Do we really care about the employee satisfaction and engagement?

I’ve been writing so far about customer satisfaction, but usually in organisations, satisfied customers are only possible when there are satisfied employees who deliver top-class service or create top-class products. Having said that, as an Entrepreneur since I started my career, I don’t really think we care too much about the employees. We do care about their performance, their enablement and ensuring that they help us scale our business, but do we “care” about them? I am not so sure. Recently, with one of my colleagues, I was discussing this and she said she has seen how much her friends rave about when they join a new job and they are given goodies etc. So it’s actually not true that companies don’t care about employees and in fact a lot of companies do a lot of things for their employees to keep them engaged and satisfied and happy. It’s a very interesting topic for us from business perspective too because we developed a specialized vertical of eKomi purely focused on Voice of Employees. As a reminder, here’s the video overview
Of course, like all our focus areas, employees engagement also focuses on actually enabling organisations to improve their employer brand eventually have better glassdoor ratings etc. When we designed it, we thought of employee experience management exactly as customer experience management — track it, give them a voice, and then get good reputation. The following image shows our original idea of how to get not only great engagement but also improved reputation.

If you look at it, it’s almost like continuous feedback tracking. Step 1 is that we track satisfaction on a continuous basis. We actually developed it as a cross platform solution so that employees can access it anywhere they like and it should be super simple, from slack to mobile apps to desktop to direct emails.

The second step is to allow employees to ask management questions too. Now this, I believe, is important because engagement is never a one-way street. Why should only employers be asking questions, and not employees? True engagement would be if employees can anonymously ask questions and have answers from the management.
Then of course, it’s about setting the teams and the structure. Which is important because feedback from employees always has a context — their team, the current organisation environment, their personal situation etc.
The feedback can create good insights only if the employees actually use this. To enable this, we added gamification and rewards system which allows organisations to give rewards to their employees based on the activity. This in turn creates a culture of engagement which is sustainable and creates positivity too.
This of course creates very powerful insights. The following report shows how powerful this system can be. Currently, no employee survey can actually differentiate between what feedback negative employees are giving vs what positive employees are saying. For example, in the following picture, there is at least 1 employee who’s positive but would not stay at the company. There are also 3 negative employees who would stay at the company.

Finally, we allow employers to reach out to employees on the basis of their profiles without compromising the anonymity — effectively “closing the loop” with the employees. For example, how does an organisation reach out to all positive employees who are not happy about their salaries without compromising their anonymity? This is was one of the most simple but innovative ways of closing the loop with the employees and essentially got us customers such as Adidas, Nationwide in the UK, DHL, National Health Service, Volkswagen, Kraft Heinz and so on.
So coming back to the topic of this post: do we really care about the employees? Looking at the continuous feedback data, and looking at what the organisations do with the data and also talking to several consultants as well as industry leaders from Swarovski, L’Oréal, Nestlé and other large brands, I think we have a people problem in the industry. Our focus is primarily on customers and the top line. We do care about our people in general, but only as much as their performance — which is understandable — but without having a genuine care about people, it’s impossible to generate results. The good thing with most of the employees is that they give their best regardless of the situation. No one really wants to be miserable and be in the bad mood always. People try to cheer each other up and essentially everyone wants to be happy in the office — regardless of the politics, financial or job conditions. However, the “care” from organisations isn’t always clear. For one of the FCMG clients, we actually combined the employee and customer data to show what’s the impact of satisfied front-line employees on customers. There was almost a perfect correlation between engaged, satisfied front-line employees with satisfied customers who were willing to be brand ambassadors.
I am asked many time, what’s the ROI of this approach? How can an organisation justify spending $1 on every employee feedback per month (which is less than a cup of coffee)? I frankly do not know how to justify it and what can be the ROI. What’s the ROI of an engaged employee that goes an extra mile for a customer to retain and grow the customer vs a disengaged employee that is just looking to find the next job as soon as possible or is bogged down by politics and internal friction? Do we even need to measure it?
Recently, we have been discussing applying our approach across employee experience e.g. from recruitment to on-boarding to off-boarding. On that note, I think regardless of whether an organisation really cares about the employees or not (and I do believe all organisations especially knowledge based have to care about their team because there is no other choice), just knowing what’s going on and how their employees really think is a critical insight that every organisation must have. Even if 100% employees are dissatisfied, it’s far better to know it than to believe that everything is great. I will share more case studies (anonymised of course, before my customers get nervous :)) in the next days especially around where employee experience tracking is same and where it’s different from customer experience tracking as I’ve seen that some in the industry, like our friends are Qualtrics, kind of mix it up under one Experience Management — which I believe is a mistake, but more on this later.