Current State
In Brandon Hall Group‘s HCM Outlook 2024 Study, 72% of organizations rated improving the employee work experience as the top priority for future of work initiatives. 54% ranked the employee experience as the most important people strategy. Engagement is clearly still top of mind.
Complexities
Brandon Hall Group™ defines employee engagement as an outcome based on all the experiences an employee has with an organization. But there are many competing definitions of engagement and some organizations see the level of engagement simply as the result of their annual engagement survey.
The overwhelming majority of organizations — 84% — use engagement surveys to measure employee engagement. Exit interviews are inexplicably a distant runner-up at 59%. While you might uncover the factors that drove employees to leave during the exit interviews, you are only gaining insights after the damage is done. “Stay” interviews, which make much more sense because they occur while a worker is employed and still has skin in the game, are used by only 17% of organizations.
Most organizations (57%) are measuring the engagement of employees, more than one time per year according to Brandon Hall Group™ Culture Eats Strategy research. This marks a slight improvement over prior years, but not significant. With the work environment in most organizations evolving rapidly and unevenly, it’s important to be agile in assessing employee experiences. More frequent measurement – or at least deeper analysis of employee data available outside of engagement surveys – is important.
Consequences
Insufficient data (51%) presents a key challenge in gathering relevant information for enhancing the employee experience. A parallel challenge is the struggle to extract actionable insights (49% of the time) from available data. Both can be greatly impacted by more frequent assessment and leveraging technology to help with advanced analytics.
Critical Questions
- Are we evaluating employee engagement in ways that make sense relative to our business objectives and the importance of retaining and engaging talent?
- If not, how should we change the way we assess engagement?
- What are the most reliable indicators of employee engagement?
Brandon Hall Group™ POV
Here are several approaches to improve measurement of employee experience/
More frequent surveys soliciting employee feedback on their experience and point of view about any aspect of the employment experience is crucial.
- More than one-third of respondents are surveying more frequently than annually but more than half are only surveying every other year or once a year.
- Lack of data and insights is directly related to the lack of survey activity. Conducting regular, frequent, brief surveys (no more than 2 questions) often yields more actionable data and insights than an annual or bi-annual formal survey. There should be room for both approaches. The less formal, more frequent surveying can be integrated into other communication efforts, especially when they are conducted during or after a major change or initiative in the organization. Possible tactics include posting a “Question of the Week” on the company intranet or including a polling or NPS-type question in periodic emails.
- Take care, however, that you are intentionally closing the loop on feedback. When you ask employees to give you their opinion or perspective you must tell them what you are doing about that feedback. If you don’t, you will end up damaging trust in the organization and employees will be far less likely to voice their opinions when asked in the future.
Leverage AI tools to aggregate all available data (not just survey results) to give you insight into your employee experience
- Organizations collect massive amounts of data about employees on a daily basis from internet usage, email communications, performance and productivity data and everything in between. Seek out AI-driven technology that can help you aggregate all of that data to generate insights in the form of sentiment analysis and projections about the employee experience. This must be done within the data governance for your organization and should not be done without employees knowledge, of course. But handled correctly this is a huge untapped source of insight and data, the two primary barriers to building positive employee experiences at companies.
Employee Experience is an outcome of many different elements.
- Always remember that the employee experience is ultimately an outcome of many different outcomes. As such, it should be a filter on every decision being made in the business. “How does/will this affect our employees?”, is a question leaders should be including in any decision-making effort.
- Creating an employee experience/ employee value proposition scorecard and reviewing it periodically throughout the year can help keep your leadership team honest and focused on these considerations. It is important to consider because positive employee experience is directly related to positive employee engagement which has a documented impact on discretionary effort and subsequent business performance.
