There’s a massive gap between the employee experience that UK staff are looking for and what’s currently provided by HR, sparking discontent and resignations, according to unsettling new research*.
The statistics the research discovered were stark. Failing to act is driving staff out of the door – 67% of employees said they’d be more likely to stay if employers listened and made changes based on their feedback. 85% of HR staff think they are using employee feedback to improve the experience they offer. Yet only half (50%) of staff agree. Just 14% think their employer uses feedback very effectively to drive change. With staff leaving at an increasing rate, it seems organisations have lost track of how to retain talent, implementing ineffective listening strategies that employees feel minimise their roles.
“Employee feedback programmes should be helping companies battle the Great Resignation – but the data shows that they are fundamentally broken,” said Peter Wilde, Head of Employee Experience, Tivian. “Even more worrying is that unlike staff, most HR professionals believe they are still effective. It is time to stop treating feedback as a tick box exercise and deliver a personalised, two-way approach that uses communication to motivate, keep, and get the best out of staff.”
Employees feel powerless and that their bosses are out of touch with their needs. 70% of staff said they had little or no influence over how things were done at their company and 38% felt the company was rarely or never open to their ideas. While 97% wanted to work for open and transparent organisations only around half (55%) actually did. Worryingly, HR agreed – just 42% said their company “did transparency” well.
We all want to be treated as an individual. But apparently this isn’t happening at work. Only 12% of employees receive laser-targeted, personalised feedback – 88% get generic, one-size-fits-all communications that could be meant for anyone. Despite the technology they’ve got, 70% of HR staff admit that they just communicate with generic templates or on a departmental level.
HR has upped the cadence of listening programmes, with 80% asking for employee feedback on a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. But according to the numbers, they’re not listening holistically across the employee lifecycle. Only 36% of HR teams collect feedback during recruitment, 50% during onboarding and 19% on work anniversaries. Listening at these critical moments is vital to staff feeling a “personal touch” to their work life, and to provide crucial feedback that drives improvements. Only two-thirds (62%) collect feedback when an employee resigns. Too little, too late. Doing this earlier might well prevent them leaving in the first place.
“There’s two frustrating conclusions from our study,” said Peter Wilde, Head of Employee Experience, Tivian. “Firstly, HR professionals think they’re doing a good job but clearly aren’t. And most importantly these gaps can be easily bridged if HR staff start thinking like marketers. The tools and processes are out there for the customer experience – HR need to embrace them to deliver the right employee experience. Then they’ll be giving people what they actually want and add real value to the business.”
*Findings from Tivian
