16. DISCOVER DEFINE DEVELOP DELIVER
Designing Experience
16
Design is about INTENTION.
What experience are you creating?
How do you want employees to feel?
28. Designing Experience
28
Designing for CLARITY
How could you remove
uncertainty and create
greater clarity in the
onboarding process?
How could you leverage
technology to accomplish
this?
New Employee
Onboarding
29. The Experience of a Best Place to Work
CLARITY
CONNECTION
LOVE
CLARITY
34. Designing Experience
34
Designing for CONNECTION
How could you create more
connection in the onboarding
process?
How could you leverage
technology to accomplish this?New Employee
Onboarding
35. The Experience of a Best Place to Work
CLARITY
CONNECTION
LOVE
CLARITY
39. Designing Experience
39
Designing for LOVE
How could you create more
care and appreciation in the
onboarding process?
How could you leverage
technology to accomplish this?New Employee
Onboarding
40. DISCOVER DEFINE DEVELOP DELIVER
Designing Experience
40
Design is about INTENTION.
What experience are you creating?
How do you want employees to feel?
The great thing about talking about employee engagement is that while you are all leaders within the organization, you are also employees and you’ve been employees for a long time (some longer than others, clearly). So, at times throughout the day today, I’m going to ask you to take off your leader hat and put on your employee hat so you can think about your own experiences throughout your career as an employee to dig for insights. This is one of those times.
First, I want you to think back over your career and pick the time when you were most in love with your job. That time when you were totally in sync with your job and loved your work. Hopefully, you can easily remember a time like this or at least something close to it. Now that you have this in mind, I’d like you to jot down the answer to a couple of questions about when you were doing this job that you loved.
First, how did you feel about work when you were doing this job you loved? Just write down what immediately comes to mind.
Next, how would you describe the quality of your work during this time? What it poor, inspired, average?
Finally, what impact did your work have on your personal life? What impact did it have on your health? What about your relationships with others?
Okay, now we are going to make a new list. This time, I want you to think back to the time in your career when you were most out of sync with work, you know, when nothing was really working for you. Hopefully, you don’t have a huge list of these to choose from.
Now, I’d like you to answer the same three questions about this job. How did you feel about work when you were in this job?
Now, how would you describe the quality of your work during this part of your career?
Finally, how was work spilling over into your personal life at this point in your career? What were you taking home with you? How was it impacting your relationships, your health?
If you sat in these events at times, you’d think that the path to a best place to work was investing in perks for your employees. But, each year, we analyze all of the items in our engagement survey for their statistical correlation to overall engagement level. The goal is to understand which items and factors in the workplace have the strongest overall effect on engagement. Year after year, our items about benefits and perks are dead last in this analysis.
That doesn’t mean that benefits and perks don’t matter. Benefits are satisfiers, which means they are table stakes. If you don’t provide at least a competitive amount of benefits, they can become a dissatisfier and that can negatively affect engagement. But, you can’t buy engagement through perks.
So, if it’s not perks, what really matters when it comes to creating a work environment that employees would call a best place to work?
Our research points to three critical parts that are common in the organizations that are the best of the best.
Voicemail from the school.
Email from the boss.
This is what uncertainty feels like. Uncertainty is gross.
Uncertainty kills engagement. Which is why Best places to work are committed to relentlessly reducing uncertainty through ongoing communication.
o Once the hiring process is in the post-acceptance and onboarding stage, the expectation is for your process to be seamless and frustration-free for new hires – yet a noticeable number of candidates say this stage has not been ideal.
o Take onboarding, for example. 71% of employers say the onboarding experience is the first part of the employee experience within an organization. Yet only 47% say they have a formal process in place for post-hire – but pre-start date – communication and interactions. 2 in 5 candidates (40 percent) say they’ve experienced a lack of communication in the past between when they accepted the job and their first day of work.
o Source: http://resources.careerbuilder.com/guides/onboarding-process-best-practices
For those who are ready to sign up to become a social architect, I want you to get out your smart phone because I have some stuff for you. If you visit this website and enter your email address, you will immediately receive a copy of these slides and the reading list I mentioned earlier.
But wait, there’s more. Everyone who enters their email will be entered into a drawing for a dozen signed Social Gravity books to share with your colleagues to get you started on this path.
If you don’t have a smart phone or aren’t sure how to use it, find me and give me a business card.