The employee experience is even more important (and potentially elusive) today than ever before. As more employees work from home; the lines of home responsibilities and work responsibilities continue to blur leaving employers to scramble on how to engage, retain and develop their employees.
The pandemic has added new dynamics to the work-from-home environment, too – childcare, home-schooling, workspace privacy, inadequate technology, and even a challenge on utilizing new skills.
The pressures of staying on top of the job while managing personal life have become one and the same giving employees an equal challenge on how to engage and perform. Click To TweetEmployers need to recognize this change, show empathy and extra effort toward connecting and recognizing challenges faced by employees during this time, and remain flexible in helping employees cope with their new work arrangements.
One solution to this new challenge is to provide employees with customer-grade experiences at every step of their work (and life) journey.
If every interaction we had with employees was as satisfying and uplifting as hitting the ‘process my order’ button on Amazon, think how high employee engagement would soar, along with many aspects of business imperatives.
Providing online tools such as skills inventories, career mapping, peer and manager recognition tools can all be interactive solutions that allow us to design for the very experiences we want to provide to employees. The more intuitive our solutions, the more employees will see their employer truly understands their work (and life) needs.
Another solution is reinventing learning and development interactions and opportunities. Creating mentor circles or project chat channels and even learning chums are all interactions an employee associates with their employer.
The employee experience should be genuine, intuitive, and personal and applying non-traditional ways to learn and develop will have employees feeling recognized as an individual and not just an employee.
Taking their unique situation (home environment, skills, role, performance, tenure) into consideration during these interactions propels employees to do well in both home and organizational life.
Think of the employee life experience as a set of holistic processes. Every interaction with an employee counts toward the end goal, bolstered by an attitude of inclusivity. Meeting an employee where they are now, especially in today’s challenging working environment will only serve to improve their experience and building company success.
