Equipping Leaders With the Tools They Need to Improve Employee Experience
Workplace culture flows from all directions: bottom to top, top to bottom and inside out. However, if your C-Suite isn’t working toward a stronger employee experience for all, your employees will become disengaged, and the entire company will suffer for it. The core objectives of leadership are still the same.
Employee experience (EX) initiatives and a genuine commitment to enhancing EX is paramount. A few recent studies really speak to the importance of strong and caring leadership at companies:
- In a study by Gallup, employees shared that they are looking for leadership “who cares about them, keeps them accountable, and focuses on future excellence and career growth opportunities.”
- Business.com found that there are five core things employees want from leadership: follow through, respect, feeling heard, honesty and being valued.
- Interact Studio conducted an online survey that found that 69% of managers say they are uncomfortable communicating with their employees.
Another Gallup piece found that “employees who receive daily feedback from their manager are three times more likely to be engaged than those who receive feedback once a year or less.” The same report found that leadership alone “accounts for 70% of the variance in team engagement.” The fate of employee experience and employee engagement really does depend on actions taken by the C-Suite.
Here’s where Simpplr can help. Simpplr helps companies focus on the critical elements of EX, provides executives with the insights and visibility they need to take effective action and equips everyone in your company to engage meaningfully in their work. Simpplr does this by:
- Providing leadership with the tools to listen, and the confidence base decisions on internal data.
- Making leadership more accessible to employees.
- Offering real-time feedback so opportunities aren’t lost and corrections can be made.
This ultimately supports better decision-making and results in a stronger brand — and who doesn’t want more of those qualities?
Strengthening Your Employer’s Brand
There are plenty of good reasons to want to strengthen your employer brand, and the chief among them is to attract new talent by way of employee advocates. Competition is stiff, and top talent increasingly search for companies that value the importance of employee experience. And who better to talk all about that than current and former employees of a place?
Your C-Suite has a direct impact on how your organization is perceived by outside talent looking for a job. Popular job sites (like Glassdoor) offer an inside scoop. Here, employees of companies both look for and leave reviews on workplaces.
If your current and former employees are happy, they will act as advocates to bolster your brand by sharing their joy with friends, family and strangers, not just on job review sites, but everywhere online — particularly social channels. They become your best advertisement to attract top talent and strengthen your brand’s standing in its category.
This means employee experience is mission critical, as it can either create a solid brand perception, a foundation upon which many will base your reputation or it can slowly chip away at that reputation.
Happy employees take exceptional care of customers; we know this to be intuitively correct. Yet most companies fail to consider the flip side of this understanding — and overlooking it can prove fatal. Employees that feel little brand loyalty don’t go above and beyond for customers, and their resentment often bleeds through.
With the power of an employee-centric intranet that’s laser-focused on EX, your C-Suite will have the tools to make your company’s culture one where employees feel heard, valued and engaged.
Learning Opportunities
Empower Leadership to Actively Listen and Take Action When Necessary
Most executives know this, of course, and want to listen — but a lot of them have trouble finding the time. AI-driven technology can empower your C-Suite by aggregating employee data points and distilling actionable intelligence. But even that isn’t enough. Executives also need to be more visible.
By playing an involved part in the company and employees’ daily functions, leadership helps employees feel confident in what they’re doing — which in turn boosts productivity and engagement.
Additionally, when employees see that leadership cares, the C-Suite becomes a working part of employee teams, not an abstraction. And you can bet that distinction makes its way into reviews.
In a recent McKinsey study, “44 percent of respondents said that communication barriers cause delays or failure to complete projects, and 18 percent blame miscommunication for the loss of sales.” Today, employee communication is a two-way street. The top-down approach to internal communications is no longer effective (assuming it ever was). Today’s talent expects more focused teamwork, collaboration and interaction with leadership. With this, communications are incredibly important.
C-Suite leaders must open up the floor for two-way communications — holding space for meaningful and transparent communications between the workforce and those leading them into battle. The importance of EX can be measured by a company’s ability to share critical information with those who need it immediately, wherever employees are — breaking through interdepartmental, geographical and role-based barriers. Constant communication is how a company evolves and keeps pace with necessary changes.
Now more than ever, the global marketplace is a ‘winner takes all’ landscape. With the Simpplr platform, two-way communications are straightforward, with targeted communications that are relevant and focused on making a transparent culture happen — enabling people’s ability to flourish, wherever they work.
Simpplr is a Visionary-level sponsor of the Reworked CONNECT conference, taking place May 10-12 in Austin. To learn more and register, visit Reworked CONNECT
About the Author
Paige Leidig leads the marketing organization to drive demand for Simpplr's unified platform, products, services, and solutions. He guides all facets of the Simpplr brand from amplifying brand purpose through campaigns and activations to delivering value to customers and the market.
Connect with Paige Leidig:
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