How ongoing conversations ensure great employee experience

While ensuring a great employee experience is key, the process begins with understanding your people and an ‘always on’ approach of listening to them.

Customer satisfaction forms the core of businesses, but gone are the times when only the external customer was the ‘king’. Organisations have now fully accepted the criticality of managing the internal customer — the employee—and how they perceive the employer. Customer satisfaction is now directly linked to employee experience. No doubt, there are always a whole lot of happy people behind any successful business. This happiness can only be ensured by providing a great experience to the internal stakeholders or the employees.

Mangesh Bhide, HR head-technology, Reliance Jio Infocomm, strongly believes that organisations need to treat the employees exactly the way they look at their customers. He shares an example, “For instance, when consumers visit a restaurant or a hotel, their first interaction determines their experience and whether or not they will continue. Also, just as a website’s user-friendliness and ease of access determines its quality, employee experience is also about how an organisation interacts with its people and how it makes them feel in these service-oriented times.”

When consumers visit a restaurant or a hotel, their first interaction determines their experience and whether or not they will continue. Also, just as a website’s user-friendliness and ease of access determines its quality, employee experience is also about how an organisation interacts with its people and how it makes them feel in these service-oriented times.

While ensuring a great employee experience is key, the process begins with understanding the people and an ‘always-on’ approach of listening to them. This means that starting from the selection process to hiring someone, getting them on board, and helping them grow and progress until they exit, it is important to gauge employee emotions. The internal customer or the employee—just as a consumer—can decide to switch to other brands if not for a good experience. “Employees have emotions throughout their lifecycle. Creating conversations with them once a year is simply not enough to measure and improve the overall employee experience”, Ramesh Natarajan, Co-founder, LitmusWorld

Connect at every stage

Ganesh Chandan, CHRO, Tata Projects is also of the view that employee experience is critical to organisational success. He says, “Organisations that provide a great employee experience have an edge when it comes to attracting the best talent.” At the same time, Chandan feels that a big mistake many organisations make is that they ignore the importance of experience in the first stage of recruitment, that is selection and pre-post on-boarding. “Companies go silent after releasing the offer, until a candidate joins, but it is important to engage with potential employees too,” he says.

Chandan shares that HR in some organisations make weekly calls to potential candidates and share relevant information and supporting knowledge, and also provide relocation support and so on, so that they are abreast of most things before they join. Going further, the induction, the performance conversations, feedback sharing, and so on, until the exit discussions—all need to be backed by meaningful ongoing conversations.

Measure and act: The ‘always-on’ approach

Constant improvement in organisational processes and policies certainly makes life better for all, which is why the ongoing conversations with the employee need to be backed by strong analysis of what people want and how they feel. The ‘always-on’ employee conversations allow great insights about how organisations can improvise on providing them a better workplace.

A big mistake many organisations make is that they ignore the importance of experience in the first stage of recruitment, that is selection and pre-post on-boarding. Companies go silent after releasing the offer, until a candidate joins, but it is important to engage with potential employees too.

Bhide says, along with a real-time connect, it is the do-measure-redo approach or the Japanese PDCA (plan-do-check-adjust) approach that ensures great experience always. “Your past performance does not guarantee your future performance, and organisations also need to course-correct to keep meeting the internal customer-satisfaction criteria,” he opines.

Chandan and Bhide both emphasise on the importance of customising— “Positive employee experience cannot be achieved simply by a templated approach. Keep customising each effort, keeping the people in mind,” Chandan suggests.

Bhide is also of the view that run-of-the-mill engagement initiatives do not work anymore. Organisations need to keep re-inventing and for that, it is important to keep connecting with the employees through meaningful and ongoing conversations to get their pulse in order to finally be able to ensure a seamless experience.

One such leading platform enabling 120+ large businesses to continuosly create conversations across the employee life-cycle is LitmusWorld. They closely work with HR leaders to implement an ‘Always-On’ approach of improving employee experience via Pulse conversations, Annual conversations, 360 degree conversations, Employee opinion conversations amongst many other ad-hoc ones.

“eNPS through LitmusWorld has really helped us to understand the pulse of an employee because we get to know what actions we need to take, whether it is from a HR perspective or the respective HOD.“ “Due to this, we have a lower attrition rate as its made employees stick to the company. From last year to this year, we are 50% down in our attrition”, Shalini Vohra, CHRO, CROMA – Infiniti Retail

If you’re keen to measure the pulse of your employees through an ‘always-on’ approach, write in at khushaal.talreja@litmusworld.com

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