Ayesha, an HR professional in a mid-sized IT firm, is experiencing a dilemma. Even as she continues to hire top industry talent, she sees high employee disengagement and churn rates within the organization.
Somehow, candidate attraction is high, but retention issues are on the rise. Clearly, a step in the employee journey is broken, but which one? To tackle the problem, Ayesha needs not only need to identify the issue, but solve it.
She’s not alone. While IT remains a top industry when it comes to employee engagement and churn challenges, this phenomenon cuts across industries. As many as 59% of employees are not engaged or are quiet quitting, as per Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report.
As employee expectations around work, life, and purpose evolve, even top employers cannot afford to slip on nurturing employee relationships. Strong relationships are key to driving high engagement and performance, keeping them from becoming “loud” quitters, and negatively affecting organizational goals. In a highly connected industry and talent environment, these relationships are also an effective way to remain an employer of choice.
Forging a genuine connection for better employee relationships
As things stand, there is a gap in what employers and management leaders perceive as healthy, engaged employee relationships, as opposed to what most employees experience. For instance, while Ayesha and her management believed a mandate for upskilling was leading to an enhanced employee experience (EX) and a more valuable relationship, employees saw it differently. Instead, employees saw it as an added responsibility in which they had little choice, mentorship, or visibility in terms of alignment to their career goals.
This universal, pan-industry challenge calls for a shift in how we traditionally approach employee communication – a top-down or even a two-way but static approach doesn’t work. Instead, we need to have a fluid and integrated communication ecosystem. It must:
- Create visibility on employee paths as they evolve and allow for personalized, high-value interventions
- Prompt responding to employee needs and challenges in a more collaborative, fluid fashion enables moving away from periodic, framework-led solutions
- Consistently review and shape progress in employee sentiment and performance
At a larger level, this ecosystem must enable a data-intelligent culture that goes beyond cut-and-dried metrics to elevate EX and relationships.
Mobilizing data-led insights to improve employee engagement
Building an integrated communication ecosystem doesn’t come easy. The good news is that it also isn’t impossible. If anything, leaders are optimistic about the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation in this context. The sophisticated employee engagement market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 17% by 2030.
By leveraging the right end-to-end EX management solution, you can tune into the Voice of the Employee and offer value that modern employee relationships demand.
How?
In Ayesha’s case, she was able to not only gather and analyze evolving employee data from across channels but also mobilize it quickly. By creating access to an intuitive EX platform for team leads, she helped them empathize better with individual employee emotions, and align their next move – be it a new project opportunity discussion or an exit interview – in an informed manner. At a company level, it helped her build a culture of insight-driven listening and empathetic engagement.
How to improve employee relationships with integrated communication
We can continue with Ayesha’s case here, too. Some of the top benefits the platform’s integrated communication capabilities unlocked for her company illustrate how integrated communications improve employee relationships:
- Express clear intent and concern from management to employees breaking down silos and bridging employee experience gaps
- Automate for frequent and improved responses for regular employee feedback collection and flow through the company
- Create an anonymous, always-on communication channel to generate honest feedback for real growth
- Run prompt, personalized surveys through the employee lifecycle to keep the pulse of employee expectations and needs
- Monitor evolving employee sentiment with advanced analytics
- Visualized data to inform talent-related business and growth decisions
- Align all communication to employee paths and sentiment
Elevating EX and relationships: the way ahead
Your top talent wants to work with authentic people and businesses. And standard templates and reports around employee feedback don’t help you respond in an intuitive, human manner. You need to hear, predict, and engage them like their top colleague. This calls for leveraging actionable data from multiple, non-linear touchpoints through an employee’s lifecycle; it is the first and the most critical step to integrated communication.
However, it is far from the last. To excel at integrated communication, you must look for ways to channel insights into your core operations and workflows. This is because top companies will not just EX at the core of their business, right alongside CX. It will raise the bar for everyone looking to engage top talent; listening just won’t cut it. You must align every action that impacts talent to intuitiveness.
Keen to know more about our end-to-end EX management platform? Discover why Sogolytics is the top choice for talent professionals.
