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Give your HR the help they need. The help they get is the help your employees need and what your employees need is what the business need. Break the system, because your employees need you!
In the past year, I wrote about Employee Experience (EE) and why it is the change workplaces need. We have created an Employee Experience audit and tested our theories with five companies for free. Yes, you missed it, sorry! A lot of work has been done changing, adjusting and sometimes throwing everything out we thought would work.
Our EE audits showed that organisations are more concerned about their systems than their users (employees). So we reverse-engineered everything and created a framework that allows organisations to design their EE with people in mind. It is not that difficult.
We broke EE down to seven pillars (that's the basic level):
ATTRACT | HIRE | ONBOARD | MOTIVATE | PERFORM | DEVELOP | EXIT
Let's look at MOTIVATE: Designing Experiences From The Candidate's Point of View.
Here are some of the questions our audit toolkit includes:
Every section starts with a question: How Do You Want Employees To Feel About Being With You? Guess what, HR and leaders find it very difficult to articulate it:-) It is not easy because we have never been taught to think that way. We have been taught to run processes.
The toolkit then goes into detail with questions like (there are more questions):
Working Conditions: Do you have data about your employees' satisfaction with their working conditions? Physical, mental, working hours, workload, overtime management, flexible policies, etc. Do you have a full wellbeing report on your workforce? Do these conditions motivate them to do a good job?
Pay & Benefits: Do you have data about your employees' satisfaction about their pay and benefits? Do they have financial worries? Do you provide any form of support? Does your pay structure motivate them to do a good job?
Training: Do provide structured training to managers and leaders about employee motivation? What does it look like? What are the topics? Do you use scientific theories?
Leadership Quality: Do you have quality leaders? How do you define quality leaders? What are the criteria? How do you measure it? Do they know what is expected of them as leaders? How do they know? How do employees feel about your leaders and their quality?
Measurement: Do you measure or classify motivation? How do you do that? What type of motivations do you measure? Do you use that info when personalising career development, benefits packages and other related areas?
Motivating employees is the most crucial element of employee experience and the foundation of productivity, length of service, creativity and everything we want from employees. Yet, we went radio silence on this topic. Nobody is talking about how to motivate employees (I am not talking about engagement activities those do absolutely nothing especially when engagement and motivation are different).
Employee motivation is backed by science whilst engagement nonsense runs by the rules of thumb created in the business world. Read here.
It is time we educate managers and leaders about these differences and how they can use science when it comes to motivating employees. Trust me, you will get much further than with your engagement silly games and all that. People don't want that, they want to be treated like adults and view work differently.
In short, know what people are motivated by and how you can accommodate that. Also, know how motivational theories show up daily. They constantly surround us during arguments, celebrations, performance chats, interviews, onboarding, learning, and when resigning.... they are everywhere and you are ignoring them! No, not ignoring! Creating false stories about them saying things like "This person is so lazy", no he is not, he is not motivated to do that job because it is not interesting to him! Now you see? This is a whole different way of looking at people and you don't even know this!
PS: If you want the EE Audit Checklist message me. Or, if you know somebody who would like to redesign their employees' experiences and change the mindset that governs these old-school practices I would appreciate the connection. HR has changed, and we are here to help them because nobody is helping them let's be fair. We just all blame them.
In the meantime, answer those questions and see whether your organisation gives a thought about EE or just looking after their processes.
