Employee Experience industry useful reports – March 2024

Is yours a transformative EX organisation?

Willis Towers Watson have produced Making an Impact – Employee Experience Technology Guide - which provides some useful EX stats and ideas, and then introduces their EX platform 'Embark'.

Takeaways:

• 'Transformative EX organisations' are likely to experience +40% employee experience, +35% employee engagement, +44% organisational culture, +28% employee wellbeing - This all sounds amazing!
• And are more likely to report 2.7% higher productivity and 90% lower turnover - Which impacts upon the bottom line
• According to WTW 'transformative' means setting an employee experience strategy which is inherently linked to the business’s goals and using digitisation to embed the strategy into the lives of employees - So, people the driver and tech to support... ideal! (Gladly not the other way around.)
• Businesses can engage as many as 1,000 employees in a digital focus group at the same time - This would be rather challenging to ensure all voices are heard
• Employers can look at data from people who have left the company over the last six months - Definitely! It's vital to understand why people are leaving... don't forget that there are good and bad reasons why people leave

As the report states, 26% of organisations don't have an EX strategy at all and 35% have a basic yet undefined approach.  The business case for investment in EX should be clear by now... those that seek transformational EX are much more likely to attract and retain employees and achieve higher levels of productivity.

Link to report: https://www.wtwco.com/en-gb/insights/2021/12/making-an-impact-employee-experience-technology-guide

How to fix roadblocks to higher employee morale

HR Magazine discusses how to turn the talk into actions that really deliver results.

Takeaways:

• According to the article, just 45% of companies run quarterly employee satisfaction surveys - data is supposed to be the new gold: are your employees not worth measuring?
• 93% of survey respondent said they didn’t have instant access to results - There's plenty of 'real time' survey apps out there to support reducing the gap between taking the survey and creating those all-important action plans
• 40% of respondents said that their employee surveys were not anonymised - This can lead to either employees not completing a survey or, worse, giving artificial scores
• 'Openness and honesty shouldn’t just be on show every time you survey your employees, but be part and parcel of everything you do' - A survey should not be the only employee voice tool and it should not be the only time you openly discuss workplace issues
• 50% of employees surveyed said that they quit their jobs to get away from their line manager - Line managers need supporting to have an empathetic and impactful relationship with their teams, which is why Brand Experiences created mojo
• Only 46% of survey respondents said that the results of their surveys were communicated - So, don’t be surprised if fewer people fill it in next time

It’s simply odd that almost a half of employee survey results are not communicated. This indicates that the leadership are hiding something. Employee surveys should be a part of a wider employee voice mix – with focus groups, meet the leaders lunches, town halls etc. The results should also form part of an EX dashboard to include aspects such as sickness rates and reasoning and turnover rates and reasoning to get a fuller people picture.

Link to report: https://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/content/insights/six-ways-to-fix-the-roadblocks-to-higher-employee-morale

How unpopular are return-to-office mandates?

Pretty much weekly now we're hearing of yet another organisation demanding a full-time or close to full-time return to the office. Yahoo Finance reports this may not produce the results senior leaders expect.

Takeaways:

• Companies that issued return-to-office mandates to their employees experienced no improvement in financial performance and 99% of them saw a drop in employees’ overall job satisfaction - Most organisations exist to make a profit, so this evidence tells that bums on seats doesn't equate to better performance
• Mark Ma, University of Pittsburgh: “When you force people back to the office, which most people don't like, they react negatively to this mandate because they know they can do the job [remotely].”  - What's often missing from the return to office mandate is the 'why?
• Stephan Meier, Columbia Business School: "People can shirk their duties at the office just as effectively as they might at home." - This is very true; how do you know what employees are typing or looking at? 

What’s interesting is that many huge organisations are mandating RTO without any evidence of why. If it were proven that metrics were improved by being in the office, there would be a better case for it. In the absence of proof, employees will assume it’s all about presenteeism and will likely feel aggrieved about having control over their work taken away.

Link to report: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/unpopular-return-office-mandates-99-110000889.html