Over the past few years, employees have developed a more sophisticated sense of their needs and, as such, are less willing to settle for an experience that doesn’t meet their expectations. As a result, there is an increasing demand for personalisation of the employee experience.
Most of the positive outcomes that organisations often aim for; pride, loyalty, wellbeing, have their foundations in an experience of work that genuinely meets the needs of each employee. It’s hard to exaggerate the extent to which a broad-brush approach fails to cut it today. And it’s not just employees that stand to benefit from increased personalisation. Attracting and retaining talent is becoming more difficult than ever and personalising the experience of work will help to engender trust and loyalty, and lower attrition rates.
Finding balance
But balancing the needs of the individual with the needs of the business is easier said than done. And it’s especially tricky in large, global organisations with multiple different audiences. Often, the fear of the challenge being insurmountable leads many to shy away from the ambition all together.
With scope to make a tangible difference across the entire employee lifecycle, we think there’s opportunity for enhanced personalisation in even most complex of organisations and that it is possible to balance flexibility with performance and profit.
From customised recruitment and a well-considered and engaging onboarding experience to personalised job families, reward and benefits packages or bespoke learning and development experiences, there are multiple opportunities for organisations to tailor their employee’s experience.
Enabling line managers
With their personal knowledge of an employee and an ability to directly impact their experience, so much potential personalisation comes via the line manager.
If they can dedicate time to surfacing people’s individual goals, motivations and needs and put effort into responding to this information, they will improve their employees overall experience and sense of fulfilment at work. To create an environment that allows everyone to thrive, managers must update their mindset and aim to tailor their approach to the individual, while balancing with the needs of their team.
Updating organisational structures to ensure that managers have fewer direct reports may help to drive further personalisation. It’s unreasonable to expect a line manager to deeply understand or respond to the needs of 20 to 30 people, but entirely possible for them to do it for a team of 10.
Organisations could also consider developing flexible, high-level policies that line managers are empowered to interpret and adapt to the wide range of needs in their team.
To drive change, personalisation should be considered an integral part of a manager’s role and be included in the expectations an organisation has of their leaders, with objectives and performance management aligned where possible.
But what about business performance?
Being able to truly get what they need from work so that they can perform to the best of their ability is a huge win for employees. But it has huge benefits for organisations too.
Although it might concern some who foresee a lack of control and consistency, to compete in a competitive market they need to retain the best talent that they can attract; ambitious individuals who are motivated to perform and drive commercial growth.
The probability of finding and keeping these people are higher when they believe their needs are met. The evolving mindset of employee’s, and the more individualist culture that has emerged in many organisations, reveals more expectation on the ‘get’ side of the ‘give and get’ contract than we’ve seen before.
You don’t have to go it alone
Some organisations have shied away from enhanced personalisation because of the perceived amount of time and resource it requires.
But there’s an increasing amount of technology that can help. Bespoke AI-driven dashboards can provide insight into team trends and help identify needs with much less human attention and effort than might have previously been required. Many organisations are also investing in more sophisticated feedback gathering tools that allow them to evolve beyond the typical annual engagement survey of which employees often question the impact.
Priority call
However you go about it, it’s vital to prioritise enhanced personalisation of the employee experience as we move through 2024. The organisations that are brave enough to do this now, and those who put concrete measures and boundaries in place, will be richly repaid with engaged, committed, high performing employees.
If you're looking get ahead of the game when it comes to personalising the experience you offer your employees, drop us a line.
