It's Time To Dare to Care in the Workplacaec

Are You Putting Your People First?

Take Kathleen’s quiz to see if your organization is making employee experience and retention a priority and discover why it’s vital for success!

Employers often talk about the importance of customer experience and believe that an excellent experience means catering to individual customer needs. But how are you handling the needs and engagement of your employees? In the ever-changing environment that we are tasked with working in today, it is crucial now (more than ever) that we step back and assess how our workforce is experiencing our companies. The modern landscape of a workforce is highly individualized, based on your organization’s work and needs. You may have some employees joining you on-site, a few at home, or a large quantity may be working in various hybrid situations. It is up to the leaders of an organization to take the initiative to create a community out of these various employee experiences as they WFA (work from anywhere).

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How is your organization breaking the status quo? Are you making positive shifts for the sole benefit of your employees?*

We only seek to make shifts to our current operations when we absolutely need to.

We check in with our employees regularly and use the feedback received to make meaningful changes. It is evident to our employees that we have listened, heard, and incorporated their feedback into any changes we implement.

We are resistant to change. Why fix what isn’t broken?

Change is constant in healthy organizations. How do you support your organization through change?*

As leaders, we bring assurance and calm to our organization by modeling respect for all individual points of view and concerns. We take time to really listen and understand how our employees feel and take that into consideration while also creating an environment of safety and trust.

If employees value their job, they will rise to the occasion when change is inevitable.

We try to approach change as a new challenge that we can tackle together but we believe it ultimately depends on the individual employee as to how well they will respond to change.

Does your company value regularly receiving feedback from employees and seek to understand their points of view without objections?*

We show empathy if a situation calls for it, but employees aren’t regularly opening up about their lives and definitely try to hide when they aren’t operating at their very best.

We seek to understand why people feel or do things the way they do but sometimes it is difficult to understand. It’s also difficult not to pass judgment, at times.

We Lead with empathy, understanding, and no judgment, but still maintain a sense of decisiveness. We feel empathy is a great way to enhance employee experience by showing that we understand and care for our employees' unique lives and situations.

Not everybody can work from anywhere. What is your plan to embrace a hybrid business model?*

We prefer to have our team work together in person, but we offer some WFH or hybrid opportunities.

We are flexible! We are either working solely from home or giving our employees the opportunity to have a hybrid schedule where they are splitting their time between working remotely and coming into the office.

We want to get back to what we see as “normal,” therefore we are all back in the office or have a current plan in place to have our full staff return to the office in the near future.

What is your organization doing to make retaining top talent a priority?*

We make recognizing and rewarding people individualized by pairing recognition with something tangible and delivering it in a way that shows we’ve listened and are aware of the way an employee would prefer to be celebrated.

We try to shout out wins as we see them, but we admittedly don’t have a great system in place right now for making employees feel valued. We are unsure of where to start or how to improve.

We have a recognition program in place — we haven’t noticed any complaints or suggestions for changes, but it doesn’t seem to be very effective in improving employee contentment.

How do you demonstrate that you trust your employees?*

Honestly, we don’t fully trust our employees — they need constant oversight and their work requires thorough review and/or, at times, micromanagement.

We attempt to build trust by giving it. We give a little and expect a little in return.

The key to trust is transparency. We can give out trust without feeling the need for someone to earn it because we believe that by selecting the right people who fit into a community (built on being fair, reasonable, and accountable to our shared values and practices) will be beneficial to all involved.

Do you regularly take time to listen to employees’ concerns, perspectives, and feedback on current policies, procedures, and seek to find ways to improve their experience?*

We strive to make time for small talk and company-wide social events so that our work feels less transactional and we keep an open-door policy when it comes to meeting with employees to hear their concerns.

We prioritize showing that we care and respect our employees by regularly engaging in productive dialogue with each employee. We always listen first, share openly with transparency and trust, and discuss whatever the employee wants to talk about without fear of judgment. Because of this, we feel we know our employees and what’s most important to them and we are actively working to meet their needs.

It’s not our top priority to seek out employee feedback, but employees are free to go to their supervisor if they are having an issue with any of our current policies and procedures and it will be handled accordingly.

A HuffPost article has coined this concept as Posttraumatic Job Disorder. How would you categorize employees leaving your organization? Do they have positive things to say about the company or are they detracting from your business due to poor treatment?*

We’re not in the business of making everyone happy. We hope that everyone has a positive experience while employed with our company, but realistically that’s not the case.

We know that stress is a common feeling in any workplace — which is why we try our best to create a positive environment for all our employees. There may be a few people who are unhappy when they leave, but the majority would only have positive things to say about our company.

We believe we have a “Camelot Community” — a positive environment where people find dignity in the work they do. If someone leaves our organization, it’s usually not because they are bogged down by stress or don’t enjoy working with us.

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