How to Improve Employee Experience in the Age of Hybrid Work

For years, companies have invested limitless time and budget into solutions intended to enhance customer experiences. “CX”, as most organisations know, is often the key to success in a competitive landscape. More than anything else, your customers use the experience you can deliver to determine whether or not to buy from you.

However, customer experience is far from the only “experience” brands should be focused on.

Indeed, as we head into 2022, a year defined by new working patterns, mass resignation, and skill shortages, “Employee Experience”, or “EX” is more important than ever.

If your employees aren’t thriving at work, they can’t deliver the kind of meaningful experiences your customers are looking for. What’s more, companies with strong employee experiences consistently benefit from better workplace results (like 21% better profit).

The good news is that employee experience ranked as the number 1 initiative most companies are investing in as of 2020 in an HR Sentiment study.

The bad news is the majority of employers aren’t sure how to enhance employee engagement, satisfaction, and overall experience, in a hybrid work environment.

Why You Need EX (Now More than Ever)

Employee experience has always been a critical component of good employee performance. Happier, more connected employees are up to 20% more productive at work, while unhappy employees take up to 15 more days of sick leave per year. Not to mention, studies show that companies with happy and engaged employees outperform their peers by around 147%.

A commitment to employee experience leads to more productive and driven team members, committed to making your business a success. It also ensures you don’t have to worry about constantly replacing your talent because your staff members are more likely to stay with you.

Of course, since the pandemic, employees have been placed under additional pressure, and are dealing with higher levels of stress than ever before. This means companies need to work harder than ever to deliver an experience that minimizes burnout and improves productivity.

Additionally, since the pandemic, the way we work has changed, with fewer people spending their 9-to-5 schedules in the office. This means the strategies that used to work for EX before remote and hybrid work, may not be ideal for the future of business growth.

As hybrid work becomes the norm for the majority of brands, business leaders need to reshape their approach to employee experience to suit a more distributed team with different needs.

How to Make Hybrid Work, Work

According to a survey from Workvivo, around 1 in 2 people say they feel more disengaged from their organizations since the pandemic began, and their work environment evolved. To ensure EX continues to thrive in this new landscape, you need to take some crucial steps:

1. Talk to your Employees

First, you can’t improve employee experiences without understanding the pain points and challenges your employees encounter on a regular basis.

Setting up meetings with your team members (virtually or otherwise) to discuss their work patterns and requirements will be an excellent way to get a sense of what you really need to do to enable a hybrid future. This process also helps to ensure you’re not making assumptions about what your team members really need from you.

When speaking to your employees about their needs, make sure you consider:

• Hybrid Work Variations: While some people might want to spend more of their time working from home than in the office, others will feel the opposite about their professional future. Make sure your team members have options for how they can work. This will be particularly valuable for people who don’t have a suitable office space at home.
• Hardware Requirements: If your employees are going to be working at home occasionally, do they have the hardware required to do so? What’s their home computer or laptop like? Do they have a webcam to engage in video conferencing sessions? How good is their microphone or speaker? Providing access to the right tech will be essential.
• Software Needs: Moving technology into the cloud is an essential component of hybrid work, but what exactly does your team need? Are you going to need to invest in a new UCaaS solution, or build UCaaS around an existing collaborative tool like Microsoft Teams? Do you need to access cloud-based contact centres and additional tools?

2. Prioritise Company Culture

Company culture isn’t just a buzzword defined by the pool tables business leaders used to install into business offices long before the pandemic. If you want your team members to have an excellent experience at work, they need to feel as though they’re part of something special.

Start by building a focus on consistent communication into the essence of your company. Your employees should have a multitude of ways to communicate regardless of where they’re located. This may include investing in new tools for video conferencing, file sharing, and messaging.

For the majority of hybrid teams, it will be important to take a remote-first approach. In other words, think about how you’re going to keep your remote employees included in the business experience first. While it’s easy to host a meeting in-person with anyone available in your office, this excludes the remote staff in your ecosystem. People in a hybrid environment should have just as much of a voice regardless of whether they’re in the office, or not.

Don’t forget to concentrate on building bonds within your team as much as possible too. Communication shouldn’t just be for work purposes. Give employees opportunities to chat, get to know each other, and form deeper connections.

3. Empower Better Leadership

Excellent leadership is key to a strong employee experience. Your team members are going to be turning to leaders for assistance making the most of their new workplace environment. The only way to ensure leadership can thrive, is to give your managers and supervisors the right support.

Start by making it easier for leaders to be transparent. Employees who trust their leaders experience 74% less stress and 40% lower levels of burnout. With that in mind, make sure your managers have a way to keep your team members up-to-date about everything happening in the company with regular announcements and broadcasts.

It’s also worth empowering your leaders with tools which can help them to support their teams more actively in the world of hybrid work. Real-time reporting tools built into a CCaaS environment can help supervisors to see when contact center agents are struggling. Tracking systems and analytics built into a UCaaS environment can show managers how companies are leveraging critical tools.

Don’t Underestimate EX

Every company will have its own unique approach to making the most of employee experience. The key to success is making sure you keep working on your strategy, particularly as the hybrid environment continues to evolve.

Pay attention to the needs of your employees as they transition into new workplace environments and use technology to empower and enhance your teams. Need a little help? Get in touch with us here…