I admit, I went ahead and googled the exact question, ‘what matters to your employees’, and at a rate of 0.52 seconds over ninety-four million published articles lined up beneath one another with varied timestamps dating back to 2015, and even further back. What stood out to me was how similarly drafted each article was, highlighting aspects such as compensation, pay, value and recognition – to mention but a few, despite the yearly gapped difference.
So, why is it that as we head into the year 2023, we are still not getting this right? It’s largely evident that we are still functioning in a culture of (please excuse the use of this term) ‘assumption’ , coupled with a sense of wishful thinking, that hopes to hit the target on the employee satisfaction spectrum – and we’re still missing!
How are businesses supposed to go about curating an effective working environment that satisfies those within their organization when feedback collection, and its uses thereafter still reside in a fossilized age? We understand that it’s such a gray area to navigate, more so the business of dealing with personalities, meaning there will always be a sense of uncertainty, but there is a way forward and we think it’s time to mitigate that uncertainty.
We recently went ahead posing the question of what matters to you as an employee – in hopes to drive an open-ended feedback loop for deeper context. I was not surprised to learn that empathy, trust, and organizational culture were mentioned the most. Evidently exposing that employees want to experience a sense of belonging, especially when we consider that the average human will spend approximately a third of their lifetime at work, that’s 90 000 hours! For the amount of time needed to be spent at your workplace, it’s imperative that we are able to emotionally connect with peers, and even largely imperative that leaders lead with emotional intelligence (EQ)
Surveys typically – more specifically annual surveys since it’s largely still a (useless) trend collect current emotionality and state of mind thus, unable to depict and uncover trends within your organization. When I talk about trends I refer to ongoing occurrences.
For example; you send out the year-end survey and you learn that majority of the staffers complained about the fact that the food being served at their local cafeteria wasn’t good, however, you have both in-house cooks, and on certain days you rotate and outsource cooks on some days – the annual survey wouldn’t be able to reveal tangible information pertaining to who the culprits are, however, with live feedback collection you would be able to identify granular details hence, highlighting trends amongst staff that share similar emotionalism towards issues that either affect or apotheosis their tenure with you, and that’s just a step closer toward getting to know them and keeping them happy.
So, how does live feedback collection work? With the application of business intelligence that uses machine learning techniques to discover insights, find new patterns, and discover relationships in the data – hence trends. In practice, AI analytics is the process of automating much of the work that a data analyst would normally perform, the capabilities of the software as such and its adoption can reveal data pertaining to the productivity of each employee (year to date) and prior, for performance comparison purposes, evaluate when your business has the most footfall to the least, highlight what your customers say and feel about your business, and how they rank your service, alongside identifying keywords (how many times certain things are mentioned) such as staff names, meal items on your menu, service-related areas, to even unveiling if the location is a factor – and the list is endless.
There isn’t a single aspect of employer offers that will guarantee employee satisfaction and those organizations that solely focus on promoting their pay and benefits are missing out on recruiting and retaining the best talent as this factor alone isn’t enough. While it’s true that compensation and benefits can help to attract new talents and workers, you really want to do something that sets you apart from your competition, meaning put your ear to the ground, connect, converse and use the input to drive real change, which is exactly what we aim to do at Hoick, uncover exactly what matters most to both employees and customers. Connect with us for a coffee, or a short call to learn more, and we will happily set some time aside.
