This article originally appeared in The Healthy, High-Performing Cultures Issue of Performance Matters Magazine. To request a print or digital copy of the magazine, click here.
Employees at all levels are looking to get more out of work—and what they want most is a bit of joy.
The talent marketplace is always shifting, but generational studies repeatedly show that people need more than fair compensation to find their work meaningful.
Demand is strong for work that feels more equitable, joyful, and gratifying. It’s not about finding easier work, but better work. Most people want to be challenged so they can grow; they want to contribute. They also hope to be supported, uplifted, trusted, understood, and valued.
More and more, employees gauge a job’s value by how it impacts their mental and physical wellness, happiness levels, their sense of progress and feelings of self-worth, and even their family dynamics. Good compensation matters but many workers take a more holistic view when assessing what they’re giving and what they’re gaining at work. When your organization offers what they value, you’ll crack the code for attracting and retaining the talent you need. It’s about the whole experience.
Employee experience (EX) is everything that happens to and is created by employees and employers, every day, due to an employment relationship. It’s the full collection of all our day-to-day interactions and emotions while at work, including those we have with other employees, our leaders, and the greater organization. It includes how we engage with technology platforms, processes, and the physical work environment—as well as the operational structures and systems at the core of our ways of working.
That’s a lot! Fortunately, we know that certain moments in the work journey matter more than others. If your organization can identify those moments and concentrate efforts there, offering what’s hoped for and expected when it counts most, you’ll make the biggest strides.
So, what will it take to deliver the right experience in those moments to win the engagement, high performance, and loyalty of your people? It comes down to aligned, effective, and compassionate leadership that cares about making work a joy-filled experience. Here are a few ways to help your leaders achieve that.
It starts with a story.
Whether it’s acknowledged or not, your organization’s leaders are serving as your employee experience creators. Are they all creating the same, highly desired experience you hope they are? Not likely. According to Gallup, up to 70 percent of the variance in an organization’s EX is due to direct managers. At most companies, they are the primary influencer of something they’ve never discussed or learned about.
Awareness and alignment are the first steps to getting leaders onboard, and that means putting it down in writing in a company narrative. This should be seen as an aspirational reality. The company narrative captures the truth of your organization at its best. Start with curiosity by engaging in a full assessment of how you meet the needs of your employee base and where you’re offering them a unique, brand-right, supportive, growth-oriented experience.
Armed with that insight, what you write can be so much more than an employee value proposition. It can encompass your organization’s values, why you exist, and what’s noble about your purpose. It can highlight your unique cultural realities and aspirations. (If you want to engage and retain people, we recommend highlighting trust, purpose, and growth.)
The company narrative also should articulate your authentic, difficult realities: what’s hard about your environment, which high standards aren’t easy to achieve, and why you need employees who can “bring it.” Capture differentiating aspects that set your organization apart from the competition and other employers, while acknowledging the high expectations and unique challenges that your associates face.
When your company narrative paints this holistic picture, it will serve your direct managers in building shared understanding of your culture. It’s an effective alignment tool for them and the whole organization, helping everyone to see the expectations everyone has for and of each other. (Click here to learn more about the impact of a meaningful company narrative on leadership at Mom’s Meals.)
Leaders make the story real.
Aligning on the desired experience is not the same as enabling leaders to create it. That’s a much bigger effort that is best accomplished through high-quality, thoughtful, custom-tailored leadership development.
From frontline supervisors to the C-suite, every leader in your organization should understand their responsibility to deliver an engaging, retention-driven EX, particularly in the moments that matter. So, if your company narrative represents a people-centered, high-performance culture that’s desired by today’s workforce, your leaders will need strong social-emotional skills.
Great leaders know themselves well and can regulate their own feelings and emotions. They’re also skilled at knowing others well and helping them regulate their feelings and emotions. When sharing a vision of the future, offering clarity, having difficult conversations, offering feedback, supporting someone through a failure, discussing compensation, or addressing interpersonal team dynamics, leaders are called upon to have a deep reserve of psychological capital they can tap into, as well as strong relationship-building skills. That takes training and practice. (Want more insights on how leaders create great teams? Click here.)
Effective leadership development programs strategically support people in shoring up those social-emotional reserves, while also enabling them to tap into the needed actions and behaviors in the moments that matter. That step-by-step “how it should show up here” is the critical piece that’s often missing in off-the-shelf leadership offerings.
Employment is a relationship.
Healthy interpersonal relationships help us thrive, individually and collectively. They are difficult and challenging; they require deep work, resilience, and adaptability; they are built on collaboration, compromise, struggle, and growth. Yet, engaging in a healthy relationship makes us better. It enriches our lives, creating new possibilities within us and between us. Healthy interpersonal relationships are a source of joy, and a healthy employment relationship is no different.
Today’s workers are wary of being asked to bring all their energy and talents to the table for the benefit of their organization, only to be rewarded with stress, long hours, and emotional strife for themselves. They’re looking for mutual value creation—meaning everyone gets more out of the deal than what they put in, realized in fair, equal measures.
When the organization’s leaders and employees all show up at their best, putting in the hard work for each other and investing in each other’s needs and goals, we make each other better. It’s a collaborative creation of mutual value where the needs of individuals and the organization are understood and served. Creating an environment where this is the norm is not only possible—it’s imperative for organizations to thrive.
Healthy, high-performing organizations inspire and enable their leaders to create conditions that engage everyone in this kind of relationship. They intentionally design for the moments that matter to their employees, transparently communicate a unique and authentic company narrative, and actively equip their leaders with support tailored to their needs for managing an engaging, mutually valuable, joy-inducing EX.
Craft your organization’s unique narrative
Through this work, both your organization and the people in it can realize their own—and their collective—potential. Are you looking for a partner to help craft your organization’s unique company narrative, determine the moments that matter to your employees, and customize leadership development content that meets your specific needs? Let’s talk! Fill out the form below and a member of our team will be in touch.
This article originally appeared in The Healthy, High-Performing Cultures Issue of Performance Matters Magazine. To request a print or digital copy of the magazine, click here.
