Among all of the visitors who come to your enterprise, there is a specific kind of visitor to your hybrid workplace who shares an ongoing, everyday relationship with the enterprise.
This visitor is the employee. Thus, how we can maximize the employee experience at the office in 2023 will be the big topic we will be covering as you read along.
To support the upcoming insights on employee experience, we also conducted a dipstick research internally with Veris to understand what it really takes to make your employees feel the red-carpet welcome.
This blog uncovers the biggest drivers shaping the workforce of 2023 and, in turn, playing a crucial role in affecting the employees’ productivity and overall employee experience. Each driver is followed with a simple tip to help you in adopting and adapt these for your organization with ease.
#1: “Real-time” is a two-way street.
With organizations increasingly focusing on the real-time management of the clients’ and business needs, employees don’t want to be left out. The Workforce in 2023 is expecting a swift and thorough response to their issues and queries.
“As an employee, I am available on the dot when a customer requirement jumps in. No questions asked. Similarly, when I have something urgent, I want my company to respond as swiftly as I do. It’s only fair” – Nilesh, Product Management Team
Tip:
Employee listening is a rising trend that is compelling companies to use survey tools and related tech to know what their workforce wants so that they can react and address it quickly.
In fact, for HRs today, employee survey capabilities rank as one of the top priorities while measuring employee experience at the workplace.
#2: Exploring the lesser-known paths to career advancement
Employees are not just seeking new approaches on how to get work done but also a strategy on how they can advance their careers and increase satisfaction. When they can find new ways to explore and extend their existing talent, their loyalty and engagement with the organization grow.
“There are many ways in which an organization can keep us productively engaged. While our points of view on things like office policies, well-being etc., are important, how the organization helps us build our capabilities is very important. In fact, more than before, because things are only getting more competitive” (Aradhana, Product)
Tip:
This is where tech can play a big role in the organization. AI-driven career pathing technologies can help in the development of existing talent, point towards new opportunities, and make recommendations that will not only enable employees but also help leaders in their journey in coaching employees.
#3: The act of giving visibility in a digital environment is a must for your employees
Digital accessibility and connectivity don’t automatically imply visibility. It means ensuring that both the work and the individual are visible, noticed and applauded from time to time.
Managers and leaders need to make sure that they offer continuous visibility to all team members equally. This will ensure that there is clarity of job roles and evaluation and cuts out the friction among employees.
Tip:
One effective way to improve visibility and employee experience in your company is to have one-on-one and in-person meetings and discussions where employees can get a chance to participate. Team members in different working models should be motivated and told how their individual contributions matter and are accounted for.
#4: Balancing flexibility with connection works like magic in the workplace
The autonomy and flexibility offered in hybrid come at a cost to the company, that is, a lack of connection among team members. Deeper connections that help build bonds while working over a collective purpose are often harder to find.
As a result, there is always scope for smaller teams to form within larger groups with allegiance to each other than to the organization at large. While employees have benefitted from collaboration tools like Teams, Slack, Miro and many others, which have helped mitigate this concern and improve employee experience, the bottom line here is that the need for bonding goes beyond collaboration alone.
Tip:
Ensure timely planned events in the online and offline space that allow interaction with each other beyond work. Host mandatory in-person collaboration and team-building events wherein you can encourage employees to work together on a problem.
#5: Stages of the employee experience game
Given that different employees (and prospects) are at different levels of engagement with the organization, it becomes important to personalize them at each point.
There are 8 stages to an employee’s experience, starting right from attracting the right talent to onboarding, engagement and development, performance and rewards and finally, exit. To simplify this process, we are integrating these 8 stages into 5, which you can find here in our latest ebook.
Amongst these drivers that are shaping the workforce of 2023, there is an overall insight found in our research:
A heightened need for a symbiotic relationship between the workplace and the employee.
It is not just about addressing feedback or dissonance or complaints, it is also about enabling the employee to find a larger purpose within the workplace. A purpose that is composed of not just viewing the employee as an employee but also as an individual with milestones and goal-posts for growth and development.
In the next blog, we will dive deep into some learnings from Great Places to Work in 2022 that can be borrowed by a company to step up on the employee experience ladder in 2023. But if you can’t wait, feel free to download our full e-book below.
Download the full E-Book here