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How can you improve the employee experience? It’s one of the most critical questions that today’s leaders can ask of themselves. Happy workers are productive workers and, for many firms, their most valuable asset.
Promote Yourself
Top of the list of things that leaders need to do to improve employee experience is to promote their self-importance. Promoting one’s importance doesn’t sound like a plausible strategy for enhancing the experience of others, but research suggests to the contrary. Scientific analysis of leadership dynamics shows that when followers believe that what their leader is doing is valuable, they are more like to stick with the firm and enjoy their work.
When you think about it, this is an incredible finding. Conventional wisdom suggests that treating employees with respect is what matters for their experience – and undoubtedly it plays a role – but what seems to be even more important is this idea that the leader is doing something worthwhile. Strange but true.
Create Better Software Tools
When polled, employees often report that one of the most frustrating aspects of their work is the quality of their computing experience. Employees are sick and tired of waiting for apps to load, programs to run and files to download. It’s a constant drag on their ability to get things done.
App developers, however, say that companies can quickly improve the employee experience by offering them a range of bespoke apps, all hosted by cloud providers. Third-party app development and hosting remove many of the most common issues that workers experience when trying to use in-house solutions. Cloud-based apps negate the need to interrupt services during updates and, frankly, often load much faster than their legacy counterparts.
Create Career Advancement Opportunities
Most employees like to feel as if they could progress if they wanted to. Employers, therefore, need to carefully craft career progression plans for the people in their organizations. Gestures can be both symbolic and real: both are likely to have a profound effect.
The primary purpose of these opportunities is to make workers feel valued by the firm. Colleagues who believe that management has their best interest at heart are more likely to put in long hours and work hard on projects valuable to the firm.
Don’t Use An Open Plan Office
Recent research suggests that open plan offices aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. A study by Karlstad University in Sweden showed that employee satisfaction declines, the more people shared an office.
What’s so strange about this finding is that it seems to be at odds with the advice of management consultants. Professional advisors have implored companies to ditch their cubicles in favor of more people-friendly, open-office arrangements, and yet that doesn’t seem to be an option either.
The trick is to create multifaceted spaces. Employees should have the option of being able to work in peace by themselves, or in a team when required. They shouldn’t be forced to work among others, even if they do not need to interact with them. There’s plenty of opportunities for networking over the lunch break.
