The Top Five Innovating Factors Companies Have In Common

If your sights are set on continuous innovation and implementing new but ever-changing technology, then it is critical for your business to attract and retain valuable employees. In our previous blog 5 Things Most Innovative Companies Have In Common, we discuss the importance of encouraging and rewarding employees for taking part in the broader workplace culture and sharing their ideas. Furthermore, when preparing for the future of work and assessing your company’s readiness for artificial intelligence, educating and training employees is key to the continued success of your company. In order to maximize these efforts, it is important that the business put in equal effort to keep these employees. This is why creating a positive employee experience is imperative. In a global 2018 study conducted by ServiceNow, 83% of the CHROs surveyed emphasized that a positive employee experience is crucial to organizational success.

Favor a Holistic Approach

Just like implementing the agile methodology, creating an engaging employee experience requires a holistic approach. This means dissolving the focus on department specific responsibilities and encouraging the crossing of functions. Instead of looking for perspectives from people in the right roles, there should be open communication from employees that have the deepest insight into an issue. Implementing this approach will help people feel connected to the company in a big picture way and generate more holistic solutions to problems across the company. Workplace collaboration leads to more engaged employees, better retention of talent, easier attraction of talent, and even better profitability for the company overall. RedThread Research studied how progressive organizations create a positive employee experience and broke down their results into four levers, much like a four-layer cake. These insights reveal a closer look at what makes a successful holistic employee experience.

The Four Levers of Employee Experience

The four levers to a holistic employee experience are a clear philosophy, a supportive culture, an articulated accountability, and an aligned measurement approach. Having a clear workplace philosophy means identifying a target audience and clearly defining your employee experience and its relationship to employee engagement. Supportive cultures include employee-centric values and beliefs that reinforce positive behaviors like collaboration, transparency, psychological safety, alignment, and feedback sharing. Articulated accountability distributes the responsibility for the employee experience strategy and other large-scale issues across senior leaders. Taking an aligned measurement approach means considering the organization’s data analytics maturity and having a clear data analytics strategy aligned to key business metrics. According to RedThread Research, “these four layers build on each other to create an experience that compels, engages, and satisfies employees.”

A clear philosophy is the base of a holistic employee experience. It is important to understand the definition of the term employee experience, which is the employee’s collective perceptions of their interactions with the organization from the emotional to functional level. Outlining how your employee experience leads to better employee engagement is an important aspect of your strategy.
Next, the supportive culture values employee insights and expertise. The perspective of employees provides valuable first-hand feedback for the success of the overall business across departments. For productive feedback to take place, employees must feel comfortable sharing their opinions and ideas.
Then, articulated accountability makes senior leaders responsible for large-scale issues while direct managers should effectively respond to employee feedback. The role of HR is important to coordinate and share responsibility across all functions.
At the top of the layers is aligned measurement. Mature data analytics capabilities and paying attention to specific outcomes will help your business effectively implement a positive employee experience.

Creating a workplace culture that promotes a positive employee experience does not require a complete overhaul of your policies or an expensive price tag. Engaged employees means more successful processes and increased innovation for your business. Employee engagement technology provides structured collaboration opportunities to encourage and organize employee feedback. This creates a culture of transparency with solution-oriented collaboration that will motivate employee participation. It is important to collect, understand, and act on feedback in order for real and substantive change to take place across your organization. Consult Planbox’s Employee Engagement Software brochure, and learn how you can provide your own workforce with an engaging platform that enables transparency, constructive dialogue and solution-oriented collaboration.

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Fostering Employee Engagement: Let Your Employees Have their Cake and Eat it Too