Meeting Employee Demands in the Workplace
The Great Resignation is unsettling, but fundamentally only by name. It poses a significant threat to organizations that make no attempt to adapt to the rapidly evolving professional environment. Adaptation, however, requires change. When looking at how, when, why, and where to make these changes, we must look at what or who is demanding them. In this case, that means the employee.
“Many are reflecting on what a quality job feels like, and nearly half are willing to quit to find one,” Gary Knight, HR department director at BSI, the national standards body of the United Kingdom, adds in an interview. “Reversing the tide in an organization requires managers who care, who engage, and who give workers a sense of purpose, inspiration, and motivation to perform. Such managers give people reason to stay.”
Gallup’s State of the American Workplace Report, meanwhile, confirms that we are working in an employee’s market. It is up to managers and companies to provide the workforce with what they want and need. Workers, the report claims, are not only seeking greater work-life balance in their jobs, but also those that offer “better personal well-being” – accomplished through the factors mentioned above, but also by providing employees with a sense of purpose and belonging.
To do so, companies “are realizing that they must pay closer attention to the moments [and experiences] that matter most when employees decide to join or remain with an organization.”
Modern Value Drivers
A September 2021 McKinsey article examining the Great Resignation revealed interesting insights between what employees want and what employers believe employees want. While some of these factors are aligned, many are more important to employees than employers think. This is especially true about feeling valued by both organization and manager, having a sense of belonging, and being able to participate in flexible work schedules. Meanwhile, employers are on the mark when valuing factors such as employee engagement – meaning they are just as important to employees as employers think.
Aligned or not, the important takeaway is this: to attract and retain top talent, employers must develop empathy for and understand their employees – then take action based on employee desires and demands.
The below factors are of critical importance to employees, which means that employers should take note, then formulate a plan of action to address each area.
Feeling Valued
When it comes to working for a company, employees prefer human-oriented experiences. This goes for work with colleagues, but especially with managers or higher-ups. Those who feel they are not receiving these interactions are likely to quit, with 54% of employees polled providing it as the reason behind their resignation.
A Sense of Purpose or Belonging
In the same survey, 51% of respondents said a lack of a feeling of belonging at work was a factor in them leaving a job.
“They want a renewed and revised sense of purpose in their work,” the report states. “They want social and interpersonal connections with their colleagues and managers. They want to feel a sense of shared identity. Yes, they want pay, benefits, and perks, but more than that they want to feel valued by their organizations and managers. They want meaningful—though not necessarily in-person—interactions, not just transactions”
Workplace Flexibility
The rise of remote and hybrid work has led to employees demanding increased flexibility from their employers. Another McKinsey report, for example, shows that 20% of employees can productively work remotely anywhere from three to five days per week.
As far as the workplace is concerned, there is no returning to full-time in-office work. Given the choice, employees would rather leave their jobs.
Employee Engagement
Always a hot topic, employee engagement is one of the areas in which employer and employee see eye to eye, with each recognizing its importance in talent attraction and retention. Engaged employees are happier and more productive. And right now, according to Gallup, only 33% of the American workforce is engaged – leaving the rest actively disengaged (16%) or “just there” (51%).
These percentages – as well as the statistics above them relating to the Great Resignation – may seem distressing; in fact, they are an opportunity.
Engaging and Retaining Talent
Once employers understand the needs of the workforce, they must begin to develop, maintain, and adapt plans for talent retention that are both ready for the present and future-proof. These plans should be fully constructed with the employee in mind – and may even call for an “employee experience” team comprised of existing members of your organizations, with HR playing a key role.
Forming an Employee Experience Team
A recent HR Morning article focused on improving employee experience in 2022 reveals that “more than 90% of employers plan to make enhancing the employee experience a top priority in 2022, according to research from Willis Towers Watson. That’s a good idea after many companies and their employees strived, but didn’t exactly thrive, since the pandemic.”
To effectively do so, organizations must put HR center stage, forming an employee experience team that is focused on the design and delivery of an organization’s employee experience. Additionally, companies would be wise to continually update the tools they use to elevate workplaces, providing employees with experiences that will keep them connected, engaged, and happy – leading to increased talent attraction and retention.
Staying Connected
As organizations develop and adapt to models of hybrid work, keeping colleagues connected to one another is of the utmost importance.
Offering employees easy, convenient, and authentic ways of staying connected with one another and your organization – not only through simple communication tools such as chat functions, but with a platform that brings the workplace into the homes of remote workers via a tech-enabled experience that replicates the workplace and makes it more accessible – wherever they are working. This leads to increased engagement, when in turn, leads to increased retention – while bettering your chances of attracting top talent.
Keeping Employees Engaged
Engaged employees are productive – and ultimately, more profitable – with another Gallup study revealing that organizations ranking “in the top quartile of engagement realize substantially better customer engagement, higher productivity, better retention, fewer accidents, and 21% higher profitability.”
Fostering a connected culture that enables employees to develop themselves in alignment with the organization is an excellent method of increasing engagement. When employees have purpose, they are willing to put in the extra effort needed for success.
Fostering Happiness
A study by Oxford University’s Saïd Business School and British multinational telecoms firm BT found “that workers are 13% more productive when happy.” And as we know, productive employees are engaged employees.
Happiness, however, is an abstract concept – even more so than engagement – and may differ from employee to employee. It may come in the form of compensation for some, for other flexibility may be key. Regardless, it is up to managers and the organization to put in the time to understand the drivers behind the individual, whether through face-to-face “coffee chats” or other methods of one-to-one communication.
Adopting Employee-First Technology
The evolving workplace requires the modernization of the teams working within it. In turn, these teams must have access to modern technology to meet ever-shifting employee needs, especially in consideration of hybrid work.
Fully integrated workplace experience platforms, such as those provided by HqO, help create a more well-rounded and holistic employee experience – and offer managers or office administrators the ability to measure the abstract, with real-time insights into employee behaviors and activity that enable organizations to make better-informed decisions when it comes to real estate investment. They also serve as talent attractors, offering potential talent seamless, convenient methods of interacting with their office spaces.
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