Grasping the reality of the employee experience is vital if you want to drive engagement and performance
You’ve been lured away from your last job to take on a leadership role somewhere new. Of course, you want to make a mark as soon as you can. But before you rush through any big changes, you want an in-depth understanding of the organisation.
So you start with the numbers, getting an initial read on all the main performance indicators. But you know the intangibles are important too. You want to get a feel for the culture. You want to know the organisation’s underlying strengths and weaknesses. And crucially, you want a clear idea of how you can win the support of the people you’ll be leading and harness their talent and commitment.
You do the obvious things. You arrange meetings with your new management team – as a group and in one-to-ones. You walk the floor and have ad hoc conversations with your frontline staff. You might even commission an employee opinion survey to get data on metrics like job satisfaction, management effectiveness, pay and benefits.
So far, so good. But there’s a limit to what you’ll learn from all that.
Inevitably, some of your senior team will tell a story that reflects well on them. Individual employees will probably be careful about what they tell you to protect their position. And the standard set of questions in an off-the-shelf survey won’t tell you much about the lived experience and very specific issues in your organisation.
That’s when it pays to take a deeper dive into the employee experience.
Moments of Truth
Here at Axiom, we’ve developed a proven process for uncovering what your employees are really thinking and feeling – warts and all.
Our Moments of Truth approach creates honest dialogue among employees about seven key aspects of their experience in an organisation – from job application to eventual exit.
Discussions take place in expertly facilitated focus groups that protect people’s anonymity and establish an environment of trust and psychological safety. Participants are given free rein to share experiences and express their views – positive or otherwise.
Importantly, we encourage people to generate ideas that they want their leaders to hear and act on. No-one knows better how to make things better than those on the frontline.
We then present you with our analysis of the key findings. This always includes verbatim comments to provide an authentic account of what it’s really like to work in the organisation – even if that can sometimes make for uncomfortable reading.
Critically, you also get a prioritised set of recommendations drawn both from participants as well as from Axiom’s three decades spent identifying and implementing best practices.
Armed with accurate knowledge of your employees’ actual needs and concerns, you can confidently make changes that will drive engagement, ultimately contributing to improved performance against organisational goals.
The ripple effect to customer experience
Our approach is based on evidence that enhancing the employee experience will ripple out to improve customer experience. Simply put, happy employees = happy customers.
Best-selling business and leadership thinker Simon Sinek puts his finger on the issue: “Customers will never love a company unless its employees love it first”.
When you put improving the employee experience at the heart of your strategy, by listening to how your employees feel and delivering on the moments that matter to them, you not only resolve some of the long-term thorny issues, you also improve the experience of your customers. Ultimately, that translates into revenue and profit.
Invaluable insights
We recently completed a deep dive into the employee experience for a client in the pharmaceutical sector. We were able to provide a new leader with invaluable insights into previously hidden issues as well as solutions generated and championed by participants. (You can read a case study about this work.)
Our employee experience evaluations are led by Christina Dolding. Leveraging her expertise in customer experience research, Christina conducts candid conversations with employees to understand their concerns. She is a specialist in analysing this data as well as tapping into employees’ knowledge and expertise.
Read more about our approach to enhancing employee experience. Or talk to us today about how we can shed light on the Moments of Truth in your organisation.
