Whether they know it or not, every person in an organization shapes the overall employee experience.
Often, there’s an assumption that Human Resources owns employee experience because HR shapes the processes and scopes the tools that support it. But the truth is that nearly everything that happens in an organization affects the employee experience, from the words said by the CEO in a town hall to the moments wasted while an outdated piece of software lags. Everyone–from the leaders at the forefront to the workers on the front line–impacts employee success.
But the employee experience only takes center stage at certain times. When engagement survey season comes, leaders loudly encourage participation. Employees at every level reflect on their work lives and (hopefully) share what is and isn’t working. HR analyzes and reports the results. Managers probe their teams’ responses, working with leadership and their teams to address problems.
For a short time, employee experience is the center of everyone’s attention. But sooner or later, new priorities take center stage.
So how do you shift from monitoring the employee experience periodically to making it better every day? It requires a kind of behavior change. We have to make employee experience an organizational habit, and we can do that by following some best practices for building new personal habits.
With that in mind, here are three steps to helping you build an organization-wide employee experience habit:
Make it easy
Friction, or any force that stands in the way of taking a particular action, is one of the most persistent barriers to building new habits, according to reporting from The New York Times. Habits hold when we make them easy to adopt–think of how a “one-click” button makes buying on Amazon easier.
Engagement is easier for managers and employees when it’s facilitated by software and services that automate repeatable tasks, give users customization options, and make personalized recommendations on how to act on listening data.
When HR adopts tools that are easy to use and easy to integrate, the rest of the organization gets instant value from that. That’s a key step toward activating everyone’s ownership of employee experience.
Make it visible
In his bestselling book“Atomic Habits,” author James Clear lays out for four laws for creating good habits. The first one: Make the cues that trigger that habit obvious.
In the HR-led model for employee experience, the cues are obvious but infrequent. When it’s time for an annual engagement or quarterly pulse survey, the cues for participation are everywhere: in your email, on company meetings, on team and 1:1 meeting agendas.
Consistent cuing is where senior leaders can really drive the shift toward an experience-first culture. They are the most powerful influencers of culture. When they set a clear vision for the employee experience and use their platforms to talk about it regularly, the experience becomes a priority for everyone.
Voice is only one way leaders can spur organization-wide ownership. By investing in the right engagement initiatives, they create the infrastructure that HR, managers, and employees need to transform experience.
Pursue progress, not perfection
If perfection is your goal, no new habit will stick. Anyone who’s ever dropped a New Year’s resolution before February knows that.
Focus on progress, though, and you’re already on your way to a persistent employee experience habit. This is where managers and employees themselves have such a crucial role. Empowered by HR with intuitive, well-integrated engagement tools, they can make tracking progress on employee experience a part of the team’s daily life.
There’s no better place to make and track progress on employee experience than the 1:1. These intimate get-togethers should be safe spaces for contributor and manager alike to honestly raise concerns and collaborate on how to address them.
But for the 1:1 to do that meaningful job, it has to happen consistently. Employees favor a weekly cadence over a monthly one by a two-to-one margin. And seventy-one percent of those who have weekly meetings with their managers report being highly engaged.
An improved employee experience is a competitive advantage hiding in plain sight. The future belongs to the companies that understand how everyone affects experience and make a organization wide commitment to the habit of creating an excellent employee experience.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Graden Hudson
Lead Product Manager
As the Lead Product Manager at Quantum Workplace for six years, I strive for balance — blending a cocktail of design, psychology, and research to make change palpable, feasible, and — dare I say — enjoyable for organizations and individuals. Relationships are my true North Star, guiding both my management style and my life. The health and well-being of my team and family are not just bullet points — they’re my guiding principles. When I’m not working, you’ll find me being outwitted by my four brilliant kids or celebrating almost two decades of marital bliss with my wife, Jessica.