Intent is Key When Designing an Employee Experience Plan

 By: JD Fairweather

The key to a good employee engagement plan is the intent. If the intent is only to increase productivity, revenue, or customer growth—any gains achieved will likely not last long.

Now that customer experience is recognized as the differential between competitors many organizations are planning to improve those experiences by deploying employee engagement programs. The thought is that by increasing employee engagement the customer experience will improve resulting in gains in both revenue and customer growth.

Although productivity, revenue, and customer growth are benefits of positive employee experiences, using the happiness of employees to drive growth is a poor approach and one that will likely fail.

Here are a 5 questions to ask yourself when creating an employee engagement plan to ensure its success—

Is it Authentic

If you can’t honestly say the project is for the betterment of the employees don’t fake it, find or hire someone to lead the program that can. Create advocates not enemies by being genuine in your approach; nothing creates an enemy of change more than the feeling of being manipulated.

Include advocates from each impacted department early in the planning process and acknowledge their contributions in the final plan.

Is There an Executive Champion

Nothing is worse than starting an employee engagement plan and not having the backing to see it through.  Even rumors of a plan that goes unimplemented will negatively affect morale and trust with your employees.

Get an executive to champion the project, the higher-up the better. Be sure to include both the desired qualitative and quantitative results that show value, providing result driven metrics for the executive to share in the c-suite will help garner more support for the initiative.  Remember though, some of the greatest growth is in the people impacted and that can be immeasurable so don’t keep pushing.

Is it LongTerm

Don’t think short term, include goals in the plan that might not see success for some years to come. Career, financial, family wellness, skill-set and health improvements can take years to achieve but are very important to your employees.

Is it Transparent 

No secret slide decks or hidden agendas, everything should be decided and shared openly to establish and maintain trust throughout the campaign.

Transparency is not only about removing secrecy, it also extends to clarity and having a clear vision for the well-being of your employees and the value they bring will go a long way.

Is it Fair

Value for you, value for them. A great employee engagement plan is an agreement between both parties, it must benefit the employee and the organization.

Upping employee benefits and pay increases is great, but not if it makes the company financially unstable. Open floor plans only work if majority of the staff enjoy working outside the confinement of cubes and walls.

A plan that only brings value to one and not the other is guaranteed to fail.

It’s great to see companies looking to improve the experiences of their employees, by establishing one with the right intent any uptick in performance will be natural and lasting.

Are you planning an employee engagement initiative? Do you have one going on now that has stalled out? Let us know, we would love to discuss some proven methods on establishing one and keeping it on-track.

via The Taylor Reach Group Inc. http://ift.tt/1nJacNo