Now more than ever, you need to know what your employees are thinking. It’s crucial. And that doesn’t mean waiting until year’s end for the annual, and too often perfunctory, employee survey that between eggnog and seasonal budgeting tasks, somehow rarely gets acted upon.
You need to know what employees are thinking because the pandemic has people exploring options. And that’s a phenomenon that is still developing. So, to attract, motivate and retain employees, it’s imperative that you gain and respond to their perspectives, using solid data.Such data will also help improve the employee experience and provide the agility you need in this unstable business environment.
Here’s more about what you need to know about driving business success with employee insights.
What is Meant by Collecting Employee Insights?
It’s basically the process of learning and understanding what drives employee satisfaction, with the goal of an improved employee experience. In turn, a better employee experience means more happy customers, which naturally helps the organization. It also means better recruitment and retention numbers.
What is Meant by Employee Experience?
The employee experience is a staffer’s perception of what they observe, encounter, and feel at various points during their tenure at an organization, beginning with their job candidacy through their exit.
Why are Employee Insights Key?
For most organizations, salaries are their biggest expenditure. That’s money you don’t want to just throw away. The problem, though, is that human resources and marketing typically operate – to your disadvantage — in isolation of the other. These “silos” mean that your leaders are only considering a part of the picture and as such are making strategic decisions sans info about their employees’ needs and wants.
Employee insights are also key in that these front-line people often can ID brewing issues before you spot them. They know and see more than you may think.
Building a culture of regular feedback and candid communication promotes empowerment, investment, and trust, which results in better business results.
How Mercer Can Help
With more than a half-century of employee experience research, Mercer is a consultant that has the deep knowledge, tools, and experience to help with your employee insights strategies and programs.
Mercer understands that getting actionable employee insights when they’re needed is crucial to establishing a formidable workforce. To that end, the firm has established a “listening program” that tunes into what employees are experiencing at various points throughout their lifecycles. Such ongoing listening allows you to draw direct lines between experiences and your company’s outcomes and permits you to craft interventions to continuously improve the employee experience.
In addition to establishing strategic listening programs that marry appropriate methodologies with superior content and nimble technology, Mercer delivers action-ready insights and integrative analytics. In addition to periodic surveys, it does this through digital focus groups, preference research, 360-degree feedback.
Mercer also offers employee experience insights advisory services that can help you with your employee experience and strategic design programs, as well as deployment services and data integration, utilization, and analytics, plus design change and action planning.
Now that you know how you can drive business success with employee insights, you can get going on that to make better strategic decisions that will markedly improve your bottom line. It simply has never been more important to hear from your people. It also would behoove you to enlist the expert help of a consultant such as Mercer, which has loads of experience in this sort of thing, plus powerful data to back it up.