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Employee experience is critical, but it’s often misunderstood. Many leaders approach “employee experience” as if they are Google, spending time and energy on games in the office, fancy foods, and expensive offsites. What’s often missed is, quite simply, the little things.
Little things like office chat make all the difference to the employee experience. As a team leader, it is your responsibility to lay the groundwork and find ways to improve cross-team communication and interaction.
Small steps can lead to impactful, positive changes to the employee experience in your organization. In this article, we’ll take a super-speedy look at how you can improve employee experience with office chat. Before we dive in, let’s get warmed up with some SCIENCE! Here are three recent findings from various studies on employee experience:
In 2017, Jacob Morgan, from the Harvard Business Review, conducted an in-depth analysis of why large organizations spend millions of dollars on employee engagement and see little change in outcomes. Morgan wanted to understand what aspects of the workplace environment employees care about the most. By doing this, Morgan studied the workplace environment through the employees’ lens.
Jacob Morgan found three environments that matter the most to employees:
Using these three core areas, Morgan analyzed 250 different companies. Many of these companies can be found on various “best place to work” lists in major publications like Fortune.
More than half of the companies from the selection were rated poorly in at least one of the three environments and 20% of the companies received low scores across the board. Many of these companies missed the mark when it came to employee experience. However, Morgan did identify a small portion of companies that he deemed experiential.
Morgan singled out these experiential companies based on their heavy investment in technological, cultural and physical environments for their employees. From his findings, these investments have paid off. Typically, these companies have 40% lower turnover than those companies not identified as experiential.
The investments made by these companies also translated into bigger profits. Jacob Morgan discovered the experiential companies have two times higher average revenues, tying a direct correlation between employee experience and business impact.
Surprisingly, employee experience is still a relatively new concept. The experiential companies who invested heavily in their experiences simply grow faster than the companies that didn’t. As time goes on, we expect those actively investing in employee experience to continue to grow and attract the best talent in their industries.
Employees want to enjoy being at work. Workplace culture breaks down when the working environment becomes negative. Team leaders need to explore ways to increase employee engagement, particularly in cross-team communication.
Team members need to feel comfortable with talking to their co-workers. Effective teams have a consistent stream of communication across the office. To build this culture, you should set up a series of non-work-related activities designed to get your team members talking to each other. You can think of these as being ice breakers.
It’s a way to spark conversation about something other than the weather or weekend plans, for those awkward two minutes in the elevator together or at the start of a Zoom call.
Water Cooler Trivia is the perfect tool for facilitating office chat in the workplace. With Water Cooler Trivia, you can customize your weekly trivia quizzes around topics most relevant to your team. These quizzes can be seamlessly sent to your team members. Team members could work in small groups to tackle the questions, creating conversations and strengthening relationships.
