’t run a business without them, as they keep the business wheels turning. CEOs who effectively engage with their employees and provide the right motivation and direction are more successful.
As a thought and people’s leader, you will always want your employees to feel proud to be a part of the organization. You will also want to ensure that your employees work in a happy and enjoyable environment. As a result, CEOs can undoubtedly do many things to help manage employees better and keep them feeling secure and connected.
Today, in this article, we will discuss the five powerful things CEOs can do to engage with their employees and appreciate their value in the company.
How a CEO can engage with employees
Building employee engagement is the primary responsibility of a company CEO. To create a healthy relationship with their employees, CEOs need to engage more often, which will lead to increased employee engagement and efficiency.
Now the question arises of how the CEO can engage with his employees? Through an effective CEO engagement plan. Effective employee engagement increases employee retention and creates an emotional and psychological attachment between employees and companies.
So let’s look at a few steps a CEO can take to interact with his employees.
Allow employees to share their ideas.
Implement some of the shared ideas for the betterment of the company.
Share personal stories that connect with employees and help them better understand the company and the CEO.
Leaders have a lot to do with an employee’s happiness at work–because when they feel good about themselves, they perform better. Building employee engagement is very important for the overall growth of an organization and requires a good CEO engagement plan.
Follow these employee engagement initiatives to create more genuine, productive, and longer-lasting connections with employees.
1. Build Trust
Building trust is one of the major components by which a CEO can set an instance for his workforce. When you set a good example, people are more likely to follow in your footsteps. Likewise, a poor example can lead people in the wrong direction.
If you respect your people, they will feel more comfortable opening up to you, and you can point them in a better direction than they would have gone on their own. It’s all about how much trust you can gain from your people and be a source of good examples.
The best way to gain trust is to communicate with transparency and authenticity with your workforce. This is necessary for your business.
2. Invest in Small Acts of Kindness
The value of kindness is priceless in human relationships. Little gestures to the employees mean a lot, and these small acts significantly impact employee motivation and build an emotional connection with the organization.
The CEOs can send customized messages on special occasions, like employee birthdays and remarkable organizational achievements. Investing a little of time and money can help break down barriers between teams and make them feel at ease where the CEO is a guide and leader to them.
3. Create an “Advisory committee” Structure
Creating an advisory committee or council often helps to connect with the workforce. The group can comprise selective volunteers from specific departments, and they help the senior management set up long-term goals and important business planning.
Although the CEO takes major decisions regarding the company’s long-term planning and strategies, the advisory committee helps ensure the CEO gets all the help needed in deciding right. Thus, the employees feel more engaged and actively participate in building organizational strategies.
4. Use Social media to Interact more
Presence on social media is a fantastic way to connect with the employees and build a brand value for people. Most successful CEOs often follow this in connecting with the people and their employees. It allows you to stay up to date on your team’s life events and interact with them outside of the office.
Connecting employees through social media is an excellent tool for a good CEO engagement plan. Employee engagement through social media can be done in many ways which a CEO can leverage. Some of the ways include:
Drop in comments, answer questions or reply. It is one of the best ways to engage with them, as it makes them feel heard.
Compliment employees on their achievements. It makes them feel proud and happy, boosting their productivity and further career development.
5. Recognize and Celebrate
Recognizing the achievers and celebrating their successes always encourages people to deliver better. To be a successful manager, you must first understand what recognition works best for your employees.
CEOs often take this employee engagement initiative to keep the employees motivated and recognized for their good work. Initiatives like ‘Employee of the Month,’ are always conducted to build a trusted and energized workforce.
These initiatives often help build a strong, dedicated team and thus improve morale, increase motivation, and allow employees to get to know one another outside of the office.
6. Allow Employees to Develop
Most managers don’t give their employees the room they need to perform to their best ability, but this is a mistake. Your employees always need support and mentorship. As a company CEO, you need to allow your employees to show off their skills and ability to do their assigned tasks.
By giving employees the chance to prove themselves, you’ll help them work well with you in the future. To do this, you need to create an open and friendly environment, which will give your employees a chance to work in a way they’re most comfortable.
A comfortable environment enables the employees to work harder and bring out their best, building stronger teams, leading to more productivity and more overall success for everyone in the company.
7. Providing tools for success
It can be hard to explain to your employees why their daily routines are important to run the organization smoothly. You have to have a good grasp of the company’s workflow and how each department fits into the big picture. Training is the only way to ensure your employees are on the same page as you.
Team members may feel unsure about their role and how to handle any critical situation, which will hamper productivity. A minor hiccup could become a much larger issue if the problem increases further.
When you approach each employee individually and explain their duties, they will feel more confident in what they are doing and be more willing to take on new challenges without becoming overwhelmed.
8. Get to know your Employees
Spending time and building relationships can be what brings a team together. Learning about one another may seem like an old-school, outdated concept in today’s workplace dynamics. Still, a manager needs to consider taking the time out to know who employees are as people.
Making an effort to get to know your employees personally and treat them with respect will make them more satisfied and inspired to work. To connect employees on personal levels, feel like they are being recognized as a person rather than just a worker.
An effective CEO Engagement Plan has been proven to help business leaders connect more effectively with employees and improve their company’s results. It’s also good for employees, making them happier at the workplace.
Many factors determine how satisfied your employees are. Is your workplace environment a comfortable place? How well does the company’s management work with the employees? So many things can make or break employee engagement, but the best way to find out about it is to take feedback directly from them.
CEOs can learn a lot about the overall job satisfaction of all their employees in one go, ensuring they can make any changes to their work and prepare a specific employee engagement plan. The process and the plan to engage with employees make all the difference and help to create a positive work environment
How do Employee Engagement Initiatives Contribute to Organizational Development?
Employee engagement initiatives build a happy and engaged workplace.
These environments are fun and creative and are filled with intelligent, enthusiastic employees who will go the extra mile to help their company succeed. As the employees are engaged, the office environment improves, and their actions become reliable, resulting in significantly fewer internal misunderstandings.
Employees who are engaged are more likely to help increase profit revenues year after year, and highly engaged employees are more likely to increase their productivity significantly—the advantages of engaged employees spread throughout the organization.
Engaged employees work with a sense of pride and motivation to provide a higher level of service to your customers. When your customers are satisfied, sales and profits rise, leading to constant business growth.
As a CEO of the organization, you will always want to have a dedicated and happy workforce, and when everyone is engaged, it’s much easier to lead your team to success.
How can Employee engagement be measured?
There are many ways to measure employee engagement. A survey can be conducted, and the survey helps gauge employee engagement and company culture through your employees’ eyes.
Conducting periodic surveys helps the management and CEO understand how the employees are aligned and focused on company goals and how they are comfortable with the work environment.
Conclusion
Why is a proper CEO engagement plan important? Employee engagement initiatives motivate the workforce to be productive and dedicated to organizational goals. The goals and values represent the prime foundation of the organization.
From the top management to the frontline workforce, every employee wants to be heard, valued, and trusted. Making your employees feel valued and essential creates higher levels of employee engagement.
Building employee engagement creates a positive atmosphere in the workplace and leads to higher productivity. Higher employee productivity yields superior customer satisfaction and builds a trusted and profitable organization.
Engaging employees at all levels will help to increase morale and lead to improved productivity. The best way to do this is by making them feel as though you value them. When you show them the value of their work, they will be more apt to make more effort to ensure that they’re doing a good job. By also engaging with them, you make sure that they can provide feedback on how they feel and how they are aligned with company goals.
A good CEO engagement plan will help you make informed decisions to change any negative work environment. Holding regular meetings with employees is also a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of your employees, and this is the best way to find out if there are any issues or problems that you can help mitigate.
Want to know how Engagedly can help you mange your remote employees better? Request us for a demo.
Reviewing an employee’s performance is an essential aspect of any successful performance management process. Without a question, a 360-degree review is an effective methodology to collect inputs from various stakeholders at different organizational levels and to steer employees’ performance in the right direction.
While the 360-degree review is a developmental tool rather than a rating mechanism, many companies combine it with other assessment techniques to enhance company-wide development.
However, what is a 360-review process and what type of challenges and advantages can they bring to your organization? Here’s a detailed look at everything you would like to know about the 360-degree review.
Understanding the 360-degree feedback mechanism
A 360-degree performance appraisal, sometimes referred to as a 360-degree review, multi-rater feedback, or 360-degree management review, happens when an employer analyzes an employee’s performance through different sources such as colleagues, customers, and managers, rather than just one-on-one input from a manager directly.
Once all inputs have been obtained from various sources, it is utilized to determine an employee’s strengths, shortcomings, and talents, and may be used to create a comprehensive performance assessment report. If the 360-degree performance assessment is well-designed, it may help to improve a team’s performance, employee awareness, and communication among employees.
In this article, we will cover the pros and cons of 360 degree feedback tool as an employee development tool.
The 360-degree assessments can be an exceptionally efficient performance management tool.
1. Provides more precise, thorough, and extensive feedback.
In a typical evaluation, the employee receives input from a single source — their immediate supervisor. However, the 360-degree review focuses on the collection of inputs from various sources, providing employees with a far larger, more diversified, and, in many circumstances, more accurate variety of perspectives on their work.
This form of feedback is often better than the performance evaluation of a supervisor, who only observes how an employee performs in certain situations.
2. Fosters a favorable work atmosphere
A 360-degree review helps employees and teams to understand their strengths and limitations. Whenever a team is able to recognize all of their unique capabilities and challenges, they possess the required skills and understanding to make necessary changes for advancements.
When employees understand the responsibilities clearly, aligned with a company’s objectives, they may become more effective as individuals and as teammates, resulting in a more productive and happy work environment. Thus, a 360-degree review aids in the improvement of employees’ performance and fosters strong working relationships and a favorable work environment.
3. Scope for development
Another significant benefit of the 360-degree review is its effectiveness in identifying an employee’s growth needs.
The collective viewpoints offered by colleagues and managers may present fair facets and provide more clarity on the shortcomings of an employee. The company may then take the required steps to close the gaps by creating training programs that promote individual development and address the skill gaps.
For an instance, during a ‘360-degree review‘, an employee may receive reviews from his immediate team leader and multiple peers on his performance and time management skills. The employee may then collaborate with his manager to establish objectives. Post this, they can create an action plan to enhance his performance, according to the available working hours to enhance time management skills.
4. Helps to determine training needs
The 360-degree performance review helps to identify employees’ training gaps. To elaborate, the feedback enables management to get a holistic knowledge of employees’ skill competence and, accordingly, spot specific areas where training is needed.
When utilized properly, feedback may help to create trust, enhance communication, boost overall performance, and motivate teams to work together to accomplish common objectives. Additionally, it may assist employees in aligning their objectives with those of the business and providing a better picture of the abilities necessary for success.
6. Understand how others perceive you
Observing how people view you in the job may be a positive experience. The 360-degree review enables colleagues to anonymously share their feelings about their peers, which is not something that occurs often in a workplace.
If you can handle constructive feedback without being offended, you would like to know how others perceive you. To deal with criticism effectively, you need to cultivate a growth attitude and see it as a chance to bring in the required improvements.
7. Anonymous feedback
360 feedback is often anonymous and a reason for many employees to freely voice their opinion about other employees. Thus, this can be considered as one of the benefits of 360 feedback, since certain employees may feel more at ease providing feedback. This is particularly true for both positive and negative feedback.
If certain members of your team are afraid to offer negative feedback about a colleague, 360 feedback may provide a secure platform for them to bring their concerns to the attention of their manager.
8. Promotes transparency
Increased transparency, resulting from 360-degree feedback, may give rise to the development of trust among employees.
An open and trustworthy environment may improve managerial decision-making skills; enhance employees’ performance and establish a firm knowledge foundation. Thus, 360-degree feedback can be used to develop a higher degree of trust among employees and create a transparent work environment, which may help to improve employees’ performance throughout the organization.
While there are several benefits to adopting 360-degree feedback, there are also concerns related to it. The following are some drawbacks of using the 360-degree performance assessment evaluation approach.
1. Time-consuming process
A 360-degree performance assessment might take considerable time to conduct due to a large number of participants.
Employees need time to respond prudently to the questions, and supervisors or Human Resources professionals need time to sort through the information and assess it. Often, the quality and quantity of feedback come at the expense of extra time.
Evaluating the feedback and putting it into a single performance review document using specialized tools, such as that offered by ‘Engagedly 360-degree performance review,’ may speed up the process.
2. Ambiguous assessment
If there is a lack of trust among employees, they might refrain from expressing their true opinions. If the feedback is not candid, it is also likely to be erroneous, which is ineffective.
A small team, on the best of terms, may be fearful of being overly critical, whereas a big team may lack the necessary familiarity to provide an informed judgment.
Prevent this issue by establishing clear boundaries and communicating expectations transparently via 360-degree feedback.
3. May affect leadership
It is critical to communicate to managers what they learned from the 360-degree review and how they intend to handle the feedback.
If participants believe that the 360-degree feedback process was a waste of time or a pointless exercise, no concrete progress or constructive change will occur; confidence in leadership will erode, and engagement will likely decline.
Leadership may avoid this by implementing an action plan based on the feedback outcomes.
4. No way to monitor anonymous input
While anonymous feedback is beneficial in terms of encouraging employees to voice their ideas, it can occasionally be a double-edged knife.
If a serious problem arises within a 360-degree feedback loop, you will be unable to identify the person who provided the negative or constructive input. This makes it more difficult for the management to properly address and resolve the disagreement.
5. Ineffective execution
Often, companies introduce and use the 360-degree assessment approach ineffectively. It is critical to approach the assessment process correctly, which includes appropriately and positively presenting the method and optimizing the relevance of the feedback.
This is particularly critical when transitioning from one kind of performance feedback to the other and especially when the change may influence employees’ salaries or positions.
The 360-degree review process comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. If you’re unsure whether to deploy 360 feedback within your team, the solution is to use Engagedly’s 360-degree performance review software.
Engagedly streamlines the 360-degree review process by enabling stakeholders at all levels of the business — including management, managers, colleagues, and direct reports — to provide real-time input.
Additionally, Engagedly conforms to your organization’s performance management strategy, easing the review process regardless of whether you conduct evaluations annually, mid-year, quarterly, or regularly.
In a recent report by SHRM/Globoforce, 89% of HR leaders agree that giving feedback to peers is the key to employee success.
Constructive feedback has always been crucial for employee growth. It helps increase employee engagement, decreases turnover, and also helps in professional development. Constructive feedback is observation-based and aims to identify weaknesses in individuals, and find a solution. It helps in providing actionable suggestions and reinforces positive behavior. Considering the pandemic-stricken times, it has become more important now more than ever.
Sometimes, giving constructive peer feedback to colleagues is challenging because it tends to discourage them. But, it gives you an opportunity to contribute to regular performance reviews without involving salary appraisals or other negotiations. More importantly, peer feedback helps build a positive culture in your team as well as the whole organisation. Constructive peer feedback, when done right, has a plethora of benefits.
How To Give Constructive Feedback To Peers
Constructive feedback is the process of providing feedback to employees through direct comments, advice, or suggestions to help them mould their behavior, traits, and attitudes to achieve higher output or efficiency in work. It identifies the strengths, weaknesses, and other aspects that give faster results to employees.
The purpose of peer review is to identify the hidden problems or causes behind lower output, productivity, or performance of employees. It further strengthens the growth of employees by making them aware of their weak areas and highlighting their strengths. It serves the dual purpose of both personal and professional growth of employees.
9 Expert Tips To Giving Feedback To Peers
Using the below tips while giving feedback to peers will help in making a better impression on the employee and will further help them in understanding the improvement areas. Feel free to customise these tips as per your business requirements.
1. Plan Well In Advance
It is important to be prepared in advance to give feedback to your colleagues. Feedback meeting with peers is a difficult conversation to have; why not prepare ahead for it?
Preparing in advance for the feedback meeting allows you to put across your point with ease and more confidence. This allows you to help your colleagues improve themselves and achieve the team goals. Always remember to keep the objective of the meeting clear.
There are many articles that talk about the importance of giving both negative and positive feedback together so that the employees aren’t demotivated. But when you are giving it to your peers, it is important to be specific about what exactly you want to convey. You don’t need to add positive performance aspects just for the sake of having them.
Being specific allows your peers to focus on the right thing and improve themselves.
3. Make It A Conversation
One of the most common problems with giving feedback to peers is that peers aren’t encouraged to participate in it. Phrase your comments properly to encourage your colleagues to participate. For example, if you want to talk about their negative performance and suggest solutions, ask them how they are planning on improving their skills and how it contributes to organisational success.
When you have chosen to give feedback to your peer, first put yourself in their shoes and understand where they need to improve themselves. Give them suggestions on how they can improve themselves. This helps them understand what you’re expecting of them and how they can meet those expectations. Make a proper action plan for your peers.
5. Summarise Peer Feedback
Summarise the main points discussed in the meeting and emphasise on the action plan that you have created for your colleague. This practice helps you avoid misunderstandings and be clear about what you discussed. In short, state your expectations, the results of their performance, the problems with their performance, the practices they should stick to and your solutions to help them improve.
6. Follow Up Is A Must
This is optional when you are just a peer. But following up on feedback is a good practice. Feedback is purposeless unless it has an effect on the employee performance. So, follow up and see if they need your help; this makes your peers stay motivated and productive.
7. Be Empathetic
Being empathic in feedback conversations results in better outcomes. It is not easy to take criticism, and employees may get embarrassed or uncomfortable while having feedback discussions. It is therefore important to point out that the intent behind the feedback is good and directed towards improvements in the employee’s performance. Another point to keep in mind is to avoid using personal statements, as they can demoralize the employees and make them reluctant to accept the feedback.
8. Show Respect
Feedback is supposed to help employees understand their strengths and weaknesses. And in such conversations, it is imperative to have respect for each other to fulfill the purpose of the feedback. Being disrespectful during conversations can make employees defensive and even challenge the feedback, or sometimes disregard the whole conversation.
9. Leverage Feedback Tools
The right feedback tools assist in taking notes, recording meetings, and providing real-time feedback to employees. They make it easier to establish the process and have a clear peer feedback loop in the organization.
Tools such as Engagedly allow employees to initiate the feedback process from their end and ask their peers to provide them feedback on their performance. The feedback recorded during the process can be directly fed into the learning and development module to assist employees in improving their performance.
Important: How you give feedback to your peers mainly depends on the nature of your relationship with them. For example, you cannot make an action plan for the CEO of your company and then follow-up on it; while you can do it easily for a colleague who’s on the same level as you. This is something you must absolutely keep in mind when giving feedback to peers.
Team meetings are a way for leaders and their team members to connect and share relevant information, make decisions, and appoint directives that serve a greater purpose.
Unfortunately, employees say that most meetings are a waste of time. They spend an average of 31 hours a month sitting in on unproductive calls. Without a highly engaged atmosphere, not only will you be unable to keep their interest, but you’ll be taking valuable time away for them to be in a workflow.
It is estimated that ineffective team meetings waste more than $30 billion a year in the US, making this a crucial problem for business owners. You want to engage your people and enable them to execute the strategies you have for them without them feeling detached and dispassionate.
Let’s explore ten ways to improve your team communication and productivity during call meetings.
Eliminate unnecessary meetings and calls
Before hosting a meeting, get clear about why it’s happening in the first place. Align with your goals and be sure that there’s a distinct purpose in gathering your team together with a direct call to action for them to follow. You don’t just want to fill up time with a call that could more productively be an email.
Tina Hawk, SVP of Human Resources at GoodHire, suggests that too often team meetings are used to discuss the routine, while their main purpose should be making important decisions. Understand what you want the end result to be before going into it. Go over your employee roster to only include relevant team members in the meeting. If the call does not impact them, they don’t need to be on it.
Clarity on the structure of the call will help you remain timely and efficient. Establish a clear agenda to share with employees ahead of time, enforce your protocol, and have a refined presentation to go over with a step-by-step plan for your expectations of meeting departmental goals.
Don’t just wing it, and don’t assume you know enough to dive in without a blueprint. Establish a layout for meetings to help employees know what to expect and prepare well in advance for it. Formulate a time frame for meetings, schedule them amply in advance, and use your leadership skills to keep everything flowing interactively and with intent.
Diminish lower priority work
David Aylor, Founder & CEO of David Aylor, believes that without a system that helps to defer and delegate lower priority work, efficiency will suffer. There are countless tasks involved in achieving the bigger goal for a company. While each component is necessary to get where you want to be, not all tasks are as imperative as others.
Team leaders should go over high-priority tasks to present to each department and how it fits in to result you want achieved for the long-term, understanding that employees wear many hats under the umbrella of their position, and focusing on what the key results are.
Staying on task is not always easy. Even though you have ownership of leading the way, involving your team always creates the impact. Assign roles that help keep the meeting flowing without delays and distractions.
You might want to have someone take notes that can be transcribed to a software that simplifies employee communication through a discussion space, or someone to keep track of timing to support focus.
Promote No Meeting Days
Logan Mallory, VP of Motivosity, an employee engagement product, says, “Attending meetings can disrupt the employee efficiency, making it hard to get back in the flow.” Sometimes, team calls can feel redundant for employees, leading them to become a part of the day they dread.
Let your team members follow their work groove without pulling them away from their day to discuss matters that could be put off for some time. Stepping away from meetings will help employees and you understand more about why they’re necessary, so convening for calls is more desired by your team.
Communicate effectively
If your employees feel they have a voice, they will be more inclined to participate in team calls. Establish open communications with your team members outside the meeting space to remain consistent with them. Find solutions through chatting apps to enforce workplace growth that improves collaboration.
Choose a platform where employees can ask all their questions, align tasks, and manage their work. This collaborative effort to enhance the way everyone interacts will boost productivity and lessen time-wasting distractions.
Find out how employees feel about these meetings. Conduct formal surveys and listen to your team about how they’d rate the calls you’re having to see if they’re effective. It will help you target the type of meetings to be hosting.
CEO of Quiet Light, Mark Daoust, states that the culture of ongoing employee feedback is the driving force towards employee development.” Initiate performance reviews and pay attention to where your employees’ strengths and weaknesses are, being willing to utilize your team calls to support improvement and development where it’s needed.
Bring all the projects under one roof
It’s a great business idea to streamline your channels of engagement to one system. Project management softwares allow you to gain access to everything your employees need all in one place, helping you plan, track data, and keep up with everyone’s task.
Avoid overwhelm for your team by making it easier for them to obtain all the resources and management tools to work productively, also allowing you to oversee all of your business’s components. When you are leading team calls, you’ll know where to look for guidance.
Measure everything
If you want a high-performing organization, you need to know the metrics for what works and what doesn’t. You must analyze company productivity, including sales and performance, paying attention to the scale that needs balancing.
Ouriel Lemmel, CEO & Founder of WinIt, says, “An effective standard in place contributes to the achievement of goals. However, one can be only sure of progress if the process is measurable.” You cannot waste time trying to figure out where to put in efforts. Track your metrics t
There’s no sense in having a call if you’re not going to follow up with how your employees take action after. Things come up, employees get sidetracked, and sometimes you need to step in to see how things are going. Whether it’s a follow-up email or a message sent on your communication channels, stay in touch.
Your employee productivity will reflect in the way you engage with them and the culture you provide to always remain a leader who is in their circle.
Don’t stop assessing your disciplines for things that could use more proficiency and be open to making necessary changes in the way you interact with your team, so there’s no time wasted. Stay up on business trends and be mindful of employee needs as they may adjust. Switching things up to make the most of team calls so everyone is contributing and growing collectively is a key factor to thrive.
Do you want to know how Engagedly can help you with Real Time Performance Management? Book a live demo with us.
Roughly 60% of top development companies are using 360 degree feedback for both development and decision making for high-potential identification, confirmation of potential, and succession planning purposes – Bracken and Church(2013).
Multirater or 360 degree review process has become the most preferred feedback method for many organizations. It is a shift from the traditional feedback process, which is subjective and based only on the direct supervisor’s inputs.
What is 360 degree feedback?
360 degree review process is the method for collecting, quantifying and reporting observations about an individual from people that an individual has worked with, both internally and externally. This makes the feedback process more objective when compared to traditional feedback processes. People who take part in the feedback process include not only the manager but also peers, direct reports, consumers, and vendors.
If you have become a manager or joined as one recently, and planning to implement a 360 degree review process in your organization, here is a seven-step guide to implement it successfully.
Communicate The Process
If you are implementing multirater or 360 degree feedback for the first time in your organization, it is essential to communicate the process to all stakeholders. As it is relatively a new process, many people are still unaware of it. Communicate the purpose and also how the process will be conducted, and the results will be used so that everyone involved in the process has a clarity of it. Take time and communicate it to everyone over one-on-one meetings, group meetings, and emails.
Rater selection is one of the most important processes of 360 degree feedback, as several people are part of it. Employees who are being reviewed should choose an adequate number of raters or feedback providers. When employees select a good number of reviewers, then there will be enough data for analysis. Review the list of raters whom your employees have selected, so that no unnecessary person is on the list.
It may take at least a week or two to finish with the rater selection process, but be patient and careful with this step.
Choose The 360 Feedback Software
As a manager, you should select a 360 feedback software that will help you set the questionnaire quickly for all your employees. It should be easy to use with little or no training so that less time is spent on understanding how it works. If there is confusion in selecting the software, then demo versions should be used before selecting one. The software should be easily customizable as per organization needs, and also robust so that the data stays secure. Not only this, the 360 feedback software that you select should have an efficient customer support team to help you at any time with your issues.
Engagedly’s 360 feedback software tool is the perfect solution for you. It is not only easy to use and understand, but also can be customized as per your needs.
Preparing the survey questionnaire for the 360 performance review process is one of the most important tasks. If you are unsure of what questions to set, you can take the help of HR experts or senior managers. Include questions such as:
What should this employee stop doing to get better at work?
Does this employee communicate well with colleagues?
What are the new things this employee should start doing to be better at work?
Does this employee show leadership qualities?
What are the things this employee is doing well and should continue doing?
Make it clear as well as concise, a long questionnaire will bore the readers, and a very short one won’t be effective. On the other hand, ambiguous questions will confuse the readers, and they will provide inaccurate ratings.Framing the correct set of questions plays a major role in deciding the effectiveness of the process.
Once all the reviewers have submitted their reviews, it is time to generate a report for the employees who were reviewed in the 360 performance review process. It should be simple and self-understood. With the help of the report, the employees should be able to identify their strengths and weaknesses. It should be a guide for the employees, using which they can improve their productivity, and have an overall development. An apt report would be one that highlights the highest rated areas, lowest rated areas, blind spots, gaps, and ratings.
For managers, it becomes a stressful task to make such a report or to find a tool that incorporates all the points in a single report. Engagedly’s multirater or 360 degree feedback module incorporates all the points in a single report through well-defined graphs. Request for a demo with us.
After the reviews have been completed and the report has been generated, create an action plan for your employees. The action plan should be based on improvement areas, blind spots, and skill gaps identified in the report. This will help the employees to improve their skills and develop themselves through training, internal or external workshops, conferences, coaching exercises, mentoring programs, etc. It should have specific goals and development plans outlined for your employees.
Continuous Evaluation
The 360 degree feedback process should be made a regular activity in your organization, preferably every quarter. If the process is conducted once a year or once in two years, then the effectiveness of the process plummets. Having a continuous evaluation helps in re-evaluating the employees from time to time and how they have improved from their previous 360 degree review process. Frequent feedback also helps the old and even the new employees to get used to the process.
Often, organizations start with the 360 degree review process but make no effective use of it. This 360 feedback guide will help you with it.
Planning to start a 360 Degree Feedback Process in your organization? Request us for a demo.
According to a recent study, 69% of employees would work harder if they felt their efforts were better appreciated.
Employee recognition and rewards in the workplace is one of the main drivers of employee engagement and retention in any company. Employees tend to stay motivated and more focused to reap the benefits of their hard work. Everyone likes being appreciated, especially when it is for their work. It increases the overall productivity of the employees and that of the organization.Continue reading “Tips for Employee Recognition and Rewards”
“When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.” – Simon Sinek (Author, Start With Why).
In the era of digital transformation, changing technical landscape, and increasing competition, how do organizations keep their employees productive and aligned with organizational goals? The answer to the question lies in finding the organizational activities that contribute towards employee engagement. One of the ways that organizations use to understand the concerns and expectations of their workforce is through employee engagement surveys.
Introduction
Through the decades, HR managers have used employee engagement surveys as a core strategy to comprehend staff engagement levels, initiate behavior change, and drive higher output. Not only do the surveys help organizations to create an impact on human resource management, but they also provide employees with a medium to share their experiences and views on the practices being followed. Furthermore, with the data revolution and digitization, surveys have become more effective and process-oriented.
There has been a significant improvement in the engagement of US employees over the last decade, with an overall 36% of employees engaged in their work. (Gallup – Employee Engagement Report, 20211)
As the world is still reeling under the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic, various aspects of employee engagement and productivity have changed in the last two years. Some progressive and innovative organizations have been making sincere efforts to keep their dispersed employees engaged and committed to the organization. Engagement surveys come in handy in such scenarios. They help in gauging employee engagement on different parameters and offer insights for leaders to take action.
Before we dive deeper into the intricacies of employee engagement surveys, let’s take a closer look at what employee engagement means to the organization and how engagement surveys provide actionable insights to leaders.
Employee engagement talks about the level of dedication, enthusiasm, and zeal that employees exhibit toward their jobs. Engaged employees are a real asset to the organization as they help in achieving organizational goals through exemplary performance. That’s the reason the majority of Fortune 500 organizations put great emphasis on employee engagement initiatives. Research has shown that some of the activities that help elevate employee engagement are reward and recognition, learning and development, diversity and inclusion, ownership, and employee experience.
By creating a workforce of engaged employees, organizations can become highly competitive and transform themselves into market leaders. Higher engagement is also linked to increased productivity, reduced turnover, effective leadership, higher ROI, and overall happiness of the workforce. Therefore, by working towards the engagement of employees, organizations can reap multiple benefits and can create a workforce of dynamic employees that is performance-driven and result-oriented.
Measuring Employee Engagement
Employee engagement surveys are a strategic technique that helps in measuring the motivation, commitment, and purpose of employees towards their job responsibilities and, thereby, towards the organization. The survey reveals important information regarding employee perceptions towards the organization. Such insights help leaders and managers make a shift in the workplace to enhance the overall employee experience.
Carefully designed surveys can help organizations understand how their employees feel about work, leadership, any barriers to engagement and higher productivity, the causes of low employee morale, and much more. Responsiveness of the organization towards employee feedback can help drive major changes in the organization. It leads to lower absenteeism, higher retention, better customer centricity, customer acquisition, higher revenue generation, and a satisfied workforce.
An organization undertakes an employee engagement survey to understand what factors lead to an engaged workforce and the hindrances to the process. Companies that are heavily invested in their employees are able to retain their best performers and build a brand that attracts job seekers. Let us try to understand the importance of conducting surveys and employee engagement in an organization through some statistics.
The number of engaged employees is significantly lower when compared to the overall workforce. In the US, the number of disengaged employees is just 64%, and globally, the number is down to 80%. (Gallup2)
Companies with higher staff engagement enjoy better productivity and profitability. The estimated productivity increase is over 20% or more. (Gallup3)
91% of the 1000 surveyed employees said that burnout affects the quality of work as well as their personal relationships. (Deloitte4, burnout report)
Gender diversity has a direct relationship with employee engagement. Employees who work under a female manager are more engaged than those working under a male manager. (Gallup5, Analytics and Advice for Leaders)
Country and age have a significant impact on employee engagement. US employees in the age group of 30-39 are less engaged than those in the age groups of 40-49 and 50+. (Sloan Center On Aging & Work6)
Employee engagement has a positive impact on all areas of an organization. Highly engaged organizations realize a 41% reduction in absenteeism, a 10% increase in customer ratings, a 20% increase in sales, and substantially lower employee turnover. (Gallup7)
90% of leaders think that engagement strategy has a great impact on business success, but only 25% have a strategy in place. (Muse8)
In the post-pandemic world, 8 out of every 10 employees would prefer employers that offer economic well-being. These include retirement plans, health, disability, and life insurance, paid family medical leave, and emergency savings programs. All the benefits have a direct relationship to employee engagement in the workplace. (Prudential9)
Employee Engagement Survey Purpose
Recent shifts in the global economy have put organizations at the forefront of employee engagement. To remain competitive in the current capricious circumstances, organizations need a highly engaged and productive workforce that can bring in results. Because of this, employee engagement surveys have gained prominence due to their ease of delivery, quick response time, qualitative and quantitative data, and feedback analysis.
It has been found in multiple studies that employees that actively respond to employee engagement surveys are enthusiastic about their jobs and want to share the feedback for the betterment of the organization. On the contrary, employees that do not respond to surveys are not engaged in their jobs. While there are multiple reasons for employees to not fill out the engagement questionnaire, some of the most prominent ones can be:
Dissatisfaction with their current role and responsibilities.
Lack of trust in the process of engagement surveys, i.e., they believe that feedback doesn’t matter in the current business environment.
Distrust in the management of the organization.
Lack of communication and interpersonal skills.
Employees are afraid to give their honest opinion.
An employee engagement survey serves multiple purposes for the organization in the following ways:
Drives Behavioral Changes In Employees
Psychologists have found that asking questions can prompt people to change their behavior. It is based on the fact that questions help people reflect on themselves. It helps with staying committed to a cause and changing personal traits and characteristics for future goals.
Coined as a “question-behavior effect,” the phenomenon was first published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology10. It states that asking questions about the future behavior of a person can speed up their process of being ready to change.
The same concept is used in employee engagement surveys. Questions prompt employees to understand their current behavior and the changes required to achieve their goals. The crux of the survey lies in initiating the behavior change process among employees.
Interacting with employees and taking their feedback sends a signal that their opinions matter to the organization. Sending out regular surveys and acting on them makes the workforce more engaged and dedicated towards their work. Let us look at the importance of hearing from employees using the below statistics.
86% of surveyed employees felt that people in their organization were not heard fairly or equally.
63% of employees felt that their managers ignored their voices in some way, which had a devastating effect on their performance.
Over 74% of employees felt more effective at work when their concerns were heard by the management.
Engagement is directly related to being heard in the workplace. Around 92% of engaged employees felt they were heard by more than 30% of disengaged employees.
The above statistics highlight the importance of hearing out the employees and taking appropriate action on that. Through employee engagement surveys, organizations can break the shackles and prompt their employees to share realistic feedback.
Predictor Of Employee Behavior
Employee behavior is central to the success of an organization. Much of how employees behave in their day-to-day lives predicts the culture of the company and ultimately drives results. Predicting employee behavior can result in multiple benefits for human resource managers. It helps in understanding the level of commitment of employees towards the organization and how long they are willing to serve them.
It has been observed that asking people in employee engagement surveys how long they are willing to serve the organization is twice as accurate in forecasting future turnover as a predictive analysis. Additionally, surveys also help in predicting the number of upcoming resignations. It has been found that employees who do not respond to annual engagement surveys are highly likely to leave in the next six months.
Employee engagement is critical to the success of an organization. By undertaking various engagement initiatives, organizations can improve their overall performance and create a dynamic workforce. Much research has shown that engagement is an indicator of progress, and companies with higher engagement indices do well, even in unprecedented situations.
Employee Engagement Surveys are a great tool to measure engagement at various levels of the organization. Let us look at some of its benefits.
Industry Benchmarks
Engagement is the result of multiple activities that an organization undertakes. The product of these activities vary across countries and industries. Consequently, organizations that are expanding to different geographies need to understand what engages their employees the most.
Knowing where the organization falls on the engagement spectrum provides a bigger picture of the organization’s policies and practices. With the help of employee engagement surveys, upper management can compare the organization with the industry leaders and focus their efforts on improving engagement.
Frequent surveying provides a glimpse of changing trends in employee engagement and experience. Thus, HR managers can understand which strategies are helping out the organization and which obstacles need to be removed.
Preventing Revenue Loss And Catastrophic Mistakes
An estimate by Gallup states that the US companies lose between $450-$500 billion12 due to actively disengaged employees. This is on top of the revenue loss due to the pandemic and the shift in the external business environment.
The statistics clearly indicate the importance of adopting employee engagement initiatives at all levels of the organization. The higher the level of employee disengagement, the higher the chances of making costly and catastrophic mistakes. Therefore, to prevent losing out on revenue, it is critical to hear employee feedback and take appropriate action to boost employee engagement in both the short and long term.
Employee Mental Health And Overall Wellbeing
Depression and anxiety are the leading causes of loss of productivity and employee engagement. It has a tremendous impact on the world economy; the world stands out on losing over $1 trillion every year due to a loss of employee productivity. (World Health Organization13)
Another survey14 by SHRM found that of 1,099 surveyed employees, around 40% felt exhausted, burned out, and despondent due to the alteration in their lives caused by the pandemic.
There is no doubt that the pandemic has taken a toll on the mental health of employees. Aggravated by the long working hours and stress of family and child healthcare, things have gotten even worse. Employee wellbeing has become a priority for employers, and organizations globally are investing heavily to counter the effects of the pandemic on the mental health of their employees.
But, how do organizations identify that their employees are stressed and in need of support? Employee engagement surveys offer insightful data to understand the employee’s wellbeing and the peculiar areas that are a cause of concern for them. Furthermore, employers can also focus on the departments or business units with highly disengaged employees and focus on their improvement to prevent breakdown.
Employee Turnover Data Analysis
The information collected in engagement surveys can be used to analyze the employee turnover data. By comparing the responses of employees with the turnover data, HR managers can comprehend the areas of employee experience that need improvement in order to contain attrition.
The process involves comparing the responses of employees who left the organization within 3–6 months of conducting the engagement survey. It reveals how employees felt about the organization and their overall experience before leaving. Furthermore, the perceptions of such employees can then be compared with the ones who stayed to gauge the reasons for employee turnover. Managers can then intervene in the areas that need improvement and strategize a plan to increase engagement and enhance the overall experience.
Connecting Engagement Initiatives To Key Business Results
Leaders throughout the world believe engagement to be one of the five most important strategies in creating a revolutionary organization. But the biggest challenge they are trying to solve is tying employee engagement initiatives to key business results. Having an engagement survey is not enough if it cannot produce the desired results. Therefore, to get the most out of the surveys, human resource managers need to develop them in accordance with the key business indicators, such as customer centricity, overall stakeholder value, company reputation, and brand building.
Such an amalgamation of business outcomes with employee engagement surveys helps in strategizing the operations across different departments. Furthermore, it can bring important insights that help in charting out how organizations utilize their employees in unprecedented situations, such as the sudden change in the business environment, regulatory compliance, new competitors, and changing customer expectations.
Creating an employee engagement survey is a tedious task. It requires months of planning to address the areas that the survey should touch upon, and the involvement of employees from every level of the organization. To yield actionable results from surveys, HR managers should consider forming a cross-functional team of experts to look into different aspects of survey creation. The following points highlight the extensive process of creating employee engagement surveys.
Define The Purpose of the Survey
Employee engagement encompasses various factors, and working on all of them in one go is not possible. Though it can be tempting to include multiple focus areas in the survey, it might confuse the employees and digress from the current state of the company. Thereby a result, providing inaccurate results.
At the time of discerning, it is crucial to identify three or four high priority objectives, especially where engagement and productivity are lacking. For example, if customer acquisition and retention, employee turnover, and decreasing sales volume are the areas of concern, then the survey should only focus on these factors.
Involvement Of Leadership
For the survey to produce any results, the involvement of leadership is a must. The dynamics of leader-employee relationships are not one-directional, and that’s why involving leaders in employee engagement exercises can give direction and purpose to the process.
In the initial phase of survey planning, human resources managers must reach out to organizational leaders to get their input on the objectives of the survey. This also ensures they have a vested interest in taking action on the survey results.
Review Previous Surveys
While designing an employee engagement survey, HR managers can refer to the previous surveys to inculcate best practices and improvise on the ones that did not work well. It can offer meaningful insights, such as which survey designs were liked by employees, the response rate, accuracy of results, core focus areas covered, actions taken on the feedback, timeframe adopted for the whole process, and the overall engagement score. Such action points will help in designing the survey to bring in better results from employees.
Consider The Timing Of Survey
The timing of the survey is of great importance in order to get a higher response rate and data accuracy. HR managers should consider the following do’s and don’ts when deciding on the timing of the survey.
Engagement Survey Frequency
The frequency of conducting a survey is of the utmost importance. Some organizations conduct surveys annually and then wait for a year to collect input from their employees. Much has already happened in the gap, and if their surveys are not accompanied by action, then it might result in disgruntled employees.
Therefore, human resource managers must conduct engagement surveys regularly in order to send a message that employees’ inputs are being valued.
Drafting Questions That Provide Actionable Results
Drafting good survey questions is time-consuming. It generally requires collaboration from multilevel, cross-functional teams to understand whether the surveys target the organization’s key objectives or not. The questionnaire must cover all the aspects that are relevant to the purpose of the engagement survey. The quality of questions has a statistically significant effect on the survey findings; hence, one must take the utmost interest and care while designing them.
The questions must be drafted in a manner that elicits an accurate response from the employees. Open-ended employee engagement questions must be included in the survey questionnaire. It helps employees voice their opinions and ideas. Furthermore, managers can analyze the collected responses and can dig into the areas that they would’ve never considered looking into.
Testing the questionnaire is also important to understand the relevance and accuracy of the collected data. Organizations use techniques such as focus groups, cognitive interviews, pretesting, and combinations of these to test the survey. Thereafter, the insights collected from testing are used to refine the questions.
Select The Best Employee Engagement Survey Template
An employee engagement survey template includes questions that measure the motivation and engagement of employees to perform their job duties. Additionally, the responses collected from the survey are useful in understanding the performance, competence, and satisfaction of employees.
A template comes in handy when conducting a survey, as it helps in gathering, organizing, and analyzing the data collected from employees. A good template should be customizable as per the needs of the organization and must highlight the areas that need improvement.
Designing Surveys to Inform Better Decisions & Drive Meaningful Outcomes
Survey design requires some art, but even more science. Some research estimates that employees are surveyed 1.5 times per year. Given this fact it’s important that we implement sound practices in the design of organization surveys that help inform key business decisions.
When it comes to survey design validity is essential, it determines what survey questions to use, and helps ensure that we are using questions that accurately measure the issues of importance. Validity ensures that we are measuring what we say we are measuring.
The Engagedly Team has spent time and effort constructing an engagement survey that is valid, supported by research, and reviewed by industry experts. Now our clients can confidently assess employee engagement within their organization in a few simple steps. This new product offering provides our clients with an easy-to-administer employee engagement survey built around evidence based practices. Additionally, we provide insights to better understand employee engagement within and across the company while highlighting key strengths and areas for opportunity as well.
Now more than ever we can all benefit from thinking more like a scientist by applying more rigor and critical thinking in the work that we do. At Engagedly that is our responsibility, to marry science and practice, wherever and whenever possible.
Once the engagement survey is created, it is time to get it rolling. There are a few things that managers need to consider before they decide to roll out the survey. Following the best practices for employee engagement surveys will help in getting accurate results. Some of the tactics to be followed are discussed below.
Communicate The Employee Engagement Survey Purpose
Effective participation in surveys happens only when employees are clear about the purpose of the survey. To encourage employees to participate in the survey, organizations need to clearly communicate the following to their employees:
What is the purpose of conducting the engagement survey?
What does the organization want to accomplish by taking feedback from employees?
What steps will the organization take upon completion of the survey and the anticipated results?
How will the survey help employees in their day-to-day activities?
The projected timeline of events starts with surveying and analyzing the results.
Emphasizing the importance of the survey to both employees and employers.
Maintain Employee Anonymity
It is important to keep the employee engagement survey anonymous. The reason behind this is that employees feel less anxious about the survey and are ready to provide open feedback without the fear of any retribution. Additionally, employee anonymity increases the likelihood of getting more responses.
By veiling the employee’s identity, surveys can prompt them to share their candid responses regarding the leadership styles, culture, interpersonal relations, support from managers, and other relevant areas that organizations want to mull over. Thus, it helps in gathering more responses with higher accuracy, leading to a better analysis of the data.
Commit To Taking Action
A sense of purpose is essential for an employee to work productively and contribute towards organizational growth. Without this, employers will lose their best talent to their competitors who value their employees more.
Taking action is the most crucial step in conducting a successful employee engagement survey. Employees value their employers more when they see their feedback is taken into consideration. Therefore, sharing key findings of the survey in a timely manner with the employees is important. By involving the workforce in survey findings, employers can make them feel valued and responsible for the solutions.
Please note that acting on survey findings also avoids “survey fatigue.”It refers to a lack of motivation to participate in assessments and can lead to fewer and (or) inaccurate responses. The fundamental reason behind survey fatigue, as found by McKinsey15 after reviewing 20 academic articles, is the perception that employers will not act on the results.
Often, employers do not tend to share the results or communicate with their employees after conducting the survey. This leads to an employee perception that employers do not value their responses.
On the contrary, sharing and acting on survey results leads to better response and participation from employees in future surveys. The below discussed best practices for employee engagement surveys will help in making surveys more effective and impactful.
Designing and conducting surveys takes a long time, and by not following the best practices, there is a good chance that it will not achieve its purpose. Asking questions that are ineffectively designed will lead to low response rates and inaccurate data. Thus, to avoid wasting time, effort, and money, it is pivotal to follow certain guidelines. The following points talk about employee engagement survey best practices that will help in designing and conducting surveys constructively.
Keep The Survey Short And Simple
Keeping the survey short and simple is an effective way to increase the response rate. The ideal number of questions to be kept in an engagement survey is around 75. And, it should not take more than 20 to 30 minutes for an employee to answer all the questions. Furthermore, try to avoid repetitive questions and confusing language. It may lead to vague responses if the employee is unable to understand the questions.
HR managers should also look into the previous surveys as well, to understand the optimal number of questions that got the highest response from employees.
Avoid Grouping Key Focus Areas
Grouping the key focus areas may confuse the employees and will result in uninterpretable responses. Avoid using double-barrelled questions regarding pay and benefits, growth and satisfaction, and learning and motivation. Even when the focus areas are closely related, grouping them will not be beneficial.
For example, an employee may find the pay satisfactory but not the benefits, or vice versa. In such a case, the surveyor will not be able to interpret the response, leaving no chance to create an improvement plan.
While building a questionnaire, managers should clearly segregate the categories and create questions around them. This will avoid any sort of confusion among respondents.
Involve Employees In Survey Design And Analysis
Before rolling out the survey to the whole organization, it is crucial to run it through a set of selected people to test its structure, consistency, and accuracy. It will help in redesigning unclear and ambiguous questions and will further refine the survey.
Involving heads of business units and departments in the design and analysis phases offers numerous benefits. They can highlight the areas that seem to be problematic and need to be addressed through surveys. Furthermore, they can help in laying down a strong foundation for examining the survey findings, leading to better analysis and actionable results.
Using Neutral Statements In Questions
The survey should have a mix of both positive and negative statements. Having plenty of positive statements such as “my manager understands my concerns” or “my team is quite responsive” will make the survey too rosy. Similarly, using too many negative statements will also subdue the intent of asking questions. Therefore, it is better to use neutral statements wherever possible, as they will elicit the best response from respondents.
Questions To Avoid
Management may want to include questions about age, gender, race, and other demographics to look into the trends or concerns of a group. For example, if women of color find the workplace to be responsible for their growth and development, or if employees in their 50s find the workplace more stressful. But such questions may raise one’s eyebrows, as employees might believe that management might use the data to target those specific groups. Thus, it is necessary to avoid or limit such questions in an engagement survey.
Another set of questions to limit is asking nice things about the management and focusing on the things that can be acted upon. Too many questions about management’s efficiency can put off the respondents. Instead, try to understand things from the employees’ perspective.
Question Behavior Rather Than Motive Or Thoughts
Questions about the thoughts, traits, and motives of an individual are disputable and will not provide any actionable data. The line of questioning should involve the observable behavior of the employee to understand their involvement and engagement. Thus, avoiding opinion-based questions in the survey will remove distortion from the results.
Another important aspect to work upon is removing personal bias from the survey. The questions should be drafted in a way that prevents any sort of bias from influencing the results. For example, asking questions about productivity and involvement of female employees can skew the purpose of the survey.
Include Some Verifiable Questions
Including questions with variable responses will help in establishing the validity of the survey. Such questions provide quantifiable data to understand if the responses collected are in line with reality. For example, a survey can include questions about the leadership of a particular department. The responses collected from the questions can be verified with objective measures like employee retention and overall departmental productivity. These measures will help in verifying the exactness of the collected data.
Another example could be asking questions about customer satisfaction from the client service department. The responses can be verified using metrics like call drops, frequency of calls from the same customer, and feedback submitted by the customer. The correlation of these metrics with the customer satisfaction index is a great measure to verify the survey responses.
What To Do With Employee Engagement Survey Results
The employee engagement survey forms the baseline for creating an action plan and implementing it across the organization. The real job starts after collecting the responses of employees in various key focus areas. Response data has to be thoroughly analyzed and subjected to various tests to check for validity and accuracy. To get the most out of the feedback results, management must follow the following steps to create a strategic action plan.
Share Employee Engagement Survey Results
There are multiple benefits to communicating employee engagement survey results. Firstly, it helps in building trust and shows employees that their responses are being taken into consideration. Secondly, it brings transparency to the system, which eliminates confusion, and thirdly, it creates a channel of communication between management and employees.
Sharing results with business heads helps them prepare to take action and hold discussions within the departments to find the root cause of the problems. Some issues will pertain to departments, and they can find the best solution by looking at the granular level of data.
The survey results usually provide insights about engagement, productivity, satisfaction, and other elements. Weaving them into a story will help employees understand the rationale behind the survey. Therefore, using a suitable medium like a presentation or an infographic, to highlight the results while narrating the importance of each focus area will be more effective.
Analyze & Identify Areas Of Concern
Analysis of survey results helps in finding the areas of concern and creating an action plan accordingly. Categorizing the results into different segments will help transform the data into actionable items. While some organizations rely on manual segmentation and analysis, some have transitioned to engagement platforms that come with tech-advanced algorithms to accurately analyze and interpret the data.
Such platforms help in providing a deeper understanding of every key focus area. For example, the survey results might show a positive organizational culture, but digging deeper into the data can reveal information about departments that are lacking support. Such an analysis is imperative for large-scale organizations with multiple business units and departments.
Facilitate Discussion Within Teams
Once the survey results are out, it is time to act on them and find solutions to the problems. By running post-survey meetings, organizations can ask people from different departments to brainstorm and come up with the right solutions. The purpose of these meetings is to involve people and give them an open channel to discuss issues and chart out an improvement plan.
Business heads or team leads must ensure that all employees participate in the process and establish a link between the survey results and employees’ perceptions. During the meetings, the problem statement must be clearly defined with the focus areas, and every employee must be given an opportunity to provide their thoughts on it. Through this process, employers can gather first-hand information directly from the employees who are facing trouble.
Make & Implement Decisions
The data gathered during engagement surveys and post-survey meetings helps in pinning down the problems. Leaders can utilize this information to create organizational-wide goals and cascade them to different business units.
Using Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle16 can help in streamlining the implementation process and providing observable changes and corrective actions to refine the processes. Introduced by Dr. W. Edwards Deming17 in the 1950s, PDCA is an iterative technique that helps improve business processes. It is used in designing and implementing decisions in the following manner:
Plan: It provides the framework for operations and is directly related to the goals and objectives of the survey findings.
Do: Also known as the action stage, the plan is set into motion and the insights are gathered for future evaluation. All the employees related to the focus areas to be worked upon are involved in this process. It may involve training, re-skilling, mentoring, coaching, and other significant activities required to improve staff engagement.
Check: Evaluating the action plan should be done in two steps. Once during the implementation process, as it helps in checking if the goals are correctly aligned, and twice at the end of the implementation to address the success and failure of the activities.
Act: At this stage, the reasons for the failure and success of the program are collected and used as feedback for running the next PDCA cycle.
Employee Engagement Survey Questions form the foundation of measuring engagement in multiple aspects. They should focus on solving organizational problems, get candid responses from employees, and intend to find the strengths and weaknesses of the organization.
Touching the core areas of engagement, such as satisfaction, leadership, culture, work environment, learning and development, organizational mission, and values, is imperative to have an overarching understanding of employee engagement. Let us look at some sample questions on different areas of engagement.
Sample Employee Engagement Survey Questions
Employee Work
I get a sense of accomplishment from my work.
I have access to all the tools and resources required to be productive at work.
The volume of work I have is manageable.
I feel my work is being valued.
Workplace Communication
My views and thoughts are taken into account while making decisions.
I can openly share my thoughts and experiences in my department.
I am well-informed about the organizational values and policies.
I feel the communication models used by the organization are effective and sufficient.
Organizational Culture & Strategy
I feel the organization is open to feedback and criticism.
The organization can adapt to the changing business needs.
The organization is equipped to meet the challenges.
New ideas and innovation form the core strength of any organization.
I feel that my job is secure.
Employee Manager
My manager encourages me to take action and initiative.
My manager provides honest feedback to me.
I need enough support from my manager to succeed in my role.
My manager is involved in my learning and development.
Leadership
I trust the leaders and their vision for the organization.
I see strong evidence of effective leadership in my business/unit head.
I see leaders committed to the organizational goals.
I am clear about the organizational mission and vision.
Learning & Development
I trust the process of learning and development being followed by the organization.
I have ample opportunities to grow and learn in my current job profile.
I get regular feedback from my manager.
The appraisal process is justified and helps me understand my quarterly and annual goals.
Employee Engagement
I am proud on the work that I do
I am immersed in my work
I find the work that I do provides me with purpose and meaning
Time flies when I’m working
I try my hardest to perform well on my job
I am fulfilled by the work that I do
Open Ended Employee Engagement Survey Questions
Open-ended questions provide deeper insights by encouraging employees to express their opinions and experiences. With the help of responses, it can become relatively easier to understand the cause of a problem. That’s why including such questions in engagement surveys is helpful. Check out the sample open-ended questions in the section below.
What improvements would you like to see in the organization?
Rate your overall experience on a scale of 1 to 10. Give reasons for the rating.
What changes would you like to see in the company’s policies?
What changes did you see in the organization since the last survey?
What strategies would you suggest the organization include for better work-life balance?
Final Thoughts
Much of the organization’s efforts in today’s world revolve around creating a dynamic, smart, adaptive, and engaged workforce. Organizations with a high engagement index are leading the way and utilizing various strategies for employee development.
Employee engagement surveys give employees a voice and assist employers in identifying areas for improvement. By considering employee feedback, organizations can dramatically improve their productivity and efficiency.
Over the last decade or two, the world is increasingly becoming a global village. Technological advancements have meant that businesses can now employ and work with remote workers around the globe. The new opportunity has brought people from different cultures to work together, creating a multicultural environment.
One of the tricky parts of this development is communication, especially when giving feedback. Feedback across cultures is a sensitive and challenging topic and will only get more popular because of the increasing popularity of multicultural workplaces. This article will discuss the various forms of feedback, why it is tricky, and how to improve your feedback.
As shown in this study by Officevibe, 65% of employees want more feedback, and 69% believe they would perform better at their workplace if recognized for their efforts. It isn’t surprising that employees want feedback as a source of motivation and growth. No one wants stagnancy. Organizations have also discovered the many advantages of giving regular feedback.
When it comes to giving feedback across cultures, there are more variables at play here, and this section will help us understand some of them.
Upbringing
Most of us can trace our first communicative interaction with early childhood. This period is where you learn how to communicate with your family. Part of what you would pick up is the subtle styles of communication, which are hand gestures, facial expressions, and other non-verbal forms of communication.
In fact,nonverbal communication can make up to 55% of what we relate, with 38% attributed to our tone and only 7% comprising the words themselves. This behavior is ingrained in us and reinforced by friends, social gatherings, and learning centres. If an individual has been told all their life to behave, speak and act in a certain way, it becomes second nature to them. This habit will follow them to the workplace.
Humans believe their way of speaking, acting, and responding is how others will also behave. Sadly, this mindset is a bubble experience created by our lack of exposure to other cultures and their peculiar communication styles.
Although the internet has made it possible to search about the culture of people, reading it online and experiencing it are entirely two different things. Even if you casually know someone from a different culture, it’s likely a different ballgame when in an office setting.
These are two common reasons employee feedback may be tricky in a multicultural setting.
Feedback Styles
When you talk about feedback, we mean both positive and constructive feedback. Companies pay attention to how frequently they give positive feedback and how well they present constructive feedback.
We can say the same about a multicultural setting, where different cultures have various ways they express their positive and negative feedback.
And so, in this section, we will explore some of those feedback styles from different cultures.
To better understand the various feedback across cultures, we will use the hamburger analogy of feedback to explain the different styles.
Only Meat
We categorize the only meat approach as the direct method. The feedback is straightforward, blunt, and often comes out harsh. It is giving feedback with only the negatives and nothing positive.
Countries that practice these include Germany, the Netherlands, and South Africa, to name a few. In a system like this, no feedback is good feedback. It means you are doing the right things.
The meat and bun approach is also a direct method, although a little less blunt. It is a straightforward system that gives negative feedback before positive feedback, highlighting what you have done well.
This system emphasizes mistakes to improve performance but dwells very little on positive feedback. Some countries that practice this method are France, some German companies, Spain and Italy. Some Nordic countries also practice this approach.
Whole Hamburger
It has become a popular and widely used method. The approach suggests one starts with a positive comment about a project or behavior towards the project, followed by the meat, which is the negative comment. Finish the feedback process with another positive commentary.
The indirect system tries to dress up the constructive feedback. It seeks to point out mistakes and encourage the receiver of the feedback. It’s a common approach in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the UK.
Vegetarian
This method is gentle and indirect about its feedback. The approach uses metaphors, stories, and even parables to pass on negative feedback. Some places prefer to give positive feedback and remain silent on the negative.
Others provide negative feedback in private. In some cultures, how close you are to the person also influences how you pass on the negative feedback. Some countries where we see this feedback approach include Japan, Korea, India, and Vietnam.
In recent times, the expansion of multinationals has influenced some of these countries’ feedback culture, and hence we see hybrids of a sort in some of them today.
Upgraders and Downgraders
In the last section, we spoke on the various feedback forms and how direct or indirect they are. Upgraders and downgraders are words used in the direct and indirect approach to either emphasize or soften the effect of constructive feedback.
Upgraders
They are words like ‘absolutely’, ‘totally’, ‘strongly’, ‘fully’, and ‘completely’ are examples of upgraders. If we are to use them in a sentence, “This report is completely wrong,” or “This is totally unacceptable.” The goal of upgraders is to strengthen the feedback. Cultures that use the direct approach commonly use upgraders in their sentences.
Downgraders
Downgraders are words that soften the effect of feedback. It can come as a roundabout method and is often paired with the indirect form of feedback.
Words like ‘maybe’, ‘a little’, ‘a bit’, ‘kind of’, and ‘slightly’. Examples in a sentence include, ‘maybe you should think about it’. ‘We need to put in a little more effort’. ‘You are kind of there’. These words are deliberate understatements to soften the blow.
When properly utilized, upgraders and downgraders can become powerful tools when giving feedback across cultures.
How to Give and Receive Feedback Across Cultures
It’s one thing to know about different cultures and what words managers prefer to use when giving employees feedback. And another to implement the newfound knowledge. Here are some steps to take to improve your employee feedback across cultures.
Learn about the Culture
There is a rather popular case study used online to portray this point. It’s the story of a German executive named Jens who went to the Shanghai manufacturing plant of his company to improve performance. What ended up happening was performance dipped within the first six months, key management members resigned, and his feedback style that worked in Germany was failing here.
He later discovered that his direct approach to feedback demoralized his employees, and he quickly needed to change. With the help of a friend who was a local himself, he learned about the culture. He found out the direct approach wasn’t favorable in a country like China, where you needed to be more indirect with your constructive feedback and vocal about the positives.
The story is a real-life story that highlights the importance of observing and learning the cultural cues of a working environment. Jens learned it the hard way. Don’t be Jens.
Develop a Feedback System That Works for Both Parties
Still following Jens’ story, he had to adapt and develop a new feedback system that works with the Chinese. He didn’t want to be insincere with himself by adopting their method, so he had to build one.
He needed a style that represented his German roots but was softer – so the Chinese employees didn’t lose motivation. Jens successfully created a hybrid that worked in that environment.
There is a popular slogan for managers who enter a new cultural setting. “Go native.” The problem with this slogan is you either overdo it or underdo it, causing more problems. The best solution is finding a hybrid that can work in the environment.
This point sounds like an easy decision, but we humans have a history of complicating matters. Practice makes perfect, but feedback in the direct direction makes it worthwhile. Getting feedback from employees can help you keep improving your feedback system. Getting their opinion will also help give better constructive feedback to your employees.
Build Good Working Relationships with the People
In the workplace, you don’t have to be friends with everyone. If both parties can duly perform their duties, that’s good enough. But you see, there is an advantage to being understood by your employees and colleagues as this helps when giving out feedback.
Having a relationship can be as easy as being approachable, asking about other people’s days, giving your employees a chance to speak if they mess up, and complimenting them on their growth and positive performance. Doing all of this creates the atmosphere of someone who wants the best for them.
Your constructive feedback is also much more receptive if they know you want to help them improve. Action speaks louder than words, so show them.
In conclusion, giving and receiving feedback across cultures can be tricky but not impossible to learn. It’s a skill that will become increasingly useful as technology gets better and connects us.
Learn how Engagedly can simplify your employee feedback process by requesting a demo with us.
Deloitte research cites culture and engagement as the top challenges for 87 percent of organizations, particularly for measuring culture and engagement effectively. Measurement of both factors, culture, and engagement, is necessary as they yield major benefits. For developing a high-performance culture fueled by engaged employees, decouple the two – culture and engagement – and see each as an individual entity with its own set of contributions.
Companies with high-performing cultures are innovative and customer-focused and meet their strategic objectives under their values. In the same way, employees who are engaged are more productive and far less likely to leave the company. Both are important and closely related, but they differ in nature, and hence, measuring a company’s culture and employee engagement requires specific metrics. Unfortunately, companies often employ the same tool to measure both. For example, when employee surveys are conducted, there is no specific questionnaire for measuring the culture and understanding level of employee engagement. Your cultural change and employee engagement programs will fail if you aren’t clear on what you are measuring.
Can any one aspect –company culture or employee engagement – thrive by itself?
Although many managers believe that employee engagement surveys alone can boost productivity, it is not so. Improving the organization’s overall culture with a higher level of employee engagement is a far better way to boost business productivity and drive growth. To simply put, employee engagement is inextricably related to the strength of the company culture.
Understanding what is Employee Engagement
An employee’s engagement has to do with how employees feel about their workplace and work culture. The healthier a company’s culture is, the easier it becomes for the employees to grasp their roles and responsibilities. Engagement leads to happier, more motivated, and more committed employees.
Engaged employees are more likely to be:
Dedicated and motivated to exceed their company’s goals.
Positive and proactive about acquiring new skills and being creative in resolving problems.
Devoted to building their careers with an organization
Engaged employees add a multitude of benefits to an organization, which include increased productivity, stronger customer relationships, and decreased turnover, to name a few.
What do stats have to say about employee engagement and culture?
The number of disengaged employees actively seeking jobs is 73 percent, compared to 37 percent of engaged employees. The culture of an organization may influence the engagement of an employee.
The productivity of high-engaged employees is 21% more.
Interestingly, looking at certain stats, it is undeniable that employee engagement is closely related to a company’s high-performing and healthy culture.
Understanding what is company culture
Simply put, company culture refers to the employees’ norms, practices, and behaviour that influence how and why certain events or actions happen in an organization.
In what ways does a high-performance culture differ from a usual company culture?
A high-performance culture focuses on following effective and workable practices and norms to drive superior employee performance in an organization.
To elaborate, it’s a culture that allows a performance-driven organization to achieve superior financial and non-financial results, with values such as better service, high employee engagement; improved client satisfaction; increased productivity, and employee retention, over a long period.
Company culture and employee engagement:how are they unique?
To differentiate between the two, think of employee engagement as focusing on an employee (or ‘I’ factor) and culture as emphasizing the whole (‘or ‘we’ factor). Therefore, the employee engagement factor has to do with how employees feel about their employer and their workplace work.
An engagement survey can make a good predictor of employee retention, as it can measure loyalty and productivity. Managerial actions or other factors can severely affect employee engagement or even hurt it quickly.
Culture, on the other hand, focuses on intrinsic company values, which are often unquantifiable and difficult to assess. An organization’s culture is, essentially, ‘the way we do things.’ Changing culture takes time and effort because it’s often deeply ingrained. Hence, to influence a company’s culture, you must engage in a long-term reform program, or you must experience a significant external change, like an acquisition or merger.
Thus, employee engagement focuses on keeping employees motivated and happy while company culture lies deeply buried within an organization based on certain values, practices, norms, and a set of beliefs. To understand each of them better, it is necessary to understand how to measure your company culture and engagement.
Why is it necessary to measure engagement and culture?
Measuring culture and employee engagement is crucial since engaged employees are directly linked to employee retention, performance, and a company’s profitability. Importantly, the measurement of company culture and employee engagement helps to understand whether employees’ engagement and commitment align with a company’s expectations and strategic objectives or not.
Most organizations adopt certain metrics to measure company culture and employee engagement. To start with any form of quantifiable measurement, understand and know where the culture stands now and what steps you have taken to create a high-performing culture.
Unlike employee engagement, culture focuses on an organization’s core values and vision, and hence, any type of off-the-shelf survey will not be effective.
How company culture and engagement are assessed differently?
Culture and engagement are not only measured for different reasons, they must also be evaluated differently. For instance, you can find out how engaged your employees are based on the scores of your employee engagement survey. Using this data, you can then determine what improvements can be made. You can compare employees’ performance to that of previous years or similar organizations to get clarity on employee engagement and performance.
On the other hand, when it comes to culture, there is no right or wrong way to respond. Based on its goals and business objectives, an organization must identify what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Viewpoints on culture differ greatly from one organization to the next. For example, the culture of a bank will differ greatly from that of a start-up.
How does company culture shape employee engagement?
High-performance company culture is directly related to employee engagement, as the culture clearly defines healthy and supportive values and behaviors. In such a culture, employees know what’s expected of them and how their environment positively influences their performance. They feel connected, involved, and supported. Owing to all these factors which build up a conducive culture, they tend to be engaged. To enhance employee engagement, begin by strengthening your company culture, and here are several methods to do so:
1. Clearly define company culture
Culture forms the heart and soul of your organization, and thus, you need a strong culture to foster strong employee engagement. To get started, the leadership team should outline:
Company’s mission, vision, and values
Employee behavior expectations
Define culture and document it as a presentation or on your Intranet system, or in an employee handbook. Make your document widely available once it has been created and follow up on your defined culture. All hands meet or virtual gatherings can be held for the same.
2. Conduct Employee Surveys
Regularly assess your organization’s culture. By doing so, you’ll:
Learn what works in your company culture and how you can improve it.
Give employees a voice and you’ll discover new ideas you might not have thought of.
3. Work on employee feedback
When you decide to engage employees’ feedback, the payoff will be immense. The employees will sense that they are helping to shape the company culture, and their engagement will increase. Communicate the actions you plan to implement based on their feedback. Hold focus groups to discuss your action plan. Encourage employees to participate in brainstorming sessions to generate ideas.
Creating a strong culture for employee engagement has its own set of challenges – more like an ebb and flow, as it is not a one-time task. For long-term value, your culture needs to be nurtured regularly and for the same, measuring culture and employee engagement is crucial. In the process, you shall understand how satisfied and committed an employee is to her job.
By offering training regular sessions, managerial encouragement, and keeping an open mind about effective workplace practices, companies can meet the expectations of employees to create a high-performance culture.
In a nutshell, employee engagement is an ongoing process and is inextricably related to company culture. Over time, you need to focus on employee needs, and then use that information to create a strong company culture.
Feedback is a very essential aspect of every organization. Most organizations these days are designed in such a way that all these different departments are interconnected and contribute to accomplishing company goals and help increase organizational productivity.
Discrimination in the workplace isn’t always overt or obvious. Sometimes, people are discriminated against more subtly, like an unfair joke or comment about their appearance. This type of discrimination, known as a microaggression, often goes over people’s heads, but it really shouldn’t. Microaggressions harm the victim’s mental health and ruin their self-esteem. Microaggressions are usually unintentional, but they cause harm nonetheless. As a business owner or manager, it’s your job to teach your employees how to recognize and avoid committing microaggressions.
What is a microaggression?
Microaggressions are actions or behaviors in the workplace that unintentionally cause harm to members of marginalized communities. They’re called ‘microaggressions’ since their individual impacts are small. But, the cumulative effect of microaggressions is large and measurable as ‘microaggressions’. Since modern people spend most of their lifetimes at work, microaggressions impact their professional lives and mental health. In extreme cases, microaggressions even damage the victim’s physical health. Deep-rooted unconscious biases against marginalized communities cause microaggressions at work. Often, the people who commit microaggressions are not aware of the damage they’re causing. They have to be informed that they’re guilty of committing microaggressions and taught how to avoid them.
Unfortunately, workplace microaggressions are highly prevalent in American workplaces. We can assume the same is true for workplaces in most other countries. Many workplace studies and researches have concluded that microaggressions in the workplace are often routine and normalized to the point that victims don’t realize they’re being discriminated against.
For example, one studyfound that women suffer significantly more microaggressions in the workplace than men do. The six most prevalent microaggressions against women were often several magnitudes more likely to happen to women than men, especially women of minority ethnic and sexual identities. For example, 36% of women’s judgment was questioned in their area of expertise versus only 27% of men. 40% of black women report having their judgment question, and 37% of lesbians reported their judgments being questioned.
Another studyrevealed that 64% of women reported daily microaggressions as workplace reality. On average, women are forced to provide greater evidence to demonstrate competence than men. Women are also x2 likelier to be misidentified for someone in a more junior position than their male colleagues.
Damages caused by microaggressions
Suffering from daily workplace microaggressions causes numerous mental health issues for employees. Employees could suffer from any of the following conditions:
Microaggressions in the workplace can even impact employees after they’ve left their workplace. An individual might be less likely to apply to new jobs for fear of rejection or differential treatment because of their name or ethnicity. The result is decreased talent and declining employee productivity for companies.
Workplace engagement is likely to decline because of microaggressions. Employees that frequently suffer from microaggressions may become less willing to speak during meetings or actively participate in the company. They could also lose motivation and struggle to maintain their sense of purpose in your organization. For this reason, appropriately responding to microaggressions is vital for a company to maintain morale.
There are multiple microaggression types. The most common ones are :
Microassaults
Microinsults
Microinvalidations
Each microaggression type causes different damage to the victim. Some microaggression types can cause significantly greater damage than others to specific people.
Microassaults
Microassaults consist of intentional overt discrimination against a marginalized group. Common microassaults include putting-down someone, belittling them, or bullying them. A specific example of a microassault could be carving a racial epithet into a wall or posting historically offensive symbols and flags, like the American Confederate flag or Swastikas. Microassaults also include slurs against people because of their religion or sexuality. Microassaults actively cause damage to peoples’ self-esteem because of their overt nature. Micro assaults are easy to detect, but they’re often considered harmless jokes in a workplace.
A microinsult is when a marginalized community member receives a compliment that secretly insults their demographic group. The most common microinsult is to contrast the victim positively against a negative stereotype associated with their demographic. Microinsults are disguised as compliments, and they may be genuine from the person providing them. Yet, they are a microaggression because they reinforce the stereotypical image of the victim’s demographic. Microinsults imply that the victim’s demographic is a negative entity, with the victim’s positive attributes being an exception to the norm. An example of a microaggression is judging female business leaders as ‘harsh’ for speaking with authority. Another type of microinsult is when a professional is favored or discriminated against for choosing an occupation not traditionally associated with their demographic. For example, a female fighter pilot or a male nurse.
Microinvalidations
Microinvalidations are behaviors or words that invalidate the experiences and opinions of others because of their background. Most often, microinvalidations are expressed against members of historically disadvantaged groups. The target will typically be dismissed, discredited, and even be laughed at because of their divergent experiences and opinions. A specific example of a microinvalidation would be for an ethnic majority person to say ‘I don’t see color’ to a colleague from a minority ethnic background who’s complaining of workplace racism. This action is a microinvalidation because it denies that an ethnic minority may have different experiences from the ethnic majority. Microinvalidations are harmful since they delegitimize minority concerns.
Different forms of microaggression
Microaggressions occur in different forms:
Verbal
Verbal microaggressions involve comments or questions about minority members that hurt their self-respect or identity. An example of a verbal microaggression would be saying, “You’re so smart for a woman.”. This phrase is a clear microinsult.
Behavioral
Behavioral microaggression consists of non-verbal actions that imply certain people are inferior. An example of a behavioral microaggression would be a bartender serving a cis-person before serving a trans-person, despite waiting longer. This action is a microaggression because it involves treating the trans-person unfairly compared to the cis-person.
Environmental
Environmental microaggressions involve subtle discrimination against minorities. An example of an environmental microaggression is naming college campus buildings after members of the ethnic majority, despite no lack of relevant minority figures.
Microaggressions in the workplace are common. In any workplace, you’ll find people discriminated against for their race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and other demographies. For example, a 2018 Kansas State University studyfound that 73% of women in STEM fields were sexually objectified at least once.
Other common examples of microaggressions include:
Treating someone as an inferior citizen because of their background.
Offering backhanded compliments to people born outside the U.S. for their English language fluency.
Telling underweight people to eat more
Making assumptions about people because of their age or religion.
Refusing to use a trans-person’s preferred pronouns.
Underrepresenting people of different demographic backgrounds in the media.
Refusing to accept stereotypical or derogatory sports teams’ names as problematic.
Using insults that involve accusing an individual from one group of stereotypically acting like a different group’s member.
Assigning value to people based on their demographic origin.
How to combat workplace microaggressions?
Businesses need to prevent workplace microaggressions to maximize employee satisfaction and productivity. Refusing to prevent microaggressions in the workplace damages employee morale and mental health and harms organizational efficiency. Thankfully, there are several ways to combat workplace microaggressions actively.
Promote Actionable Awareness
Most microaggressions are not intentional. Instead, microaggressions result from either ignorance or subconscious biases. As such, organizations need to proactively raise awareness of microaggressions and inform employees of the microaggressions they commit. Your organization should actively provide employees with workplace instruction on what actions constitute workplace microaggression. They should also know why to avoid it.
It’s also important to consult employees who suffer from microaggressions about their experiences and empower them to bring attention to their problems. Educating employees about microaggressions is necessarily a communal effort that will involve your entire company to be effective.
Facilitate Respectful Dialogue
Microaggressions are an emotional matter that requires the sensitivity to resolve. When bringing up microaggressions with your employees, approach the subject respectfully. Remember, your job is only to facilitate conservation among your employees, not to teach how to think.
There are several ways of appropriately treating microaggressions. For example, don’t single out any demographic. Conversations about microaggressions should be broad and cover all. Encourage all demographics to discuss microaggressions, but don’t create an ‘us versus them dichotomy.
Also, don’t direct attention towards any specific individuals as that would cause workplace tensions. You want to generalize behavior and not avoid blaming any person or group.
It’s not enough to educate employees about microaggressions; you also have to penalize anyone that commits them. Ideally, you should have a safe and progressive workspace free of discrimination.
Failure to correct microaggressions is tacit acceptance of the bad behavior. Employees who frequently commit microaggressions need to know that their behavior is unacceptable. Consistency will ensure your organization has a safe and progressive work environment. You should follow this process every time:
Identify microaggression
Apply penalties
Evaluate results
Apply lessons and repeat
For example, if a male employee refers to a female manager as “bossy” for being assertive, HR should immediately explain why such language is inappropriate. HR must then examine the employee’s subsequent behavior with female managers and conclude whether his behavior has improved. If it hasn’t, you require to take additional action.
In conclusion, microaggressions are harmful to workplace productivity and employee mental health. Microaggressions consist of actions or words that often unintentionally cause harm to others. Repeated microaggressions damage workplace morale, so businesses should learn to prevent microaggressions by fostering a healthy and constructive work environment.
Learn how Engagedly can help you manage your employees better by requesting a demo from our experts.
Unconscious bias at work have become a major concern for modern workplaces. But, just what is an ‘unconscious bias’? And what does an unconscious bias mean? Quite simply, an unconscious bias is a bias that you don’t know that you have. Almost everyone likely has unconscious biases, but they cause a lot of problems in the workplace. The biggest problem with unconscious biases in the workplace is that they impact how people are treated by others.
What is unconscious bias at work?
The answer to the question, ‘what is unconscious bias?’ is that it is a set of non-conscious attitudes that a person feels about those around them. The sub-conscious attitudes aren’t necessarily coherent thoughts so much as biases that people don’t realize they have. As for how unconscious bias is formed: Most unconscious biases are deeply ingrained in people because of their social environments.
Unconscious biases affect how people think about and perceive others. Sometimes unconscious biases also affect how people emotionally feel about others or how they behave around them. For this reason, unconscious biases can cause harm in the workplace. There are many different types of unconscious biases–most relate to an individual’s own thoughts.
The most negative manifestations regarding unconscious biases are those that involve a negative emotion or stereotyping of other people. For example, an individual who has an unconscious bias against people of a different ethnic group will likely treat members of that ethnic group differently or worse in an office environment.
Unconscious biases around other people are the most dangerous, since they affect people’s behavior with others. For the rest of this article, we will mostly be referencing this form of unconscious bias since it is most relevant for modern workplaces.
Impact of unconscious bias at work
Unconscious bias harms a workplace by making it less comfortable for the people in it. Unconscious biases can directly lead to financial loss for a company and deteriorate employee experience.
Financial Loss
Unconscious biases threaten meritocracy in any firm. When there’s a high degree of unconscious bias among managers against members of certain groups, it leads to fewer people of that group applying to the company. This deduction in applicants leads directly to a loss of potential talent. There are also direct financial costs of unconscious bias.
It’s believed that US workplaces collectively lose $450 to $550 billion annually because of workplace bias, a majority of which is estimated to be unconscious bias. When employees face bias, they will tend to either leave the company or become dissatisfied. The result is a higher turnover rate and increased inefficiency. Companies can even face legal charges for demonstrating bias against employees.
Employee Experience
Unconscious bias can damage employee experience by inflicting micro-aggressions against the victim. Since unconscious biases are not deliberate, they get triggered outside of people’s control, which means unconscious biases can appear anywhere. For example, a manager would assume that an older employee does not have an interest in learning new technologies only because of their age. An older employee could feel personally attacked by such comments.
Another example could be a manager refusing to permit a younger employee to become a team leader, even if they’re the best qualified, because of a bias against younger people. These types of biases can cause a large degree of harm to employee morale over time. Some types of unconscious bias may even become systemic in an entire company or region. For example, 48% of African American women and 47% of Latin American women have reported being mistaken for administrative staff.
Employees who experience such biases actively are likely to have lower morale and higher dissatisfaction with the company. Employees with reduced morale will almost certainly contribute less to the company and have decreased productivity. One study that involved over 3,570 respondents of different racial backgrounds reported that those who experience unconscious biases were:
Now that we’ve answered the question, ‘what is unconscious bias?’, and ‘what does unconscious bias mean?’, we’ll cover how to prevent unconscious bias and combat it in your workplace.
Preventing or combating unconscious bias mostly involves teaching your workforce to recognize and eliminate their unconscious biases. Most people don’t realize they have unconscious biases, so they must be taught to do so.
Unconscious bias can’t be removed on an individual basis. Instead, it’s necessary to remove that throughout an organization. The following ways will help you successfully tackle unconscious bias at work.
1. Inform your managers and teams
The first step to removing unconscious bias from your workforce is to make them aware of it. After all, unconscious bias, by its nature, is not known to the people who possess it. Explain what stereotyping is to your employees and help them recognize their biases. By educating employees about unconscious biases, they’ll automatically recognize their own biases. Awareness training is the first step to combating biasness. The goal is awareness training is for your employees to understand and reflect that they may have demonstrated an unconscious bias in their past actions.
2. Help employees identify unconscious bias
Most of your employees will reflect immediately about whether they have any unconscious bias, but some may need a stronger push. The best way to convince all of your employees to start working on fixing their unconscious bias would be to set company-wide policy. Your employees need to know that your business is anti-biased and anti-discrimination. You can do this by inserting a diversity statement in your organization’s values. You should start using terms like ‘ diversity, equality, and inclusion’ to promote your workplace culture in favor of eliminating biases. By doing so, your employees will be motivated to work on fixing their unconscious biases.
3. Improved hiring process and career opportunities
Hiring and promotional activities are when unconscious bias is likely to be the most problematic. You need to have a company-wide policy of transparent hiring and promotion. Your employees need to feel that they’re judged only for the quality of the work they produce and not for their ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, or other demographic qualities. When hiring new employees, make sure that only their qualifications are taken into account. When considering employee promotions, it’s vital to prove to your employees that only the best performing employees receive promotions.
You’ll know that your hiring and promotional policies are appropriate when no employees will feel left out for personal reasons. Your employees need to always feel that they’re valued for the work they produce, and not what the color of their skin is. Your inclusive workplace needs to actively demonstrate to employees that your firm’s total commitment is to diversity and inclusion.
4. Establish accountability at work
Unconscious bias accusations are most commonly directed towards managers and company leaders since unconscious bias is most dangerous when directed from these people. You need to ensure that your managers and business leaders are devoid of unconscious biases against employees. It’s also extremely important to ensure that when they do commit biased actions, your managers are held accountable for them.
Your employees will respect your company more for holding managers accountable. You should have an active company policy to ensure your managers are always accountable for their actions. Doing so will help systematically eliminate unconscious bias from your organization and prevent it from ever developing again.
5. Elevate to data driven approaches
One of the best ways to eliminate unconscious bias is to set objective standards and criteria for hiring and promotional activities. By reducing the amount of judgment that managers can leverage, you’ll automatically reduce the amount of unconscious bias they can demonstrate. You should start by developing an objective and clear criteria for recruitment. Your managers should have a clear set of requirements against which to judge potential candidates.
Some companies even use ‘blind evaluations’, in which a candidate’s demographic information, including gender, remains undisclosed during the evaluation process. It’s also possible to dispense with mostly human recruitment managers in favor of having performance management software judge whether potential applicants are suitable for a position.
You can also prevent unconscious biases from growing by encouraging your employees to increase communication among themselves. Building an open and expressive work environment makes it easier for employees to interact with one another and reduce the chances of developing biases. These conversations will also help employees improve work morale and develop better relationships with one another.
The more of your organization’s members participate in such activities, the better. By opening as inclusive a dialogue as possible, your employees will have the most opportunity to eliminate their biases. Another benefit of open dialogues is that they represent an excellent opportunity for employees to bring attention to the unconscious biases they’ve experienced.
7. Making meetings inclusive
Increasing inclusivity is generally one of the best ways to reduce unconscious biases. When every employee has the chance to speak in meetings, they’ll be able to value one another better by recognizing the importance of each other’s time. You can make meetings more inclusive by ensuring that all employees speak and that all of them speak equally. Equal interaction is one of the most effective ways to ensure that your employees feel inclusive in your organization. When every employee feels listened to, it’s evidence to them that they won’t suffer from unconscious biases or prejudices in your company.
8. Train managers and staff
Formal bias training is the most effective systematic way to reduce biases from your organization. Formal unconscious bias training includes all members of an organization. Bias training will help your employees to recognize what unconscious biases are, how to spot them, and recognize the different unconscious bias types.
This training will be invaluable for raising awareness of the importance of bias training, in addition to also providing employees a way to inform you of their concerns regarding any bias they’ve already faced in your organization. Bias training will also help teach those employees who are most guilty of unconscious biases how to remove their biases.
As such, bias training is an extremely effective way to prevent unconscious biases from your organization. It’s also the best systematic way since it would target all levels of your organization.
Ultimately, almost none of your efforts will prove worthwhile unless your company properly demonstrates their commitment to preventing bias until they empower complaints. Your employees need to see upper management take appropriate action against anyone in the organization’s unconscious bias to be convinced that your organization’s actions are genuine.
You need to empower your employees’ complaints and show them that proper action will always be taken against bias. One way that you can make it easier for employees to make complaints would be to permit them to make complaints anonymously. Employees will feel more empowered when they can make complaints anonymously and without fear of retribution.
In conclusion, unconscious biases are a threat to productivity in the modern workplace. An unconscious bias is a belief of attitude held by an individual that isn’t actively thought of. Unconscious biases are problematic because they impact how people treat others. At their worst, unconscious biases result in people treating others poorly and passing them over for employment and promotional opportunities they deserve. To ensure a good organizational workflow, it’s necessary to remove unconscious bias from your organization by implementing various steps, including bias training.
Learn how Engagedly can help you reduce bias in the performance management process and help you build a progressive workplace.
A company can look really terrific from outside, but only the employees working there can understand how their work-culture is and how it affects their performance at work as well as their career growth.
Employee engagement has different meanings for different people. Some might say it means motivated employees, whereas others may insist that it refers to happy or satisfied employees.
What ideally does employee engagement mean?
Employee engagement focuses on employees’ commitment towards their work, aligned with the objectives and values of the company. Specifically, engaged employees show an interest in their work not only because they are being paid. Rather, they care about the company’s growth, as their development is linked to the company’s development.
This article focuses on whyemployee engagement is important; how it can be achieved, and its benefits.
Relationship between working environment and employee engagement
Employee engagement can be visibly noticed in a positive working environment wherein employees can perform efficiently and with freedom. According to studies, investing in such an environment leads to more engaged employees, which boosts organizational performance and profitability. For the same, it is necessary to identify the employee engagement objectives that support an employee’s overall growth.
A look at the purpose of employee engagement activities
Employee engagement activities are aimed at creating a motivated and engaged workforce. This may be accomplished by putting in place an employee-centric environment and employee engagement initiatives that will help your team.
Factors that would help foster employee engagement
The key to achieving employee engagement is to implement strategies that address the below key engagement areas:
Aligning employees with the core values of the business
Techniques to encourage employees through employee engagement activities
Different techniques for getting employees involved in their day-to-day work are as follows:
A well-thought-out hiring approach
For a company to be successful, it must first recruit and retain motivated employees. Employee evaluation should not be solely on their skills, but personality and outlook should also be given consideration. In other words, employment monotony is not suitable for someone who needs variation in his job. This is where recruiting strategy comes into play, as it ensures that only those candidates whose experience and qualifications match the job description are hired.
Introduce employee-first workplace culture
In an employee-first workplace culture, employees feel their voice is heard and respected, and they feel comfortable sharing concerns. Thus, in an employee-first culture, every employee believes that he is free to be himself at work.
When you force people to mold their personalities to suit a rigidly defined company work model, you are restricting them from contributing their unique talents, perspectives, and new ideas to the table.
We all perform the best when we’re free to be ourselves, so don’t restrict your employees, or you’ll witness a slump in their motivation and engagement levels, along with a higher attrition rate.
This would result in unnecessary or extra expenditure due to constant hiring. Therefore, understand the importance of staff engagement and keep your best people on board, since it will be beneficial to your company.
Recognize your winners through performance culture
A performance-based culture refers to the best possible employee treatment at work so that the employee performs optimally, contributing to the company’s growth. Employees should never be promoted based on favoritism; rather, an empirical evaluation of job performance should take precedence.
Clearly outlining goals and objectives for employees is one important approach to achieve this. By making performance management as open and data-driven as possible, you can ensure that all employees take a lot of interest in their job and are accountable for meeting their targets.
The tie-up of OKRs and KPIs to data points instead of ambiguous criteria allows all employees to see who is doing well and why. This way, they will have a clear idea of the parameters of employee evaluation.
Involve Your Employees
If you understand whyemployee engagement is important, you would focus on providing opportunities to all employees. This way, they would feel like they’re a part of the team, and it would help them to take on more challenging work. Present the most pressing challenges in your organization and observe the steps taken to solve them. Consider involving your employees in planning ahead, assessing prospects, and improving company strategy.
Embrace Flexibility when it comes to working hours
Long hours in the workplace are no longer a sign of a dedicated, engaged worker. True involvement entails doing meaningful, intelligent work. An effective way to increase productivity is often to allow more freedom during the workweek. Which makes sense: 10 hours of 70 percent performance or eight hours of 100 percent performance?
Create a flexible work environment that promotes effective, focused work rather than useless busy work style. Flexible work hours, remote work, holiday entitlements, and sabbaticals are ways to provide flexibility to your employees.
Understand what flexibility means to your employees: it might vary from person to person.
Investment in regular training
Spend on your employees’ professional growth through training to create a team of empowered people who will enthusiastically put their newfound talents to the test.
Ensure that you have the right tools in place to make learning enjoyable and accessible. Consider deploying the latest training technologies to show your employees that you’re eager to invest in their ongoing learning and development.
Developing thorough training programs is important not just for keeping employees interested and involved in their jobs, but they also yield positive outcomes. According to a recent study, businesses that offer in-depth training programs earn a 24 percent higher profit margin and their per-employee income increases by 218 percent.
Although training and development programs require an initial investment, continuing to invest in an employee’s growth yields significant returns.
It is critical that you foster a working atmosphere in which employees feel free to share their views, strategies, and methods of working, without any fear of judgment or retaliation. It’s really bothersome to have an idea disregarded, without due evaluation or respect for its virtues. Hence, always encourage them to discuss their ideas and recommendations. These discussions will keep you informed about what’s going on at work. Thus, the importance of work engagement based on the values of open communication has a direct impact on productivity.
Constant feedback mechanism
In the Harvard Business Review, it was found that 57 percent of respondents preferred positive and productive feedback over praise and recognition (compared to 43 percent).
Put employee feedback on the top of your priority list. Think about how you can respond positively quickly to your employees’ ideas and views. Owing to this, employees’ feedback will not be restricted only to the appraisal period.
Encourage employees to express themselves when it comes to problem-solving. Create a secure environment where employees feel free to share feedback anonymously or non-anonymously. Use tools like pulse surveys and anonymous feedback platforms.
Appreciate personal achievements
Employees will be less engaged if they believe their employer does not recognize or appreciate their accomplishments.
This helps the team to consistently accomplish extraordinary feats and come up with brilliant ideas. Also, recognizing and celebrating employees’ accomplishments instill a collective sense of purpose in the team.
Competitive and timely payment process
Competitive salary and timely payment go a long way toward retaining the best employees and attracting potential talents.
Benefits of employee engagement
We have understood why employeeengagement is important and techniques to build strong employee engagement. Now, let us explore some of the benefits of employee engagement.
Boosts productivity
It goes without saying that engaged employees mean higher efficiency. The reason being, engaged employees like their job and find it meaningful. A motivated employee will work harder, quicker, and with more enthusiasm. Employees who are satisfied are more productive than those who are dissatisfied. Evidently, a Gallup survey found that workplaces with a high level of engagement had a 41% reduction in absenteeism. Hence, an engaged employee will be less absent from work, which is a significant boost to production.
Retention of top performers
According to a Gallup poll conducted in 2017, 51% of employees want to quit their present employment. Lack of acknowledgment, internal office problems, and a lack of pay raise are some of the causes.
Employees come to work with a set of expectations and aspirations. And if you don’t supply them, they’ll start hunting for better alternatives. Retaining your best employees ensures that the company maintains a positive culture, and it also saves money. A study indicates that replacing an employee costs 33% of their annual income, not to mention the difficulty and discomfort of having to train a new recruit.
As a result, engaging employees, who generally tend to be happy with their work, lower the cost of turnover while also increasing retention.
Employees who are enthusiastic about their job are often easy to deal with. However, it’s not because they’re happier or more upbeat but they showcase a high-engagement workplace culture.
Engaged employees, in theory, live your organization’s core values every day at the workplace and are acknowledged and appreciated for it. Celebrating your most enthusiastic and valued employees is one step toward fostering an engagement culture.
Improved employer loyalty
Employers are more likely to stick around if you focus on the values and importance of staff engagement. This results in a high rate of employee retention and a low cost of employee turnover.
Employees who show low levels of engagement and disinterest in their work are likely to hop over to another job as when an opportunity strikes. Even if your employees aren’t seeking a new job, it doesn’t imply they won’t take a better offer. Employees will stick around longer if they care about their employment and the organization they work for.
Profitability
Increasing employee engagement will result in increased income. The findings of Aon’s 2018 global engagement report are intriguing, which indicates that every 5 point increase in engagement translates to a 3% rise in earning. When employees are enthusiastic about their work, they are more likely to go the extra mile to get a job done.
Thus, if you retain employees, it would increase productivity and boost sales. Consequently, it makes complete sense that your profits will rise significantly too.
All-in-all, it is essential to reinvest time and money into increasing employee engagement, as the long-term economic benefits are well worth it.
Happy employees turn brand advocates
When employees feel satisfied with their work, they show interest and enthusiasm in their workplace. They also exhibit a high level of engagement, which can be evident in their increased contribution to work. They relate with their performance and the company they work for. This results in their overall happiness with the job, which can be the best factor for company culture, productivity, etc.
Essentially, highly engaged employees become your brand advocates. That is, employees turn into the most trusted voice of your company. They knowingly or unknowingly promote your company through word-of-mouth marketing and social media posts, with an emphasis on the company’s goodness.
Employee engagement is crucial for organizations globally. It helps in improving employee productivity and benefits the organization in the long run. In this post-pandemic era, where most of the employees are still working from home, employee engagement should be a core part of business strategy.
Learn how Engagedly can help you improve employee engagement by requesting us for a demo.
Many companies consider peer-reviews a critical element of the employee performance evaluation process. This is because employees work closely with each other and have a better understanding of their peers’ performance.
Furthermore, an employee peer review process acts as a mechanism of holding each other accountable, along with gaining useful feedback. We shall discuss peer-to-peer performance review in this article and its benefits of it.
What is an employee peer review process?
The term employee peer review refers to a process that involves colleagues assessing each other’s work capability and performance. During the peer performance evaluation, managers typically hand over a peer review form to all employees to anonymously fill out the information about their colleague’s performance. The anonymous nature of the processallows employeesto express theirhonest opinions aboutcolleagues.
Though manymethods exist for employee peer reviews, organizations may opt for a ‘peer-to-peer performance review model’ that integrates all approaches or may choose only those they deem relevant. The usual popular peer-to-peer performance review approaches are as follows:
Simple Review:
In this type of methodology, comments are sought from employees about their colleagues’ contributions and accomplishments. Usually, employees are approached either privately or with a group, and relevant information is gathered from those discussions or interviews.
As a general practice, feedback providers, peers, in this case, keep their identities anonymous. In some cases, however, an individual’s identity can be disclosed when the employee peer review is communicated directly to the employee being reviewed, but not to his supervisor.
Inspection:
This methodology is an elaborate and detailed version of a simple review. It demands both time and resources, wherein inspections happen in phases that all employees must complete. This practice is usually adopted when the purpose of the peer performance evaluation is to precisely determine the weaknesses or limitations of an employee being evaluated.
Team Reviews:
During this process, a panel or group makes an evaluation of each employee individually. The panel and employee often discuss the employee’s assessment together and reach a consensus.
How does an employee peer review process improve performance at the workplace?
Since the peer-to-peer performance review process serves as a reliable technique to fetch honest opinions about your colleague’s performance, the process can render a better understanding of an employee’s strengths and weaknesses. For instance, you may not be aware of your certain habits and behavior at the workplace – which may be good or bad, but any observation from a colleague will allow you to continue your positive behavior and improve on your negative ones.
Can the process be overwhelming for employees?
Employee peer-review process can turn out to be stressful for certain employees when it comes to offering colleagues’ feedback, as they may dwell on the colleague’s reactions after the review process. However, employees should try to give constructive frank inputs instead of mere criticism, keeping their personal feelings aside. Essentially,every employee has room for improvement, and through peer performance evaluation, you are helping your peersto assess and work on their areas of weakness.
An organization’s employee peer review process will be mainly dependent on an employees’ responsibilities. In the field ofsoftware development, many employees may be part of the peer-to-peer performance review process.This ensures that the software or application has gone through multiple reviews before its launch.
In thefield of copy-writing, editing, and publishing, a write-up is edited by SMEs and editors before being published. In such a case, a different peer review process will be required, focused on an individual’s performance and flawless completion of writing and editing work.
All in all, there is no fixed peer-review approach or one-size-fits-all peer review process for all employees. It is entirely up to top management and depends on the industry and the organization.
Role of employee peer review process in performance management assessment
Let us have a brief look at how different performance review processes occur and why an employee peer-review process is an inalienable part of the employee performance management process.
Supervisor/manager review:
In supervisor’s reviews, the final outcome is more important than the process itself. Hence, it is incomplete and has its own set of flaws.
Employee’s direct report:
Reviewing an employee based exclusively on direct reports, after having a conversation with an employee, may again be an incomplete assessment. The reason is that all information you’ll receive will be subjective, based on an employee’s assumptions.
Client’s feedback:
Relying solely on a client’s feedback gives you only an impression of how an employee works on their problem-solving skills.
Peer to peer performance review process:
Employee peer-review process will enable you to analyze an employee’s personality, correlated to his interactions with his peers.
This single reason makes employee peer review an indispensable part of the whole employee performance management process.
One of the key benefits of peer review programs is that they lighten the workload of managers andsupervisors. Furthermore, an employee peer-review process has multiple benefits that go far beyond easing managers’ workloads.
In-depth evaluation
A manager may be excellent at assessing his employees, but he is likely to overlook key performance insights during a manager’s feedback process, as he may already have a set of notions of an employee.
Employees behave differently in front of their supervisors than they do in front of their peers, even in the best of work environments. Consequently, managers cannot entirely rely on the information presented by the employee. The peer-to-peer performance review process allows employee assessments to be conducted in a more objective manner, allowing a deeper look into the employee’s strengths, weaknesses, and capabilities.
Holistic Employee Reviews
A performance reviewbased solely on the output and financial results of a company is meaningless. By identifying gaps in performance that may have gone unnoticed, peer reviews offer you the opportunity to address an employee’s shortcomings. Having constructive feedback will allow an employee to concentrate on the areas of improvement and ideally receive support to do so.
In addition to evaluating whether your business processes are still relevant and efficient, peer reviews help determine if it needs any adjustment. They can also point out changes that the organizational structure needs.
By comparing the peer review process to the company’s objectives, you get a deeper understanding of the relationship between the quality of the work and the results. Also, a look at performance data by role and/or team can reveal insights into performance gaps in a business.
Improves teamwork
The most successful way of motivating employees to enhance their performance is by building a strong team and cohesive team. Including the peer review process in your team-building exercises can maximize its benefits. If peers contribute to employee bonding through the employee peer review process, this can have a positive impact on employee performance.
One of the best ways to support collaboration and teamwork within an organization is through a peer-to-peer review process linked to performance appraisals, rewards, and recognition for employees.
How to conduct employee peer reviews effectively?
A sloppy review process wastes time, effort, money, energy, and resources. As a consequence, a peer review mechanism becomes inefficient. Hence, you must ensure that your employee peer review mechanism is reliable, practical, efficient, and comprehensive. Here’s how to go about doing it.
Choosing Peers thoughtfully
Select peers carefully for the employee peer review process so that they may provide an accurate picture of an employee’s strengths and weaknesses. These findings will help managers to build training and development programs, tailored specifically to the requirements of each employee.
Further, based on the peer review, a one-on-one meeting can be arranged with an employee to discussthefeedback. In this discussion, the managers can work with an employee to set realistic goals, aligned with the company’s objectives.
Peer appraisals may also aid managers in spotting hidden talent, such as the underappreciated heroes who consistently deliver excellent work while going unnoticed.
Identify and align core values
In an employee peer review process, you’d elicit feedback from employees regarding their teammates. But if you don’t know their colleagues’ core values, you won’t have specific answers to enhance their performance and capabilities. Thus, you’ll just be wasting your time and the peer review process will be ineffective.
As an example, think of an IT/softwarecompany where an employee’s work quality, smartness, and dynamism are highly prized. In such a case, the company’s core values should be based on the abovequalities. So, it makes sense to search for the same attributes in your company’s top performers through the peer-review process.
Don’t be afraid to use and experiment with new technologies
In order to gather feedback from employees about their peers, you don’t have to rely entirely on conventional approaches. Employees often use social media for work-related purposes these days. Your employee peer review system may also integrate the use of social media and other comparable technology resources.
Peer-to-peer performance review processes may be made more efficient by using intranet or software that streamlines the review process while still eliciting important information and ratings from employees.
Take a pro-employee stance
Employees in certain workplaces worry aboutthe mere mention of the term peer review. They may feel uncomfortable and become extra cautious of anything linked to a review’s conduct.
In certain cases, employees may see the task of evaluating or assessing a co-employee as an unnecessary element of their job. They may react in this manner assuming that it would affect their future or their relationship with their colleagues.
This is when a manager has to play a vital role inunderstanding what scares them about the peer review process; allay their concerns regarding the peer review processand convince them that it is for the betterment of the employees.
Outline expectations
Clearly communicate the objective for the peer performance evaluationprocess to your team. Make it clear to your team that the goal of peer evaluations is to assist each other to become the finest professional versions of themselves. Encourage your team to appreciate one another as well as to provide constructive critical analysis. Employees’ motivation and dedication to their profession improves when they can identify their strengths and weaknesses.
It’s fairly uncommon for peer evaluations to incorporate a Likert scale, which allows employees to rate the performance and achievements of their peers on a range from 1 to 7. Make sure you offer a place for employees to express their own views and opinions in addition to the numerical scales. Getting detailed written comments is much more valuable than giving just a number based on their level of agreement.
Focusing on all aspects of day-to-day work activities
You may wish to concentrate on one aspect of your employees’ job performance, but try to analyze everything they would accomplish while at work. Instead of focusing just on a single project, you may talk about their day-to-day activities as well. Getting a more in-depth look into how others see their work might be very beneficial to them.
Timely and regular praise
What happens after completion of an employee peer review? If you don’t know the answer, how can you expect to encourage desirable behavior in an employee? Thus, after completion of a peer-review process, it’s crucial to follow-up.
To do a peer review now and provide accolades a year from now is counterproductive. If you wait so long, you lose a lot of relevance. Employees will be more engaged in the process if they see that their contributions are promptly and often acknowledged after a peer review process.
Peer review must begin with the creation of a well-defined and detailed peer review system. The most essential thing is to set up an employee peer review process; put it into action and keep refining it with time. Engagedly’s real time performance management software helps in implementing a scalable and efficient peer review process.
Request a demo with us to know how Engagedly can help you.
If your employees are unsatisfied in the workplace, then it doesn’t bode well for your business’s success. Luckily, there are lots of small things you can do to help your employees thrive and derive more satisfaction from their work.
What Is Employee Satisfaction?
Employee satisfaction is a measure of how happy employees are in their jobs and their work environment. It may be a simple concept, but there are lots of different elements that affect employee satisfaction.
From the type of work people do to the business culture, people’s relationship with their managers, and flexible working, there are many different things that decide whether people are happy in their work.
This is important for businesses because it affects employee performance and turnover rates. It’s costly to keep recruiting new workers and underperforming employees can hold a company back.
It’s in everyone’s best interests to create a great working environment, but how can you improve employee satisfaction?
10 Ways to Increase Employee Satisfaction in the Workplace
It’s in your power to change employee satisfaction levels. No, you probably can’t change the fundamentals of someone’s job, but there are a lot of other actions you can take to help them derive more joy from what they do.
1. Flexible Work Schedules
One of the biggest trade-offs with a job is receiving money for your time. It’s a fundamental part of most jobs, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be some flexibility.
People lead complicated lives that don’t necessarily fit a 9-5 schedule. For many businesses, it isn’t a problem to accommodate flexible work schedules.
The difficulty is, sometimes flexible work schedules create more problems than they solve. To make sure flexible work schedules are adding to employee satisfaction, they’ve got to be well implemented with intuitive employee scheduling software. Rotating shift schedules can give employees more control and responsibility for how they use their time, but only if they’re well organized.
If schedules are left to the last minute and communication is poor, then it’s going to be a source of frustration rather than employee satisfaction.
2. Don’t Micromanage
You have to give people space to get on with the job. Employees need some level of management, but they also need to know that managers trust them to get the job done.
You hire people because you believe they’re the right fit for the job, so allow them to get on with it. It’s impossible to do your best work with someone breathing down your neck, and likewise, managers have far too much going on to be checking every detail of their employee’s work.
Micromanagement is a common cause of low employee satisfaction because it gives the message that nothing the employee does is good enough.
Instead of micromanaging, place extra emphasis on your hiring process to make sure you get the right people in the first place. Then, empower people to make decisions while creating accountability.
If you communicate your expectations clearly, trust in your employees, and keep people accountable for their decisions and performance, then there isn’t a need for micromanagement.
3. Rewards and Incentives
Rewards and incentives are some of the best ways to motivate your employees and improve satisfaction. Everyone likes to feel appreciated, and there are lots of simple ways businesses can ensure this happens.
Of course, everybody likes receiving a bonus or a prize for their work, but it’s also about employers taking the time to show their gratitude. Employees get rewarded for their work through their income, but when they do exceptional work or go above and beyond, celebrate it.
As well as telling your employees they’re doing a great job, there are lots of other ways to reward your staff. You can create “employee of the month” awards, link bonuses to performance, reward “big wins” and much more.
This doesn’t have to be limited to performance either. You can reward loyalty, giving people perks for staying with your company long-term — a popular option for this is increasing PTO when people reach certain milestones.
If people don’t have the skills or knowledge they feel they need to do their job to the best of their abilities, then it’s going to affect employee satisfaction.
You hire people because you think they’re a good fit for the job, but you’ve still got to invest in giving them the tools they need to succeed. If you throw someone in on the first day without giving them the proper onboarding, then it’s natural they feel lost and out of place. A good onboarding process can ensure employees understand what’s expected of them, and can begin to adapt to their new team more quickly.
This investment shouldn’t stop once someone has adapted to the team. People have goals to continue to improve their skills and see progression in their careers. You can give them this by investing in regular training.
Not only does this give employees a sense of meaning, but it also results in more skilled workers – a win-win.
5. Prioritize Employee Health and Wellness
Many work environments aren’t naturally conducive to human health. People spend long hours looking at screens, lifting heavy objects, and doing other things we weren’t designed to do all day.
Employees need to take the initiative for their own health, but your business can easily make it easier by encouraging/subsidizing healthy habits. For example, you might introduce a free fruit bar, offer discounts on gym membership, or offer lunchtime yoga sessions.
Likewise, you can set a good precedent by encouraging regular breaks and encouraging people to make use of PTO. A healthy employee is more likely to be a happy employee, so this can have a positive impact on employee satisfaction.
6. Conduct a Job Satisfaction Survey
It’s hard to gauge employee satisfaction unless you take the time to find out. One way to assess if your policies are working is to conduct regular job satisfaction surveys.
Give people anonymity so they don’t feel restricted in what they can say, and encourage innovative ideas. The great thing about this is you don’t just get an idea of satisfaction level of your employees, but you also get insights that can improve your future policies.
If you want to learn about employee satisfaction, then the easiest way to do so is by getting information directly from your employees themselves.
As well as providing you with invaluable data, this also reinforces the idea that your employees have a voice and that you’re listening to it.
An employee satisfaction survey is an effective method to identify areas you’re successful in when it comes to employee happiness and job satisfaction and to understand what you need to improve. However, in order to get the best feedback from your employees, you need to ask the right questions.
It is important to include a mix of questions, such as:
Yes or no questions – these types are good for more broad and generic questions, in which you are looking for basic validation. For example:
Are you happy with your current role?
Do you enjoy being a member of your team?
Scaled questions – Otherwise known as a “Likert Scale Question”, these are best for asking employees to rate their level of satisfaction on a numeric basis, in order they evaluate their opinions and attitudes. For example:
Ask an employee if the strategic objectives of the organization are clear? The scale would run from 0 to 5, with 0 being “not clear” and 5 being “extremely clear”
Open-ended questions – these types of questions are used to collect any feedback or suggestions that could be too long. It enables employees to say what is on their minds and in their own words. For example:
Do you have any suggestions that would make your role more enjoyable?
8. Improve Communication
A lack of communication can be extremely frustrating for employees. Poor communication breeds uncertainty, and that’s not a recipe for employee satisfaction. Successful companies strive to keep their employees in the loop and give them the tools needed for transparent and effective communication.
Communication brings clarity, enabling employees to make better decisions and be confident they’re following best practices. When this communication breaks down, then people start pulling in different directions, and it’s not clear to employees what course of action they should be taking.
Clear communication, both top-to-bottom, and bottom-to-top, helps foster relationships and makes sure everyone is on the same page.
9. Frequent Feedback
Sometimes it’s hard to impartially judge your performance and spot areas of weakness. We rely on others to help us to improve our performance, and so we appreciate the feedback.
It’s easy to forget this when someone is doing a good job. You’re happy just to let them keep doing what they’re doing, but does the employee know this? Sometimes all it takes is to set up a quick meeting to say, “you’re doing a great job, keep it up!”
Employees have goals, and that’s a great thing for your company. It means associates can rise to become CEOs and make a real difference to a business.
However, if you’re not offering your employees a clear way to achieve these goals, then they’re going to look elsewhere. Too often, this means you lose your most talented employees to competitors who are willing to give them a chance of advancement.
If you take the time to help your employees plan their career path, invest in their success, and demonstrate that you promote from within, then this won’t be a problem. Employee satisfaction isn’t always down to what’s happening today, it’s also about the possibilities tomorrow offers.
11. Celebrate Milestones
Professional relationships might be different from personal ones, but at the end of the day, they’re still human. People still want to feel they’re a part of a team, and celebrate the big moments together.
Milestones are a great opportunity to bring people together and celebrate each other. That could be someone’s birthday or another year with the company.
Every workplace has its challenges, but milestones are a great time to bring people together. Recognize your employee’s contributions and bring a bit of joy to the group.
It’s hard to feel satisfied if you don’t feel appreciated and milestones are a great way to show appreciation for your staff.
There are actions you can take to improve employee satisfaction, and they don’t necessarily have to be big changes. Little things like taking the time to recognize your employees’ achievements, reward them for their hard work, and help their progression can make a tremendous difference.
Ultimately, it’s an investment in your business. Happy employees are more likely to thrive and stay with your business, helping to power it into the future.
With an action plan for improving employee satisfaction, it doesn’t take much to turn things around.
Want to know how Engagedly can help you improve workplace satisfaction? Request a demo today.
Saurabh Wani is a digital marketer at ZoomShift, an employee scheduling tool. He has worked as an HR Recruiter for over 2 years before moving to marketing. He loves traveling and can be seen binge-watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S when he is not working.
Employees spend a good part of their day in the workplace, making it a significant aspect of their lives. In the past, the workplace was a place to earn money to make a living and nothing more. In recent times, employee experience has become pivotal.
One of the primary reasons is that the labor market landscape is changing. Employees want more than decent pay at the workplace. They expect to see growth in their careers, learn more, and find meaning in what they do.
This article will define employee experience and look at why organizations should focus on them. We will also look at some of their benefits and tips to improve the employee experience.
What is Employee Experience?
Employee experience is how an employee perceives all that happens to them in an organization during their lifecycle. The lifecycle of an employee begins with their first interaction with the company to the day they exit the company. The life cycle comprises four primary spheres.
Recruitment
The first interaction with any company is at the recruitment stage. It is the stage where the candidate/future employee can have their first glimpse of an organization’s culture, work environment, and values. Therefore is an essential part of an employee experience.
Onboarding
The onboarding process is a vital part of the employees’ experience. Here, they undergo their induction into the organization. Different employers have their unique methods of carrying out this procedure, but the primary aim is to make sure the candidate, now turned employee, can settle down well into their new workplace.
Retention and Growth
The growth and retention part of the cycle is when the employee is already in the organization. It’s about the employer maintaining the employee satisfaction levels to stay as long as possible and assist their growth within the organization.
Exit
This stage is the last aspect of the employee cycle and the last point of interaction between the employer and employee.
At the exit interview, it’s important to note their feedback – especially the employees who were unhappy during their time in the company. Doing this will help to improve the employee experience of the organization.
The four stages will define the employee’s experience while working for an employer.
Components of Employee Experience
According to a 2017 studyby Jacob Morgan, there are three major components of an employee’s experience. These components are:
Technology at the Workplace
Technology is a part of most businesses today, with the internet providing a framework for the 21st-century workplace. Modern workplaces need to be equipped with the latest tech to improve productivity. Today, employees want features like a good user experience, up-to-date applications, and accessibility to the technology.
The Workplace Environment
The workplace environment deals with the office workplace arrangements, the design of the workplace, and infrastructure. How conducive the office is and the facilities will affect employee experience. We cannot limit the environment to only the physical workplace, as the pandemic has caused the rise of remote workers. This means employers are also in charge of maximizing the experience of remote workers.
Company Culture
Company culture tells of the business values, work-life balance, interactions among colleagues and managers. It is the most important of the three cores, as it dictates the working atmosphere of the organization.
It is necessary to focus on employee experience because it has become a key component for success in the current market. We will briefly look at three reasons to focus on employee experience.
A New Generation of Workers
As the era of baby boomers ends and the millennials form most of the labor force, the change in mindset is clear. Millennials don’t just want higher salaries, but want growth, progress, and meaning in their work. While the previous generations had few avenues to make money to survive, this generation has many options of earning money.
The invention of the internet has made it easy to make money through various means, like being a content creator, a freelancer, a freelance web developer, or starting an online business. Because of this, millennials need to know they are a part of the company. It isn’t just about earnings, but also about being fulfilled where they are working.
The best talents in the market today want to know what the companies can offer them. The move to an employee-centric market is a way for organizations to appeal to this new generation. Employee experience helps create an atmosphere of learning, improvement, and the well-being of employees. Factors they actively seek in employment.
Branding
Social media has become another pair of eyes looking at the activities of companies. A survey by Sprout Social revealed 78% of customers that had a positive experience on social media buy from them. This means the way the public perceives businesses matters.
A positive employee experience is a great way to show the public that your company is a great place to work, leading to more people patronizing you. Using social media to capture moments of a company culture that supports employee experience puts the company in the public’s good books and attracts talents.
Industry and Economic Volatility
Another reason you should concentrate on employee experience is in the end – these individuals are a company’s greatest asset. Focusing and investing in positive experiences will reinforce their stand for the company in times of uncertainty. Take, for example, the pandemic that occurred. If a company invested in their employees’ experience, it is easier to ask for their corporation. Taking a people-centric approach to achieve business goals sustains the company in the long run.
ROI Of Employee Experience
The ROI or returns on investments of employee experience are the benefits of investing in your employee. In this section, we discuss a few of them.
Increases Employee Engagement and Productivity
The same Gallup research also showed a 17% increase in employee productivity. Engaged employees are employees who feel like they are part of the organization. They invest their resources in achieving the organizational goals because they have the bigger picture of what it entails and therefore are productive.
A report by Gallup showed engaged employees (employees who have a positive experience working in the company.) show a 41% reduction in absenteeism and have 59% less employee turnover. The report supports the notion that employees with positive experiences prefer to stay in an organization and are unlikely to fake an illness to call in sick.
Attracts Talent
Attracting talents is becoming difficult because of steeper competition for them. Investing in the experience of employees is an attractive feature most candidates want. The average candidate wants to work in a company where their employees are valued.
Improves The Company’s Profits
A study by Willis Towers Watson revealed a company with a high EX (Employee experience) saw a 4% growth in revenue, 3% growth in gross profit margin in a year, and 4% increase in 3-years gross profit margin compared to companies that had low EX. In simple terms, a high correlation exists between employee experience and a company’s profit.
Another study by IBM Smarter Workforce Institute and the WorkHuman Analytics and Research Institute also came to the same conclusion. It found companies with high EX reports had almost three times the ROA (Return on assets) and twice the ROS (Return on sales) compared to companies with low EX.
Translate To Better Customer Service
Employee experience translating into customer experience isn’t a surprising one. Happy and fulfilled employees will work harder and be more productive, meaning customers will benefit from a positive employee experience.
A study review by IDU on their Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide Employee Experience Management Strategies, 2021showed that 85% of those surveyed agreed that an improved employee experience translated to improved customer experience.
Reduces Stress and Burnouts
Stress and burnouts are two of the most common occurrences at the workplace. Companies can mitigate this by investing in the well-being of the employees, which is a part of a positive employee experience. A CareerBuilder survey showed that 33% of employees reported they had high-stress levels, and a staggering 61% reported they feel burnout from their job. High-stress levels and burnouts cause employees to make mistakes, become unproductive, and harm the bottom line.
Since we have explained employee experience, why we should focus on it, and the ROI on employee experience, let’s look at some tips on improving your employees’ experience in your organization. In this section, we highlight six ways to improve your employee experience.
Create a Memorable Job Application and Onboarding Process
It is said that first impressions count. As such, the company’s first contact with a prospective employee marks the beginning of their employee experience journey. You should optimize the job application process for candidate experience as most candidates want timely information on their application progress and prefer a shorter interview process.
Onboarding is a delicate stage in an employee circle. It can easily dictate how the employee will perceive the company for the next few months. Focusing on a detailed and wholesome onboarding will help the employee experience. You can assign a mentor to learn from and direct their questions.
Take Regular Surveys and Be Open to Employee Feedback
Improving employee experience can only be done if both parties are open to suggestions. Anonymous surveys allow employees to open up about issues in the workplace. Surveys should not be the only place where an employee can give feedback, but also a suggestion box or a similar idea that allows employees to walk and give feedback.
Listening to feedback is one of two steps leaders should take. The next and most crucial step is acting on the feedback or communicating why you may not act on it at a point. The aim is to show your employees you are listening to them.
Company culture consists of the values, norms, rules, and traditions enforced by management. The thing with culture is it can evolve for the better, and who better to see that it matures than the employees who experience it daily? Company culture can’t be stagnant and should change for the better. This will lead to an improved employee experience and overall synergy in the organization.
Create a Career and Development Plan for Them
Your employees want to know you care about them. A good way to show this is by developing a structured career plan. Let them know where they will be in the next 5-10 years with the company and help guide them. You can enroll them into the right training programs, workshops, or a mentor program to improve their performance.
Equip Them with the Right Technological Tools
In our technology-driven world, having the right tools improves workforce productivity. Equipping your employees with the market standard tools sends the message of supporting them to do their best. It empowers them and the company to compete in the market or industry.
Team-Building Activities
It may sound a bit cliche to say, but it works. Organizing activities that help employees unwind and blow off some steam outside work is good for the company. Organizing game nights, panics, or dinners with employees of other departments can help break the ice between workers and improve the harmony of workers.
A study by Achievers showed 36% of employees felt a powerful reason to switch jobs was a lack of recognition. Appreciating those who deserve it by giving them credit allows the company to score some points on the employees. It can make for a pleasant experience to get recognized in front of others.
Employees prefer to be given credit on the spot as the buzz and filling of excitement dies off with time. Creating a recognition program that works will go a long way in improving your employee experience.
In conclusion, building and improving employee experience will require the full support of the management. It is not uncommon for management to look at it as a waste of investment. But it has many merits and proven research to show it is a worthwhile investment to make for a company.
Learn how Engagedly can improve employee experience by requesting a demo with us!
Self-feedback is a highly beneficial tool in the workplace. It is a form of personal feedback that managers and employees can provide to themselves. Managers can evaluate themselves and use employee feedback to create a well-rounded work environment.
The self-assessment motive suggests that people seek out tasks that lead to feedback, even if the feedback is negative.
There are several types of feedback, each having its purpose and benefits. Providing feedback during the quarter encourages accountability and ensures that employees stay on the right track.
Summative goal setting is beneficial because it usually provides a metric or grade and encourages improvement. Abstract and measurable feedback are both important aspects of a well-rounded workplace.
Self-feedback can improve office dynamics and communication between managers and their employees. It can lead to increased productivity and more effective goal-setting. Self-evaluation is a driver in realistic goals—we cannot set attainable goals without first addressing our strong points and areas we need to work on.
Feedback can be a useful benchmark to keep track of performance improvement. Even if there are no metrics to prove it, an increase in positive feedback or expressed improvement can help track employee growth.
It also encourages employees to be honest with themselves about their strengths and their weaknesses through employee feedback. You know yourself best. It is sometimes difficult to obtain an accurate read on your performance with external feedback alone.
Others may sometimes provide feedback that is inaccurate or too lenient. We cannot depend on the feedback of others alone.
Self-feedback can also increase self-awareness and encourage team-building. It is a beneficial trait as it improves communication and leadership skills. A healthy communicative environment correlates with higher sales and customer retention.
Employees’ self-review may suggest that they are a part of a department that hinders their productivity. Managers can use this employee feedback to find a solution and, in turn, increase productivity and employee satisfaction.
Understanding Self-Feedback
The self-assessment motive suggests that people want to find an accurate view of themselves. They seek tasks that result in feedback. This motive is especially relevant for adjustable traits. It does not matter if the feedback is negative or positive—people still naturally seek it.
Feedback is information about how a product or person performs, often used as a basis for improvement. There are several types of feedback that you can give verbally or in metrics.
You telling your employee that you are noticing an improvement in their teamwork is an example of verbal feedback. Compiling a report of their sales numbers from the previous years is also feedback. Sometimes, it can be in the form of asynchronous comments and suggestions.
Effective leaders provide several types of feedback for employees and themselves throughout the quarter. Formative feedback is ongoing and measures performance during the quarter. Summative feedback is provided after the fact and usually has metrics attached to it.
How It Can Help in the Workplace
Self-feedback can result in an overall more productive and positive work environment. When managers conduct self-feedback, it ensures that they are working to be effective leaders.
They can also evaluate employees’ self-feedback to determine what changes they can make to improve productivity and employee satisfaction.
It encourages accountability and can help all participants improve their self-awareness. The best leaders are self-aware and can evaluate themselves as well as they can their subordinates.
It can lead to professional development for both the individual and the company.
Evaluating yourself is an important and relatively simple task. To perform a strong self-evaluation, you should first determine how you will use this feedback. Are you turning this report in for performance reviews? Are you trying to set personal goals to be a better leader?
Then, write out your accomplishments, strengths, and weaknesses. It is helpful if you have analytics to back this up. For example, if you accomplished a certain amount of sales or received positive feedback from your employees, it is helpful to record those notes for your self-feedback.
It is important to be honest with yourself during self-evaluation—you cannot set realistic goals if you are not aware of your strengths and weaknesses. You should also determine the strengths and weaknesses of your employees.
You should then set measurable, realistic goals. Attainable goals are goals that are within reach. You should always challenge yourself, but unrealistic goals can discourage you and hinder your productivity.
You should also be asking yourself if what you are currently doing is productive toward accomplishing your goals or if you need to make changes. Realistic goals are important for productivity.
To set a realistic goal, design them to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. Don’t forget to align your feedback with your team’s goals.
Example of Self-Feedback
An example of effective self-feedback could be, “Last year, I scheduled three check-ins with all of my employees. These meetings resulted in an 8% increase in sales.”
Benefits of Self-Feedback
Self-feedback is a useful tool in the workplace for employees and superiors alike.
1. Helps Improve the Goal-Setting Process
Self-feedback solidifies goal-setting plans along with feedback from others. Evaluating yourself helps you set realistic goals and forces you to ask yourself if your current course of action is truly productive in reaching your goals.
It Encourages You to Reflect With Honesty and Leads to Self-Improvement. Being honest with yourself about your weaknesses makes it easier for you to frame them as opportunities to improve.
The Practice of Self-Feedback Can Enhance Self-Awareness. Self-awareness is the ability to understand your behavior and how it may impact others. Self-aware managers are proven to make better employers and leaders.
They are more likely to communicate effectively and make sound decisions.
Self-feedback increases self-awareness by forcing you to evaluate your strengths, weaknesses, and overall performance.
According to a study conducted by Harvard Business Review, there are two types of self-awareness: internal self-awareness and external self-awareness.
Internal self-awareness is how accurately we can view ourselves—it is how we comprehend our values, behaviors, strengths, weaknesses, and how we affect others. External self-awareness involves understanding how others view us.
Employee feedback helps managers ensure that each individual feels that they are working in a safe and productive environment.
The best leaders and employees are self-aware—self-aware individuals are often strong communicators. An increase in positive communication between managers and employees leads to a healthier work environment and, in turn, improved employee performance.
A reliable team leads to customer retention and satisfaction.
3. Helps Managers Keep Track of Their Accomplishments.
Formative self-feedback is useful for tracking your progress throughout the quarter, whether it is abstract like an attitude improvement or concrete, like an increase in retention or sales.
An example of formative self-feedback is: “I feel like I am improving my communication skills by setting up weekly one-on-one meetings with my employees.”
Summative self-feedback is a great tool to use as a summary of accomplishments and places for improvement. It often includes metrics like the number of sales, percentage increases, turnover rates, retention rates, and more.
An example of summative self-feedback is: “This year, I helped increase customer retention by 23%.”
Employee Feedback and Its Importance
When employees conduct self-feedback, it allows them to provide honest insights to managers about their team dynamic. Team-building is important and is impossible without the tools to do so.
Employee feedback is a crucial aspect of building a strong team. It also encourages employee accountability.
Finding out how employees view themselves as part of the team can help managers evaluate the team as a whole.
However, self-feedback from employees alone is not nearly as productive as when combined with constructive employer feedback.
The theory of self-assessment motive is especially relevant with employees trying to climb the ranks in their organization. They seek out approval from their fellow employees and higher-ups.
How Managers Can Use This Feedback
Using employee feedback can assist managers with filling in information gaps in their organization. It allows them to use their employee’s insight to determine several workplace elements, including assigning tasks and determining realistic timelines.
For example, if an employee’s feedback suggests that they do not feel comfortable or productive in their team, a manager can use this information to place the employee in a team that they will be able to perform best in.
The process of receiving and dissecting employee feedback can improve the communication skills of both employees and managers.
Whether it is for performance evaluations or a casual check-in, employee feedback is a crucial tool for managers to use to build a strong team.
Self-feedback is a useful tool for managers to ensure accountability and productivity. The combination of self-feedback and employee feedback is the recipe for success in a workplace. Self-feedback can also enhance self-awareness.
When managers and employees evaluate how their actions affect others, they are more mindful of their actions and the results that they have.
Check out this article from Forbes to learn more about formative feedback and communicating with purpose.
Effectively communicating feedback, both good and bad, is a crucial leadership skill to have.
Providing constructive feedback to your employees is an essential aspect of performance management. After all, if you don’t tell your employees what they’re doing wrong, how will they know what to improve? At the same time, you also have to make sure that your feedback is constructive. If your feedback isn’t constructive, it could demotivate employees and make them feel unappreciated, so it’s important to provide appropriate feedback. Don’t sweat it if you’re not sure how to do this; follow our in-depth guide on employee constructive feedback.
What is constructive feedback?
In simple terms, constructive feedback is when you identify an employee’s specific weaknesses and provide them with practical solutions to address those weaknesses. Constructive feedback is given to assist employees and correct their problems, not punish or lecture them. Constructive feedback is a supportive communication tool.
The opposite of constructive feedback is destructive feedback. Destructive feedback is when you insult and ridicule an employee for their shortcomings without providing any information they could use to improve themselves. Destructive feedback is never done with good intentions; it only causes harm to employees and results in deteriorating workplace relationships.
Constructive feedback, when done correctly, will improve workplace relationships and help employees address their problems. Destructive feedback only causes further problems, so you want to make sure you only provide constructive feedback to your employees to maximize productivity.
Benefits of constructive feedback
Providing constructive feedback will not only avoid all the problems caused by destructive feedback, but there are also numerous individual and organizational-level benefits of constructive feedback.
Improves morale
Giving constructive feedback to employees lets them know they’ve made progress, even if their current performance isn’t perfect. Just knowing that the company they work for recognizes their improvements, no matter how small, boosts employee morale.
Improved morale is decisive for consolidating company loyalty and encouraging increasing productivity. People work better when they feel they’re being taken care of, and constructive feedback helps engagement.
Some studies indicate that companies that routinely provide constructive feedback have a 14.9% lower employee turnover rate than companies that don’t, which saves a lot of time and energy.
Improved learning
No matter what level your employees are at, there will always be new things to learn and areas to improve. Ideally, you want to facilitate and encourage as much learning as possible. Providing constructive feedback is one of the best ways to achieve this. The more detailed information you can provide to your employees, the better they can improve their work.
Entry-level candidates, especially, benefit from constructive feedback provided by experienced managers. Entry-level candidates are also least likely to understand their overall work performance or recognize how to improve themselves due to their lack of experience.
One survey revealed that 40% of workers are actively disengaged from their company when they’re not provided with any feedback from their employees. Disengaged employees have decreased productivity and higher turnover rates, so giving good constructive feedback has long-term productivity benefits for your company.
Providing constructive feedback helps create a positive and productive work culture where employees don’t feel alienated. By giving constructive feedback, your employees are encouraged to work better. When even a single employee decides to work better, it strongly affects their colleagues.
Suppose everyone in a company is focused on improving their productivity. In that case, it creates a positive work environment where employees share mutual respect and concern. Employees also find it easier to collaborate more effectively and develop better comradery.
The improvements in your company’s work culture directly impact your company’s productivity and profitability. When your employees work better and uplift one another, they produce better results for them and you.
Clarifies expectations
One of the worst things for employees is unclear about expectations. Your employees should know precisely what’s expected of them and how they should complete their jobs. The lack of clarity contributes to workplace anxiety, miscommunication, and productivity loss.
By providing constructive feedback, your employees will clearly understand how they need to do their work. When provided with this sense of direction, people can automatically adjust their performance accordingly.
Improves leadership
Managers who provide the best constructive feedback will be perceived as vastly better leaders than those who don’t. A manager willing to provide constructive feedback helps them improve their performance. Through good employee constructive feedback, employees also experience a greater sense of community and belonging in your company, boosting their willingness to invest effort.
Now that we’ve covered why you need to give the best constructive feedback, we’ll explain how to do it.
Establish trust
You need to establish an open and trusting relationship with your employees so that they respect your opinions. Your employees need to feel that you intend to help them, not hurt them. When your employees share this level of trust with you, they will be more willing to listen to your feedback and regard it as valuable.
Balance positive and negative feedback
It’s crucial to balance your positive and negative feedback to balance your advice. When your direction is balanced, your employees feel that your feedback is genuine.
When your feedback balances between positive and negative aspects, your employees learn what their problems are and how to correct them and receive encouragement.
To have a balance, you need to provide as much positive encouragement as you do critical information. You want to paint a realistic picture of your employee’s performance, one that simultaneously recognizes their achievements but also highlights their problems.
Observe, don’t interpret
The best constructive feedback is objective and quantifiable. So use as much statistical data as possible instead of relying on qualitative judgments. Also, let your employees offer their explanations and personal opinions on their performance. Doing so will allow your employees to feel a part of the process. You’ll also obtain a better understanding of their perspectives, which will make it easier, in turn, for you to give feedback.
Focusing on specific information is the most effective way to provide good feedback. Try to zoom in on as many particular issues as possible so that your employees have a concrete understanding of what they need to do.
Focusing on specific problems allows your employees to understand better what they need to do. If you provide your employees with vague or generalized information, they might become confused or misunderstand what you’re communicating.
For instance, you might want to inform an employee that their presentation skills are weak. The most effective way to do this would be to tell them of specific problems with their presentation skills, such as constant stammering, foul body language, too fast, etc.
Don’t make it personal
The best constructive feedback focuses on an employee’s actions, not their character. You need to direct your criticism to your employee’s activities and how they can improve them. Don’t make personal attacks like telling an employee that they’re lazy. Instead, inform them that they have declining productivity and you’d like to help them fix that problem.
Be timely and regular with your feedback
The best constructive feedback is provided on a timely and regular basis. Providing regular feedback helps your employees understand their performance in a given time. Predictably timed feedback session periods also make giving feedback a more systematic process, so create a regular schedule.
How not to give feedback
Alongside knowing what to do, you would also benefit from knowing what not to do.
Don’t deliver reactionary feedback, plan what you want to say
Plan employee feedback sessions carefully. Note down all the feedback you want to provide an employee before conducting their feedback meeting. Also, don’t randomly throw in information and complaints during a feedback session that you hadn’t planned to share before.
One of the worst things for an employee during a feedback session is to be bombarded with a barrage of vague complaints. Random vague complaints are not conducive to productivity because they’ll always perceive them as hostile.
Don’t talk too much, make it a conversation
Feedback sessions aren’t monologues. Don’t make the mistake of just throwing large amounts of information at your employees. Employee feedback sessions should be two-way. You need to give your employees enough opportunity to speak to you. Doing so will help management simultaneously develop a more accurate understanding of their employees’ perspectives.
Don’t make it about you, make it about their goals
One of the biggest mistakes that most managers make during a feedback session is to phrase the session around company profits and how the employees need to do more for the company. Unless they own stock in the company they work for, the odds are the average employee doesn’t care what happens to the company unless it affects them.
So focus your feedback on how your employee can improve their job and do better. People like knowing how they can improve for themselves instead of how it will help management secure a bigger bonus. Employees react better when they feel your feedback is oriented around helping them perform better.
In conclusion, providing constructive feedback to your employees is vital if you want their performance to improve. The importance of constructive criticism derives from the fact that it’s unlikely your employees will know how to improve productivity without it, but you have to provide criticism carefully. If you provide destructive criticism, your employees will take it as a personal attack, and they’ll end up leaving your company. The best way to provide constructive feedback is to balance positive and negative aspects of performance, provide objective feedback, and give employees the chance to speak back.
Engagedly can make the feedback sharing process easy for you, want to know how? Request us for a quick demo!
