Elevating the Employee Experience
Employee experience is shaped by the quality of the relationship and interactions they have with their managers. This should be a focus of investments in elevating the employee experience.
With the right people managing a company’s workplace, people love their jobs, customers feel connected, and everything works well.
Making a strong commitment to strengthening the relationships between managers and their reports eliminates a top cause of employee turnover. It can create a workplace that employees can’t ever imagine leaving.
Manager behavior has a lot to do with an employee’s feeling of a lack of career development opportunities or a sustainable work-life balance. The manager has a major impact on an employee’s development, work schedule and workload.
Identifying and promoting potential managers based on their ability to inspire, create trust, admit mistakes, and set others up to become their best focuses on long term outcomes and employee engagement. Engaged employees have innovative ideas, create new customers, and have entrepreneurial energy.
Managers can learn to create a compelling employee experience through training and mentorship by:
- Making performance reviews a positive experience directed toward the future.
- Encouraging conversations that invite employees to share their challenges and aspirations.
- Recognizing implicit signals of disengagement and engaging employees directly, showing concern and the desire to help.
- Ensuring employees have the time and capacity to engage in learning & development opportunities.
- Being open and responsive when employees speak up and advocate for themselves.
- Encouraging flexibility around work schedule and location to help employees achieve work-life balance.
- Initiating and prioritizing one on one conversations with employees regularly.
- Creating social experiences for remote and hybrid employees in place of having social outings as a team.
Effective managers will be able to shape the direction of their organizations. They will have happy and motivated employees seeking out new challenges and eager to make contributions. And they will know they are making a real impact in the lives of their employees by giving them purpose and direction.