By Salina Williams, Senior Consultant
As workplaces have evolved the last few years, our most recent Think Tank on March 3 brought together HR leaders from numerous sectors to discuss their respective organizational cultures and engagement strategies and how they have grown and developed thanks to richer employee feedback.
Here is a snapshot summary of this fascinating discussion with leaders across the insurance, banking, food manufacturing, healthcare, retail, government, and not-for-profit industries.
Building, Adjusting, and Evolving Company Culture
HR leaders recognize that building organizational culture is everyone’s shared responsibility from the CEO to employees at all levels. The role of HR is to build out the employee experience and communicate it across the organization. Employees have the opportunity to participate within the feedback mechanism.
Numerous organizations are reviewing data from comprehensive employee surveys to identify drivers for staff engagement and opportunities for culture change. Leaders are introducing new values to achieve desired cultural shifts by providing behavioural examples their employees can in turn demonstrate in their work and attitudes. Many leaders are emphasizing one value at a time (e.g. respect) and implementing as many tools and learnings as possible to ensure employees are accountable. In this way, HR leaders are working to drive meaningful change, ensuring their staff know how to adopt these values while aligning recognition and action plans to the values. This represents a new approach to shifting corporate culture.
Some organizations are facilitating engagement surveys with the expectation that managers will share results with their team. The survey identifies employee concerns and allows organizations to look at themes across different departments. Some organizations are using this data for targeting developmental programs.
HR leaders recognize that to be effective in shifting the culture, they need to start from the top down – senior leadership teams need to lead by example. Storytelling has become more important, and HR leaders are encouraging their executives to communicate more with all levels of employees. At a number of organizations HR is suggesting C-level execs invest more in their employees by taking time to communicate in ways that draw people into their world (whether through regular town hall meetings or with small groups) to connect employees to organizational values.
One example provided highlighted a senior executive of a national manufacturing business who sends weekly emails to all employees. These emails are in a more conversational tone, communicating the common organizational goals, and cover a variety of topics from business activities, world events, and personal anecdotes about the leader. This transparency and openness provides all employees (even those on the shop floor) insight into the company’s strategy.
Employee feedback has also confirmed for many organizations that their employees want recognition, so HR leaders are implementing formal recognitional programs. They are also evaluating their onboarding programs and using these to set the tone when welcoming new team members, ensuring everyone knows their roles and speak in terms of organizational values. HR continues to look for ways to instill and integrate corporate values throughout the employee lifecycle.
Measuring Employee Engagement
Employee engagement measures include an array of approaches and tools including:
- Measuring barriers to service customers and empowering employees to resolve customer experience successfully
- KPIs regarding turnover, internal applications, reviewing to what extent employees are interested in growing within the organization, and ensuring that at least 50% of opportunities are filled internally
- Algorithms that measure five years of attrition and employee movement data
- Benefit contributions and mapping precisely when someone stops contributing to benefits (sudden changes denote possible disengagement)
- Employee net promoter scores
- Client feedback, often satisfied employees produce satisfied customers
- Open and productive career conversations with employees indicate organizations are on the right track
Managing Dual Cultures
For some HR leaders, the biggest opportunity for change lies within the highest levels of the organizations as they are recognizing the existence of dual cultures, especially as we emerge from the pandemic. Some CEOs expect their employees to return to the office full time/100% and despite many organizations operating successfully in a remote or hybrid model during the pandemic, full-time in office continues to be the goal for many senior leaders. Most employee surveys indicate the majority of workers would prefer a hybrid model and HR leaders are using employee feedback as an opportunity to dispel full-time in office as an option by influencing senior leadership through conversations with various teams. HR has been working hard to shift the decision-making to department directors and VPs.
The transition back to a hybrid workplace from fully remote will be unsettling for some organizations. This state of transformation will require HR to remind their people of new policies being implemented and how they will impact each employee. After months of stickhandling and putting out fires, HR leaders can now be more intentional with their plans, learning from the past and moving towards implementing what employees want to keep them engaged.
Final Thoughts
Maslow’s hierarchy has taken affect and HR leaders are working to address the fundamental needs of their employees before addressing other human resources issues. Finding a balance is important as some organizations continues to manage staffing shortages and deal with employees who wish to remain remote. HR has become the key mechanism to advocate for employee needs and incorporate employee feedback into ongoing cultural change that meets the objectives of the organization as a whole.