Your Culture and Your Employees
Recently, we’ve been talking about the employee experience—an integral part of an organization’s culture. If you want your culture to be positive, you must create a positive experience for your employees.
It seems that we no sooner have a discussion when we discover additional research that supports our positions on these topics. Let’s look at some essential components.
Trust. Without trust in leadership, organizations can’t thrive. And once trust is broken, the journey to reclaim it can be long and often fruitless. In a recent HR Executive article about leadership, Josh Bersin and Kathi Enders say trust in the organization and in leadership is the most critical element for engagement, retention and business performance. They cite a Korn Ferry leadership study that showed that 22% of the difference in financial performance, over a five-year period, was related to trust in leadership.
Bersin and Enders offer that trust can be created with leaders who display the right human behaviors, focus on people first and the business second, and help their teams transform and adapt to new ways of working.
Upskilling and learning. Creating a learning culture that encourages life-long learning has long been a critical element to a positive culture and employee experience. And this is even more true today. For Gen Z and younger millennials, the opportunity to advance, grow, and learn new things is important.
“Upskilling employees can enhance employee engagement for your workforce,” says Dawn Kawamoto, HR Editor of Human Resource Executive in a recent article about PwC’s initiative to upskill its entire U.S. workforce on generative AI, including ChatGPT.
“One particular area of importance in upskilling PwC employees will be showing them how to use generative AI responsibly and transparently so everyone is aware of exactly what is being done,” says Joe Atkinson, vice chair and chief products and technology officer for PwC. One way to minimize generative AI chatbot snafus is to understand how important it is to ask the right questions—or prompts—when working with the technology.
PwC’s goal is to have employees grow as learners. In the past, they have provided digital upskilling and skills future-proofing to prepare employees for emerging technologies and tools they would need to do their current and future jobs.
Recognition and wellbeing. If you’ve been reading our books and our blogs, you know we emphasize the importance of recognition as part of the employee experience. Unfortunately, that critical element is often missing, despite it being such an easy thing to do.
Dawn Kawamoto reported on the correlation between the level of recognition employees and their level of wellbeing that was found in a study by Gallup-Workhuman.
Employees who reported a “great” recognition level were likely to be high performers, report receiving fair pay, be thriving in their wellbeing, and less likely to be looking for another job. Just the opposite was true for employees who reported a “poor” recognition level.
The study’s results show a powerful impact that wellbeing has—both positive and negative—on both performance and retention. Yes, managers can be overwhelmed these days, but that simple “thank you” or “great job” takes minimal time and costs nothing.