Rethinking the Employee Experience in Human-Centric Workplaces

The low unemployment rate has shifted the balance of power back to the employee. Scarcity drives demand, and the shrinking talent pool is increasingly selective.

Employees are settling for nothing less than positive work experience. And HR professionals have taken note: 83 percent of HR leaders agree that the employee experienceOpens a new window is very important to their organization’s success.

However, “employee experience” is a dangerously broad term, one easily misconstrued as meaning expensive perks and flashy offices. While cold brew on-tap and weekly happy hours are nice additions to the workplace, they do not necessarily equal a healthy, positive employee experience. In fact, without a strong foundation, these perks can erode positivity and create a culture of entitlement.

It’s important that leaders approach the employee experience as more than just perks and vacations days. The employee experience is the human experience: the thoughts, feelings, emotions, decisions and overall qualitative experience that anybody has while working at a company. It’s how someone feels, the quality of their relationships and communications and the level of performance that they are supported in achieving.

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Best-Self Management

To encourage a positive, human-centric employee experience, managers must create work environments where employees can operate at their highest potential. For employees to unlock the best versions of themselves requires leaders to integrate systems like continuous performance management. But performance outcomes are not something that can be managed directly; high performance is a byproduct of focusing on the factors that give rise to the outcomes. That requires something quite different.

Best-Self Management is the practice of encouraging employees to grow into their best selves. This means extraordinary performance, high engagement, and actual personal and professional growth, rather than bogging people down with drama, office politics and undue pressure from leadership. When managers focus on unseen motivators like finding meaning and purpose, employees are curious and open to feedback and are highly motivated and passionate about what they do. 

To create a positive employee experience, leaders must take the following steps to encourage a culture that helps people grow into the best versions of themselves. 

Also Read: 5 Reasons Your Business Needs a Workforce Scheduling SoftwareOpens a new window

Shift Mindsets From the Top

Positive employee experience is a long-term commitment that requires the support of leadership. To encourage change at all levels, founders, leadership teams and managers must first shift how they think about their people. It’s common for leaders to have a results-driven mindset, especially when the bottom line is the main concern. Facing pressure from boards and their own managers, leaders often guide with a singular goal: getting the most out of their employees.

Pressure to perform is counterproductive and does nothing to encourage a positive employee experience. Instead, it breeds stress, toxicity, and fear of failure among employees. It’s reported that 57 percentOpens a new window (Click here to read How Workplace stress leads to less productive employees) of stressed employees claim to be less productive and disengaged while at work. Disengagement leads to poor performance and dissatisfaction from both employees and leaders — and trickles down to the customer experience.

In order to cultivate high performance and engagement, leaders must shift from a “how do I get the most out of my people?” mindset to a “how do I help my people become the best versions of themselves?” Without this mindset shift, performance-driven leadership only continues to rot the roots of positive employee experience and create a cycle of stressed, disengaged employees.

Engineer a Culture of Positive Brain States

A sense of psychological safety encourages a culture of high trust and vulnerability. When employees feel comfortable giving feedback, sharing ideas and taking initiative, their experience and comfort in the workplace improve. Ensuring innovation, open communication and collaboration require giving employees the ability to take risks without fear of social or financial punishment. Employees who are scared to voice their ideas or give crucial feedback stall creativity and innovation in the workplace.

When leadership fails to address and alleviate a culture of gossip or one that lacks peer-to-peer support, the toxic culture only continues to degrade the employee experience and contribute to higher levels of turnover. In fact, a recent Harvard Business School studyOpens a new window found that 80 percent of the 60,000 employees surveyed lost work time while worrying about triggering a toxic co-worker — and 12 percent admit to leaving their jobs because of it. With a positive, safe state of mind, employees can digest, process and integrate new information. Psychological safety augments creativity and intelligence, increasing problem-solving abilities, collaboration and other benefits that drive business results.

Implement Systems and Processes to Reinforce Positivity

Positive change is an ongoing task. However, any headway with cultural or leadership changes is rendered ineffective unless accompanied by the correct tools, systems, and processes. That means leadership must take the initiative to schedule and implement a culture of continuous feedback.

While continuous feedback is unique to each organization, weekly check-ins with thoughtful guidelines to carry the discussion are a good first step. Then comes scheduling quality self-reviews that will switch people into a growth mindset. By turning inward, employees get intentional about the job that they want to have, the impact they want to have on the company and how their unique strengths tie into those goals.

Continuous feedback is impossible without an efficient means of scheduling and preparation beyond calendar invites and emails. Modern performance management systems not only boost employee performance but allow all parties involved access to automated scheduling systems, streamlined guidelines for meetings, digital methods of conversation and the integration of objective-based performance.

A quality platform will also help create a seamless process when rolling out company-wide. Many offer integration capabilities with common business applications, like Slack, Namely and BambooHR. With the right system, the aforementioned Best-Self Management becomes an automated process, not one left to human decisions and forgetfulness.

While the technology requires an initial investment, there is a large financial motivation behind a positive employee experience. Consider the employee lifetime valueOpens a new window  (Click here to read How to understand the ROI of investing in People) (ELTV) metric, where a positive employee experience directly increases an employee’s net value to the organization. Low turnover and longer tenures can not only save companies significant sums of money, but these factors also create environments people want to join as new employees

The Benefits of a Positive Employee Experience

When workers strive to become their best selves, they can truly thrive and use their unique strengths and talents to produce results that support the growth of the business that they believe in. If all of this is done right, companies can enjoy uncommon levels of loyalty, determination, and passion from their employees. Leaders will realize a culture of low drama and spend time-solving business problems, not people problems.

Exciting things happen when leadership takes initiative to encourage a positive employee experience. By fostering a positive environment for their people, leaders create an employee experience that attracts — and keeps — the best talent.