As companies do more with less, it’s key to listen to your employees to ensure burnout doesn't drive them and your customers away.
Your favorite restaurant is now closed Mondays and Tuesdays due to staff shortages. There’s not enough manpower to execute your carefully planned summer campaign. High turnover gets in the way of product development.
COVID, the Great Resignation (50-75% higher turnover compared to pre-pandemic levels), and now a new recession are forcing companies to do more with less. It takes a company 18% longer to fill a role today, in comparison to right before COVID hit.
One thing is clear: employees’ morale is lower and turnover is higher. According to a Gartner survey, 78% of employees would like to significantly change their work circumstances and 65% believe their organization is not proactively addressing burnout.
What does it mean for the bottom line? Without a full roster, companies verge into riskier territory: low staffing levels place a heavier burden on overworked employees, goals become more difficult to attain, costs increase, and customers are more likely to take their business elsewhere.
Any organization that wants to achieve a positive employer brand needs to better understand and collaborate with their employees so they can meet their needs.
Unfortunately, for most businesses employee satisfaction is hardly a priority. According to a Deloitte survey, 64% of organizations only take the time to measure employee engagement once a year. Even worse, one in five companies don’t formally measure employee engagement at all. The workforce feels it too: one-third of employees feel their ideas are ignored at work.
This is not a situation that can be solved by throwing money at it. The key is to listen to what your employees really, really want, and prioritize limited budgets by focusing on the most impactful programs (wellness programs to help with burnout, perks to keep employees engaged and motivated, etcetera). Such effort is very likely to deliver results: Businesses could increase revenue by 50% and profits nearly as much just by improving the experience of customer-facing employees.
Raising the voice
By 2025, 35% of organizations with a CX initiative will see synchronization with their EX initiative as critical to sustainable success and reduced customer and employee churn. To achieve these results, the obvious starting point is to listen. Enter the Voice of Employee.
A Voice of Employee (VoE) program gives organizations a peek into the minds of their workers. It creates a space where employees can share their opinions and ideas, data employers can shape into enhancements and improvements to the employee experience (EX). VoE is the cornerstone of EX: By collaborating with your employees you can drive significant, measurable, and systemic change within your organization.
What does this mean for your bottom line? To put it in numbers, organizations with highly engaged employees have experienced a 3-year revenue growth rate 2.3 times greater than average.
Alida’s experience management solutions can help you discover what matters most to your employees and build a fitting EX strategy to make them feel inspired, respected, and motivated.
These are some of the high-level employee experience questions Alida can assist you with:
- How do your employees feel about recent organizational changes?
- What would cause your employees to leave or motivate them to stay?
- How have employees’ perceptions changed over time?
- How do the experiences of certain employee subgroups differ?
- What traits or experiences long-term, high-performing employees have in common?
- Given limited time and budget, which perks or benefits would have the biggest impact on improving the employee experience?
- From the employee perspective, how can your business improve the customer’s experience?
From flash in the pan to never-ending loop
Typically, companies ask employees for feedback only once or twice per year—often circa performance evaluation time—or they only capture data during exit surveys or interviews. These infrequent touchpoints miss the day-to-day moments that shape the employee experience.
Email and intranet surveys are likely to miss field-based employees and deskless workers. Odds are, due to high turnover and the nature of the business, they don’t have corporate emails (snail mail? Please). Analysis takes months, a time gap that translates into lagging indicators, rather than leading. By large, findings are aggregated and provided only to HR and/or executive leadership, as opposed to specific, actionable feedback to managers.
Alida helps businesses move from simply measuring employee “satisfaction” or “engagement” to understanding the full extent of the employee experience, and empowers organizations to listen, analyze, and act on these learnings:
Listen: Get real-time feedback from even hard-to-reach employees to uncover what they think and feel.
Analyze: Understand the “why” behind the “what”, quickly spot patterns, prioritize issues, and predict changes so you can and determine what comes next.
Act: Automate actions and collaborate with your most engaged employees to improve their experiences.
Get to know the Alida EX Solutions
- VoE Surveys: Delivered via email, or for employees without email, SMS/text, or QR code. Alida has industry-leading completion rates.
- Digital Intercept and pulse surveys: Delivered via intranet or integration with internal applications. Pulse surveys are the most effective way to gather VoE as they enjoy a response rate 45-55% higher than traditional surveys. Particularly effective in engaging Gen-Z employees.
- Employee Insight Community: Virtual employee focus group. The application translates employee attributes like motivation, preference, and beliefs into agile, actionable data points.
- Social listening: This application lets your organization gather employee feedback from sites like LinkedIn and Glassdoor and then generates statistics and insights based on these reviews.
- Video Feedback and Video Discussions: Collect information about the behavior, attitudes, and perceptions of your employees by conducting video discussions, and analyzing the video and transcript.
- Sentiment analysis for open end questions, customer support logs, social, video, etc.
- Integration with HRIS: It automatically updates Profile Variables with data from employee records in your HRIS platform. This data can be used for targeting, filtering, and customizing employee communications.
Predetermined events and milestones in the employee journey can automatically trigger feedback collection. Furthermore, survey responses/scores may prompt follow-up communications to gather additional details.
Worth mentioning, Alida can guarantee anonymity and data security, so employees may feel more comfortable sharing personal information.
Once you have reached an answer based on the results of different VoE-capturing tools, you can make decisions bound to impact every step of the employee journey:
- Recruiting and hiring process
- Onboarding experience
- Promotions and organization restructuring
- Performance evaluation
- Training, support, and tech investment
- Benefits and perks
Experian Health
The challenge: As a healthcare operations management tool provider, Experian had to plan a COVID-19 strategy for their employees that would provide genuine value as quickly as possible and in a period of high demand.
The Alida factor: Using Alida’s Insight Community, Experian surveyed and collected data from their employees to gain insight regarding the challenges the pandemic presented to them.
The outcome: The insights gained drove Experian’s develop actionable plans to support efforts related to the pandemic. This didn’t go unnoticed by the workforce: There was a 37% engagement increase among Experian employees, 16 points increase in NPS and an overall improvement in the employee experience.
Global quick serve chain
The challenge: The retail chain was facing COVID-related employee turnover, burnout, and decreased morale. They needed to take action quickly and employee surveys were difficult to execute because deskless, in-store, and part-time team members didn’t have a company email address.
The Alida factor: In addition to develop an employee insight community, Alida built a custom integration into the retail chain’s in-store systems. An eSAT survey became accessible to all 270,000 employees in the U.S. and Canada, across all hierarchical roles, through an iPad located in every store.
The outcome: The surveys achieved an unprecedented 44% response rate. Knowing what to prioritize, the retail chain focused on equipment, scheduling, and training. This led to increased efficiency and employee satisfaction, which in turn translated into an improved customer experience.
Telstra
The challenge: To compete with the National Broadband Network in Australia, Telstra had to find ways to differentiate its product.
The Alida factor: Telstra engaged their workers through Alida’s Insight Communities. In turn, employees provided direct feedback, based on their expertise and knowledge. This helped Telstra shape the message and develop competitive offers.
The outcome: As a result, Telstra saw an 18% decrease in order cancellations, modem returns fell 50%, and customer advocacy increased 30 points within 30 days.
Start fast. Grow smart.
No need to get overwhelmed. You don’t need to do everything all at once. We’ve made EX consumable. Everything you need to start small and grow. Because Alida is modular, you can begin with some capabilities and future capabilities snap right in without any rework.
