From our background of customer experience (CX), we approach the challenge of creating inspired, motivated employees from a rather different perspective to the traditional HR-led models in the industry. We start bottom-up.
Because whilst you may think you know the key issues to creating a great employee experience, the truth is you often don’t truly know why. And with the impact of Covid-19, there has never been a more important time to focus on how employees experience your organisation, including their expectations, as well as how Covid may have changed their definition of a great employer.
We don’t just capture employee feedback through rating scales. In fact, most of our effort is in uncovering their stories – their language, their examples, their emotion. As researchers, we’re used to capturing unstructured feedback – rather than always forcing employees to give a score or pick from a drop-down box.
We recognise that this is a different starting point from many established surveys that the HR industry use, which we also use.
Surveys do make a great job of providing a standardised structure for the high-level drivers of engagement, including elements like Trust, Quality of Life, My Manager and so on.
We’ve developed our own approach for employee engagement, whilst keeping the best from the established models that firms are used to.
Rick Harris - Customer Faithful
But this top-down approach has a problem. It’s largely pre-determined by management from the outset, and is often built to track year-on-year change across standardised questions.
We can see the appeal of doing this, especially for benchmarking against your competitors – because everyone is capturing employee experience in the same highly-structured way. But is that really the route to capturing the essence of how your workforce feels?
Our approach is simple and ideally suited to the changing times of employment during and after Covid-19.
It runs across three streams of employee feedback activity, based on design thinking principles:
1) Listening Groups – facilitated by our impartial moderators who enable employees to speak as freely as they like. We gather representation from different types of job role, office location and length of time in the organisation. This anchors the discovery phase of our work in the employee-voice - listening, capturing, distilling.
2) Employee Surveys – evolved from standard engagement surveys to provide some continuity tracking, but can also introduce some metrics and ideas we’ve learned from other industries. We have introduced some new feedback tools, built specifically with post-Covid hybrid working in mind.
3) Open Comment Boxes – wherever we ask a structured question in a survey, we also encourage employees to “tell it their way”. We usually get a huge amount of feedback in this way, which we then interpret, code and distill into themes. We’ve developed a methodology that enables this intensive task to be done in a smart, cost-effective way; a combination of AI powered software and manual interpretation.
The true beauty of this approach is that our clients still get a read on employee engagement in the traditional structure, so they can compare to previous years’ results, or against competitors or even other industries. But the distinctive benefit is that they also capture the granular, individual clues and experiences that crystallise their unique employee culture.
Why is this approach so important for employee engagement during Covid-19?
The graphic below is an example of our signature ‘Lifelines’ methodology. Built from robust academic foundations, the output of the Lifelines approach provides:
clearly defined statements that reflect what matters to employees, based on employee listening groups as well as some benchmark industry indicators too.
a breakdown of the relative importance to employees of each statement, using an employee survey that structures the feedback into easy-to-read themes.
Side-by-side comparison charts (see below), created by capturing meta-data (such as job role, pay grade and in this particular example, location of work), enabling our clients to compare responses, identify patterns and target initiatives.
Drill-down context details - our Open Comment boxes provide real-world stories behind every statistic, so clients know precisely what is driving the scores. This enables swift action to be taken, and relevant communication to support it, directly recognising issues and tackling concerns.
These graphics also include ‘traffic-light’ shading, providing at-a-glance visualisation of positive factors, alongside issues that need urgent attention.
Perhaps best of all, our clients can empower their workforce to be part of shaping not just what a ‘great place to work’ feels like, but what a ‘great employer to work for’ is - however flexibly that work environment needs to be in such uncertain times. Engaging your workforce in co-creating how jobs are designed and rewarded doesn’t just create happier employees - it supports commercial success too.