Understanding your employees and improving their work experience has become more and more difficult. Many employees are working remotely, making them hard to reach. While for (large) organisations it is difficult to sustain a good overview of the well-being and performance of all the employees, across departments, age, gender, and education. Now, many managers just deal with these issues in a reactive way. Only if someone starts yelling about an issue, management responds and solves it. This keeps the ones who yell satisfied (but not necessarily happy), while the ones who remain silent might be frustrated internally, reach levels of burn-out, quit suddenly, or just perform poorly in general.
The new way of people and workplace management takes a different approach. Instead of just reacting on issues and solving those (too late), the goal is rather to anticipate and listen to employees. By understanding how (all of them) are doing, what they are up to, and what they (will) need. Managers can now connect and support them directly in their work. It is a focus on employee experience and well-being that makes employees flourish in their work as we discussed in our whitepaper.
Habital®
A few of our clients have internalised this message and have used our Habital®-solution. Habital® is an app for employees that focuses on supporting their work life. Habital® takes a holistic approach by involving all aspects that boost or constrain employee performance and well-being. A research of 12 weeks explores all the aspects that influence the employee. It focuses on four categories: workplace, organisation, work processes, and personal factors. Through the app, employees receive short surveys about these topics and have a personal dashboard displaying their own data, making it directly useful for them. Managers have (anonymous) group dashboards with actionable insights that are interactive with breakdowns and filters (conforming to EU GDPR).
Consultancy firm
One of our clients, a consultancy firm, was interested in Habital® since they were struggling with employee engagement. Of course, introducing Habital® by itself is already a way to show your employees you recognise them and value their opinion. But our client was really interested in the data. When using it, the employees seemed satisfied with their organisation (8.0) and their work processes (7.6), but the personal issues (6.8) caused the seeming lack of employee engagement.
Other data on the dashboards confirmed this finding by showing that the work-energy score was quite high (7.2), while their well-being score was low (4.3). The solutions for the issues were thus rather on the (personal) health side. Habital® asks employees which solutions they would desire, and the most popular answer was providing gym membership (discounts), followed by active team activities. The assumed issue, engagement to the company, was thus misplaced. People were engaged with the company, but they experienced well-being issues that they wanted to solve with physical activity.
International Project organisation
A different client has employees spread around the world talking different languages while hardly sharing an office together. With the pandemic, this organisation was worried that their employees would get further isolated. Leading to low well-being and subsequent poor work performance. The organisation wanted to understand this and see what they could do.
In the first weeks of the research, the dashboards were loaded with data. By using the Filter-feature, the client could easily compare: Remote-, Office- and Hybrid workers and look at their differences. It turned out to be completely different from expected. It was a surprise that the employees who were working fully remote reported a very high mood of 8.4 and a performance of 8.1. While “work tasks” were their most often reported issue. On the other hand for Office and Hybrid workers, the average mood (7.6) and performance (8.0) were lower. For these workers, the “work space” was the most often reported issue.
The interesting thing, however, was that the performance of Hybrid employees was quite high at the office, but very low when they worked at home. For example, hybrid workers rated “low concentration work” at the office an 8.7 on average, but at home a 7.1, a massive difference. They were struggling the most with their well-being and health. So it seemed that the highest gains, when it comes to work & space, were for the Hybrid workers. Encouraging them to come more regularly to the office, or structure their days working remotely, might boost their productivity and well-being.
Conclusions
The used cases show that it is important to check assumptions and guide decisions based on actual data. Instead of just some people shouting the loudest, or some gut feeling. Listening to your employees might be the most direct way to solve their issues. It can guide them towards high engagement, well-being, and productivity. Altogether, using Habital® showed to be useful for various organisational challenges. It covers a deeper understanding of all the topics employees deal with. While giving a clear visual overview of the dashboards. Using filters and various interactive graphs makes it easy to dive into specific topics while keeping a clear overview of what’s going on at a holistic level while giving actionable insights for future action.
