Employee communication is one of the key building blocks that support your company’s operations. While straightforward, it quickly fails without the right tools and strategies.
Arranging seamless communication between employees and managers while maintaining smooth team interactions requires a comprehensive approach. It ties into employee culture, experience, recognition, and satisfaction.
Let’s take a closer look at the importance of employee communication experience and ways to streamline it.
How to Measure Employee Experience
Measuring employee experience is vital to evaluating your retention efforts. Amidst the Great Resignation, employee churn rates are worrisome at best.
Over 50 million people quit their jobs in 2022. The future of work depends on how these numbers change.
One of the reasons for high turnover rates across many industries is employee experience. Employees who are unhappy with onboarding quality, engagement, company culture, and communication are likely to look for other employment opportunities.
In addition, employee experience directly affects the company’s bottom line. According to Harvard Business Review, a significant improvement in employee experience can increase revenue by as much as 50%.
Meanwhile, companies that demonstrate excellent results across employee experience metrics see an improvement in customer experience metrics.
To measure employee experience, you can focus on these indicators:
- Employee satisfaction – how satisfied an employee is with their experience at the company (starting from recruitment and onboarding)
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) – how likely an employee is to recommend their current place of work to someone else
- Employee productivity – how productive an employee is (ratio between the number of hours worked and the output)
- Employee wellness – how healthy employees are and how well they maintain work-life balance
- Employee retention – how many employees remain with the company for a year or more
- Employee engagement – how engaged employees feel at the workplace (generally measured with pulse surveys)
- Employee absenteeism – how often employees take sick days or unplanned days off
- Referrals – how many people employees refer for a job at your organization
- Employee recognition – how often you recognize employees for their achievements
To monitor the majority of these metrics, you need to arrange employee experience surveys and use the available HR technology. Below we’ll go over a couple of ways to get this done.
Software Reports
Depending on the type of software you use in your organization, you can leverage the available reports to check:
- How often employees have taken days off (and how many days they are absent per year)
- What type of health benefits they use the most
- How often you recognize employees, and which employees receive more recognition than others
- How many employees take advantage of wellness opportunities offered by the company
- How many people your employees refer to the organization
- How often employees communicate with each other
Meanwhile, you can use the available tools to measure productivity growth, sales, and employee churn. You’ll get a bird’s eye view of how well your company is doing across all fields.
These reports can give you exact numbers to work with. However, it’s hard to see the full picture without employee feedback. That’s where surveys come in.
Employee Surveys
You can conduct several surveys depending on the metrics you want to evaluate. The majority of these surveys come with a scale from 1 to 10 and contain several statements. The employee chooses a number that demonstrates how much they agree or disagree with the statement.
Here are a few different types:
- Candidate experience survey – a survey that collects information about the recruitment experience
- Onboarding experience survey – a survey that measures onboarding experience, usually after 30, 60, and 90 days with the company
- Engagement survey – a survey that measures employee engagement and includes such statements as, “I’m proud to work for the company,” “I would recommend this company to a friend,” “I often think about looking for another job,” etc
- Employee NPS survey – a survey that measures how likely employees are to recommend their place of work to someone else
- Pulse surveys – a regular survey with a small number of questions (5 -10) to gather current employee feedback
You can also send out surveys that encourage open-ended answers. While they take longer to analyze, such surveys usually provide beneficial information.
The key to getting valuable data without overwhelming your staff is to make surveys concise. You can take advantage of certain tools to help with survey creation, distribution, and analytics.
What Does Good Employee Culture Actually Look Like?
The building blocks of employee culture are excellent communication, meaningful work, and organizational values. By creating an appealing atmosphere in the workplace, you can boost employee satisfaction, retain talent, and improve the company’s bottom line.
According to a Glassdoor survey, 56% of employees say company culture is even more important than salary. Meanwhile, 77% of candidates look at employee culture before applying for a job.
The key elements of employee culture are:
- Communication – This key element of employee culture drives understanding, sharing, engagement, and trust.
- Sense of community – Employees should feel like they belong to a special community. This helps them care for their team members and streamlines their engagement within the company.
- Fairness – Management must treat all employees equally, especially regarding recognition. When employees believe that some receive more opportunities or rewards than others, it hinders their sense of belonging.
- Trust – When employees see that management trusts them to work remotely, set flexible working hours, or have more control over their work, they feel more engaged.
- Caring – Showing that you care for your employees through recognition, wellness arrangements, and other tactics helps your staff enjoy a safe and comfortable work environment.
- Development opportunities – When you provide development opportunities to employees, they see your genuine interest in their progress. This builds a stronger company culture.
A good employee culture is built on trust, fairness, caring, and support. When employees feel that they are a part of such a community, they are less likely to look for other employment options.
What Is Employee Connectedness?
Employee connectedness is another important part of the company culture. It’s a sense of belonging to the workplace community. To succeed in the workplace and have a satisfactory experience, an employee should connect to the:
- People – They should feel connected to colleagues, managers, and senior management, who need to position themselves as members of the same team.
- Responsibilities – They should understand that everything they do in the workplace contributes to the company’s development and personal growth.
- Values – They should feel that the company is making a difference and that they contribute significantly to its success.
Communication is important to an employee’s connectedness to people, responsibilities, and values. It’s up to the employer to ensure smooth communication tools and opportunities for the entire staff, including remote and non-desk workers.
How Are Communication Tools Tied to Culture and Connectedness?
High-quality employee communication tools are a must-have for excellent culture, smooth connectedness, and exceptional company health.
Employee communication involves sharing ideas, feelings, and information between team members. It’s a continuous process that happens in many forms, including verbal, written, and digital.
When employees communicate, they strengthen the sense of belonging to the work environment and improve the company culture. However, without the right tools, communication can suffer.
These tools can:
- Help employees stay connected regardless of their location
- Allow employees to feel like they are a part of something bigger, fostering their sense of belonging
- Demonstrate your dedication to employee satisfaction, connectedness, and well-being
- Help recognize employee contributions to the company and assist with rewarding their efforts
- Allow remote and non-desk employees to be closer to the rest of the team and battle loneliness (22% of remote workers don’t feel connected to the rest of the workforce)
- Foster social interactions and help nurture company culture on-site and out of the office
- Contribute to employee engagement by helping them see the importance of their work
Another important benefit of robust employee communication tools is knowledge retention. Employees generate a vast amount of information during their lifetime with the company and communicate it to other team members.
Without effective tools, this communication remains verbal, stays on the employee’s personal laptop, or, in the worst case, gets erased. When the employee leaves, the information goes with them.
Communication tools can keep track of valuable information and add it to the company’s knowledge base.
Good Communication Tools Are Absolutely Tied to the Employee Experience
Communication is essential to establishing meaningful relationships in the workplace, streamlining operations, reinforcing recognition, boosting engagement, and much more.
With the right communication tools in your arsenal, you can improve retention, increase revenue, and position yourself as an employer of choice. Since employee experience depends on high-quality communication, these tools have a direct connection to your company’s success.
Refresh offers a comprehensive employee experience platform with a collection of strong communication tools. Find out how we can help your business succeed by requesting a demo!