Three Tips to Improve Your Company Culture That You Can Start Today
A common conversation topic I have with HR teams is that while they want to enhance employee engagement and culture, there are 10 other things consuming their day-to-day. I can relate and start off each day with a list of “must-to-dos” and “want-to-dos”. I often don’t make my "want- to-do" list.
As a result, HR groups create grand schemes designed for all but, in many cases, satisfy few. Senior leadership may be happy to see programs in place, however employees don’t feel the impact of the program. HR’s heart is in the right place, but everyone ends up feeling blah.
What’s missing in this discussion is how to genuinely enhance the employee experience.
You should engage your employee just as you would engage your customer. You can do this by:
- Being authentic
- Being transparent
- Being committed to the enhancing the employee’s experience
Authenticity
Authenticity is a challenge in employee engagement. Perhaps it’s my NJ upbringing that I can be skeptical of people’s motivations. The thing is that when we are authentic, people see it and feel it. The goal is to recognize that in today’s corporate cultures, genuine displays of appreciation work.
Yes, tools like ours may remind a manager to give feedback. Yet it’s up to the manager to deliver a personalized and relevant message. Those moments of a person taking time to clearly communicate the impact of their work matters. We’ve also noticed that helping leaders acknowledge all employees raises the culture for everyone.
Transparency
Transparency is always a great policy to have. The trend we are seeing is to take it to the next level. All parties involved must understand how the policy works and must also understand the potential it offers for employee engagement and satisfaction.
Dropping the veil on programs is sincere and provides a tool for executive level managers to draw a correlation between employee engagement/satisfaction.
Is a certain manager losing employees at a greater rate than the others? Maybe it has something to do with their ability to engage with their team. The transparency here is to help managers out early. Rather than wait for an issue to pop up, proactively coach managers how to be effective. And tools like ours can coach and nudge using our algorithms that serve like managerial assistants.
Employee Experience
Celebrate your employees’ journey from hiring to retiring. Give them a great welcome, celebrate milestones, and provide frequent praise and feedback on how they are aligning with your organization's values.
A key to success is to be committed to the employee experience. From evaluating and working with our customers we’ve noticed that the traditional “rank and yank” type of management is not only a headwind on the employee experience. It is more often than not counterproductive. What is being sacrificed here is the opportunity to lift the team up and praise someone immediately for a key accomplishment. Working extra hard to meet that deadline is often forgotten by the time the review process comes around which results in a mindset that, in the words of the classic movie Office Space ,“makes someone work just hard enough not to get fired.”
So many organizations worry about low employee satisfaction scores and employees who leave for the better opportunity, which is rooted from a dissatisfaction with their current situation, that they rarely stop to think about the personal experience opportunities they have right at hand.
Parting Thoughts
The best chance to keeping great staff is by making them happy and the best way to make them happy is by engagement, transparency and commitment to their employee experience.
