Rethink and Recognize This National Employee Appreciation Day
This National Employee Appreciation Day, learn why prioritizing employee experience is necessary for a successful business.
Melissa Arronte, employee experience practice lead at Medallia, writes about why prioritizing employee experience for organizational success is a must and how leaders use immersive tech and feedback for engagement.
Often, when companies think about National Employee Appreciation Day, it’s through a narrow lens, with leaders taking the opportunity to express their appreciation for their employees. That’s important and part of the right thing to do, as people want to feel appreciated. Ultimately, the purpose of any business — from hospitality and food service companies to financial services brands — is to connect and engage with employees and customers. Together, customers and employees are the very heart of any business.
That’s why employee appreciation shouldn’t be something leaders make time for only once a year — it should be part of the very fabric of how teams operate every single day.
Savvy leaders recognize this, and they’re leaning into immersive technologies to truly show they care about their team members throughout the year. They’re embracing the future of work with advanced solutions designed to simplify challenges and alleviate friction points for workers to improve their lives and improve the overall employee experience.
3 Innovative Solutions for Enhanced Employee Experience
Here’s a look at three innovative solutions companies are using to enhance employee training and onboarding experience., give team members more autonomy, ensure staff feel valued and heard, strengthen engagement, and reduce turnover.
1. AI to enhance efficiency, enrich experiences, and exercise caution
AI is all anyone can talk about these days and is top of mind for leaders and staff. It may seem like a threat to employees, but the reality is that AI will never replace human decision-making. It can, however, enrich experiences, especially if it’s used to augment onboarding and training for new hires or serve as a go-to resource for instant answers to questions and challenges employees encounter on the job.
Across industries, AI solutions are helping teams work more efficiently, eliminating time-consuming, repetitive tasks. In some cases, employees may turn to AI to quickly analyze data and generate reports that might otherwise take hours or days to produce manually or quickly get to the root cause of frustrating customer issues and solve them immediately. In others, contact center agents may turn to AI to get instant summaries of customer interactions, saving hours of note-taking.
For onboarding purposes, new hires can interact with AI to get extra help and practice as they get up to speed on company policies and practices. But there are two points of caution concerning AI.
- First, it’s always crucial that any final decision-making is the responsibility of employees. Some of AI’s best use cases include automating repetitive tasks, summarizing information, uncovering insights, and generating ideas. Still, humans need to bring their knowledge, experience, and common sense to make good decisions with information made available by AI.
- Second, companies must avoid using open-source AI that gathers information from the Internet more broadly. To learn the most from truly applicable insights, businesses should use AI solutions focused on their data instead.
See More: What is Employee Experience and How to Improve It
2. Continuous employee listening
For decades, companies have run annual engagement surveys. While these are particularly helpful for assessing and tracking organizations’ baseline customer experience and engagement data because they’re only conducted once a year, they’re not great for driving actionable changes that make a difference for employees on an ongoing basis.
That’s where continuous employee listening comes into play.
Continuous listening surveys are short — two- to three-questions — and are embedded in the touchpoints employees interact with daily, such as a company’s app or intranet, and allow team members to provide feedback and ideas right in the flow of their work, without having to wait for an annual or quarterly check-in.
Companies ask simple questions, like “What’s making things hard to get your work done?” and “What ideas do you have for addressing this issue?” and allow participants to respond with video, audio, or text replies. These open-ended insights enable leaders to uncover key trends and take immediate action.
By empowering employees to share feedback at the moment, organizations give team members a chance to feel heard and valued, and not only that — they solve their problems by describing the obstacles they’re facing and offering their fixes. Well-designed continuous listening efforts can increase employee motivation, autonomy, and engagement.
3. Connecting employee experience with customer experience
If employees encounter challenges on the job, they’ll have a more difficult time serving and creating optimal customer experiences. If customer satisfaction is low, employee satisfaction can suffer as well. The reality is, often, companies operate in silos, with customer experience strategies, data, and insights separated from employee experience strategies, data and insights.
When customer experience and HR leaders come together to share data, tools, and solutions, companies can unify customer and employee feedback and data to uncover various factors, such as dated technology systems, ineffective policies, broken processes, or gaps in employee skills or knowledge, that are negatively impacting outcomes for both employees and customers.
Companies can also act on customer feedback, taking a top customer complaint and asking employees their thoughts about the issue via continuous listening, such as “Why do you think this is happening for our customers?” and “What are your ideas for solving this challenge?” Organizations can also use crowdsourcing platforms to gather employee suggestions for addressing problems that affect the customer and employee experience.
Why Now Is the Moment to Invest in Employee Experience?
When HR executives focus on the costs of implementing new systems instead of the potential gains, that’s a mistake — especially considering that companies typically spend twice an employee’s annual salary to replace them and that U.S. businesses lose $1 trillion yearly due to turnover.
Leaders are investing in immersive technologies that help organizations better understand, connect with, train, upskill, engage, and retain their employees. Businesses that fail to act will fall behind, driving up costly turnover, which no company can afford.
How do you express appreciation for your employees? What steps and strategies have you taken to boost employee satisfaction? Let us know on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
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