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Organizations hoping to foster a workplace culture that boosts employee engagement and talent retention often target benefit programs or social activities to improve morale. However, new Qualtrics research has uncovered some rather surprising results.
For its 2024 Employee Experience Trends Report, Qualtrics polled nearly 37,000 people in 32 countries — including more than 4,000 US employees. According to 77% of American respondents who rated their current work experiences, this year’s number one driver of employee engagement was effective customer-facing processes.
To Benjamin Granger, chief workplace psychologist and head of employee experience at Qualtrics, these results make perfect sense. When cumbersome systems break down or antiquated processes don’t work, frustration sets in — clients get annoyed, and employees bear the brunt of it.
The report predicts employee expectations will continue to soar in 2024, as workers insist on having a voice in building a better workplace experience, and balancing technology with authentic human connections is top of mind for employees, noted Granger.
“One of the conclusions we drew is that the needs of the customer are at the forefront of the minds of employees,” said Granger.
“That's not surprising to me because now that we're moving into an era of automation, digitization and technology, that's one of those few human-to-human pieces that both customers and employees really value. When people feel they have the tools they need to get their job done for their customer, that naturally drives engagement. When those things aren't working, they don't.”
For instance, he said, customer-facing employees such as call center agents, bank tellers and people working in quick-serve restaurants have a technology or digital experience in between them and their customer. “And when those systems are supposed to work but don't, and the employee deals with that over and over and over, it’s like a paper cut in the same spot. If it's ongoing, and creating frustration on the customer side, that has a downstream impact on employee engagement.”
Processes Are Great … Until They’re Not
Processes are supposed to embody how work should be done now, but for many organizations, they represent how work was locked in years ago — regardless of whether systems could be improved or not, said Heather Knuffke, a United States Air Force enterprise change manager in Punta Gorda, Florida.
“Sometimes, the processes are so endemic to the culture that hardly anyone in the organization can see where the problems are,” said Knuffke.
She notes that in most organizations, employees are the subject matter experts who know the problems and the best workarounds. “So,” she said, “from the get-go, you're putting your employees in a natural state of conflict and tension between doing what I'm supposed to do and doing what I should do to more effectively get the job done.”
She said that's where angst and other things arise, contributing to a lack of employee engagement. The further your processes are from how they should be, the more burden you're putting on the individual HR professional or business manager to resolve things themselves.
So, how do you fix this? Here are four potential avenues to consider.
1. Start by Evaluating Your Workplace Systems
Understand the actual work being done by your teams — especially those on the front line — because you can’t improve operations without first figuring out where processes fail, said Knuffke. Breaking down the basic steps employees follow helps uncover the inefficiencies and bottlenecks that lead to errors and slowdowns.
She advises not to overthink the exercise, either, because veteran leaders will find process problems everywhere they look, Knuffke said.
“There's always a better way to do things, but the most painful process problems are the ones causing choke points in your organization like turnover in your staff and getting behind on process delivery or reporting. So, they're the loudest barkers,” she explained.
“If you’re new to an organization, you might not know what all the problems are, but you can hear it in the cultural normative phrases people use.”
Related Article: A Flat Organization Is Harder to Maintain, But These People Think It's Worth It
2. Brainstorm to Resolve the Pain Points
Bringing in an external expert in business process re-engineering can help your team get down to the root process, especially if the issue is due to lagging technology, said Knuffke, who has worked on many top-down change initiatives focused on implementing new technology when legacy processes no longer worked.
In her experience, she’s discovered that most of the time, employees want to be part of the solution.
“Over and over, they said, ‘But they didn't ask me. If they had, I would've told them what this new system needs to do or which part to turn on or keep off,’” said Knuffke. “Nobody asked them because they were seen as the problem. That's the wrong way. Employees do actually know the right way; they're just trapped by the processes.”
Knuffke prefers doing an offsite intervention together with representatives from different departments.
“Company culture is deep; it’s in our language, our processes, and in the artifacts of the workplace. Bringing employees into a different environment can foster creativity and get people to unfold their arms,” she noted.
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She recommends a framework called Appreciative Inquiry, a process advocated by organizational behavior consultant David Cooperrider that follows the 4-D cycle: Discover, Dream, Design and Destiny.
“You start off discovering what works. Folks share where they’ve been successful instead of focusing on all the problems,” explained Knuffke.
From there, teams dream about what it would look like in the organization if things always worked well.
“By dreaming up that future workplace, that's where all the process problems are listed out: ‘In the future, we wouldn't have to do A, B and C — that's where those process snags and costly time things are,” she said.
Then, the team co-designs new processes: How would things work? How would information flow?
“Lay it all out and make it work for our organization in today's environment. The fourth D is destiny: Go execute. The idea is that you take the wisdom out of the people who are suffering from bad processes,” said Knuffke.
3. Support a Shift in Perspective
Process re-engineering succeeds when problems are identified and excess steps are cut out.
Knuffke recalls a recent situation where team discussions with expert consultants helped surface process problems within the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, when the group realized their legacy technology stymied its processes, preventing data flow from one department to another.
“Our formal process took time — we called them ‘swivel chair’ processes: You put data into one system, print it out, turn your chair, go to another system and type it in,” she explained.
Together with employees from a dozen departments, Knuffke’s team process-mapped 120 situations to figure out how to streamline their systems.
“We heard people say, ‘That's why you do that? We completely replicate that process over on our side. How many times are we assessing the same thing?’,” she said. “Those were some rowdy discussions. We locked people in a classroom for an entire week, and in the end, we built this vision together of what things should look like. We built a community of changemakers.”
Related Article: How Effective Process Management Can Reduce Business Risk
4. Address System Inefficiencies With Action
Granger said leaders can mitigate process problems by becoming aware of them early on. Sounds simple, but most organizations aren’t systemically measuring what employees expect or which processes aren’t working and why. When organizations do measure this, tools can be built in to send feedback to the right place.
“If it's a survey and I’m negatively rating a digital experience I use on a day-to-day basis, the organization can set up a workflow,” he explained. “There might be an FAQ readily available, or you can route employees directly to a resource to fix the problem now. If it's a bigger issue that can't get resolved immediately, it can trigger a flag to IT or to a help desk.”
Creating inner-loop workflows or a bigger outer loop proves to employees that their feedback is not going into a black hole.
Improving Processes Yields a High ROI
It’s a simple equation: When employees are happy and engaged, they drive better customer outcomes. And the opposite is also true: When processes take too long or require too much effort, engagement wears away.
“When you look at the history of employee engagement research, one of the consistent drivers of engagement was, ‘I have a clear understanding of how my role contributes to the greater mission, and I have clear expectations’. If the system between them and their customer isn’t working, that leads to a sense of learned helplessness: I am not in control of my objectives anymore, which can be demoralizing,” Granger explained.
He says his colleague Bruce Temkin often says: “If you're going to do one thing to drive your customer experience, talk to your frontline.”
“We've seen the benefits of being heard and have the data to support that. Sometimes, just having that open dialogue where employees feel they can raise an issue and close the loop, or when a manager can remove or work around those obstacles can be very therapeutic,” said Granger.
Being heard also has a positive influence on wellbeing, employee engagement and intent to stay.
“When you really listen to your people, you're communicating to them that they matter, and mattering matters to people.”
