Have you ever wondered what it means to have an employee-centric culture in the workplace? Throughout the years and across various industries, many have had their own notions of what this concept means. Some believe that it’s putting your employees first and your business second. Others say that it’s sacrificing corporate performance for the happiness of your employees.
If you’ll notice, they both have a negative connotation of what an employee-centric culture is. They think that they need to sacrifice their own business needs to achieve an idyllic workplace environment. When in fact, it’s the opposite.
Let’s take a look at what it means and how it can benefit the company as a whole.
What Does It Mean To Have an Employee-Centric Culture?
In simple terms, an organization that embraces an employee-centric culture respects its employees and takes good care of them. This means that every employee is valued. They’re also viewed as an integral component of the company’s success. In doing so, they create a healthy environment where employees can express themselves, make suggestions, and challenge the structure.
When your employees feel like they have the power to make a difference, to share their innovative ideas, or to participate in your company’s growth, then they’re more likely to stay with you long-term. As a result, you can increase your employee retention.
What Is Employee Turnover?
Employee turnover is described as losing an organizational talent after a period of time. While this may be a natural occurrence, it poses a significant problem for many organizations. In 2019 alone, more than 42 million workers voluntarily left their jobs.
As of December 2021, around 47.4 million U.S. workers left their jobs in search of better work. To this date, this constitutes the highest number of resignations in recorded history. If this trend continues in this trajectory, more than 33% of employees may leave their current jobs by 2023.
In this increasingly fast-paced and competitive labor landscape, many employees are resigning from their current positions to pursue other career paths that they believe will offer growth opportunities or help them achieve their personal goals. When this happens, a company experiences what is known as employee turnover.
What Is Employee Retention?
Employee retention refers to the company’s ability to prevent turnover and keep its employees in the organization for a long period of time. This is especially crucial in this day and age because the number of employees that stay has a direct impact on the business’s performance and ultimately its success.
According to a study conducted by Gallup, businesses across the country spend over $1 trillion annually to replace their employees who decide to leave their jobs. Rather than using their resources to increase their revenue, boost productivity, enhance employee experience, and build a strong knowledge base, they are forced to allocate their funds to finding replacements.
While there are several ways to prevent this from happening and increase employee retention, we believe that promoting an employee-centric culture is the best place to start.
The Importance of Promoting an Employee-Centric Culture
Your employees are the backbone of your business. Without them, it would be difficult — almost impossible, really — to achieve your objectives. By encouraging an employee-centric culture, you can give more to your workers without risking the well-being of your company. This is because designing a plan that puts the interests of your employees first will not only save money but, more importantly, increase your profits. Apart from this, below details why it’s important to focus on promoting a workplace culture that cultivates your employees.
Enhance Employee Productivity
Happiness begets productivity. This means that your employees tend to work better when they are in a positive frame of mind. In addition, they tend to pay more attention to detail and produce better outputs because they are more invested in their jobs.
If they need improvement, they will feel more motivated to better themselves because they’re not afraid to make mistakes. They will feel freer to explore new ideas and share their creative input. As a consequence, they can substantially contribute to the growth of your company.
Better Match Employees to Their Tasks
If you have a long-time employee who has been with your company for many years, chances are, you have an idea about their strengths and weaknesses. As such, you can use this valuable insight to assign them to the tasks that they are well suited for. Sooner or later, you will see an improvement in overall performance and team camaraderie.
Attract the Best Talents
A company that offers incredible benefits naturally draws the attention of superior talents. Even if you don’t offer the highest salary, as long as you open yourself up to new ideas, challenges, and suggestions, you can still attract the best employees for the job. More than that, you can further inspire them to stay loyal to your company and devote 100% of their energy to their work.
As per Glassdoor, great employee experiences can increase your retention by 82% and overall productivity by 70%. That said, if you want to meet these goals, you need to focus on promoting an employee-centric culture.
Strengthen Customer Relations
Improving customer relations go hand-in-hand with increasing employee retention. Since your existing clients have experience working alongside some of your long-time employees, they know what to expect from you and you can meet (and exceed) their expectations. As a result, they are more likely to stay with your company and strengthen their relationship with you in the future.
Increase ROI
Due to its impact on your employees’ performance and client relationships, encouraging an employee-centric culture can increase your revenue and ROI. A study conducted by Willis Towers Watson discovered that companies who are performing well put a strong focus on improving their employees’ outlook on their organization.
Whether that’s making them feel inspired by their organization’s mission and vision, giving them the opportunity to obtain their career goals, or creating a deep trust between them and their higher management, companies that value their employees will see a positive result in their ROIs.
7 Employee Retention Strategies To Increase ROI
At this point, you may be wondering, what is ROI in business and why does it matter?
Simply put, an ROI (also known as the Return of Investment) is one of the key performance indicators many businesses use to measure the profitability of their expenditure. It’s especially useful if you want to determine your success over time. Ultimately, this can take away all the guesswork from making influential business decisions in the future.
If you want to learn how you can increase your ROI through your employee-centric culture, we have narrowed down some of the best strategies you can implement in the workplace.
1. Analyze Your Existing Culture
Before you can take action on improving your workplace culture, you first need to analyze your existing one. In doing so, you may see common patterns and recurring issues that typically arise in one or more departments. Only when you’ve identified the problems you need to address can you start planning on ways to improve your workplace culture.
2. Use Data to Make Decisions
When making pivotal decisions, it’s important that you use more than your gut. Rather, you need to use the data available to you to make decisions that will reap positive results.
Besides the complex tools that can gather substantial data, you can also use your skill of observation to determine which areas need improvement. For example, you notice that you have a complicated process or you find that your workflow is not efficient. In any case, your first-hand experiences can help you understand your company better and, therefore, take the best course of action.
3. Ask for Feedback
While your personal experience in itself proves to be an asset in your decision-making process, it may not be enough. If such is the case, we recommend that you ask for your employees’ feedback on how you can enhance the work culture.
For this to be effective, you need to be proactive in your approach and involve your workers. Ditch the suggestion boxes and communicate with your employees face-to-face. Conduct interviews, organize focus groups, or chat with your employees on a daily basis. These methods will help you obtain the most valuable information regarding your organization.
4. Integrate a Rewards Strategy
A great strategy to involve your employees in is to integrate a rewards strategy. When they’re driven by monetary incentives and compensation, they are more likely to feel empowered, participate in your company’s growth, and remain loyal to your business.
But, take note: money is not the only motivator you can utilize. If your employees value learning and skill development, your rewards can center around opportunities for them to develop their skills and progress in their careers.
5. Prioritize Your Employees’ Physical, Mental, and Psychological Well-Being
As mentioned before, your company is only as good as your employees. So, you really need to invest in their overall well-being to ensure that they are in the best mental, physical, psychological, and even emotional state to function properly in the workplace.
You can start by creating a conducive atmosphere that promotes health and wellness in the office. Below are some tips to help you out.
- Make sure that the rooms are well-lit and well-ventilated.
- Control the amount of noise that penetrates through the walls.
- Install ergonomic equipment and furniture for your employees’ comfort.
- Offer healthy food options in your cafeteria.
- Allot spaces in the office where they can recharge and unwind.
While creating a supportive environment in the workplace is a good place to start, we don’t think you should stop there. You can also try to branch out and look for wellness programs online that can enhance your employees’ mental, physical, and emotional well-being. Perhaps you can allot a budget for their therapy sessions or organize physical activities.
More than addressing your office, you should also take the time to recognize how work impacts their lives at home, too. Due to the rise of remote work, people tend to bring their stress and worries to their homes. That said, it’s essential to promote a positive work-life balance that encourages your employees to set boundaries.
6. Work on Digital Experiences
It seems that remote or hybrid work is not going anywhere anytime soon, and the only way for you to adapt to this ever-evolving labor landscape is to embrace it. One way to do so is to enhance your employees’ digital experiences.
For instance, you can invest in digital tools and applications such as Asana, Trello, and Zapier to easily manage your team’s workflow even on the go. In addition, you can also introduce new communication softwares like Zoom, Microsoft Meetings, and Google Meets to collaborate with your members wherever you may be.
Depending on your company’s objectives and guidelines, you can also find apps that can help your HR and accounting departments tackle administrative tasks to improve productivity.
If you have never dabbled in technology before and, therefore, don’t know what apps to integrate into your daily operations, don’t worry. We’ll share the crucial factors you need to consider to achieve an excellent digital experience for your employees. These are:
- Ease of usage and implementation
- Efficiency and productivity-boosting
- Standardization (meaning, everyone can access the app or software regardless of the device)
- Ability to collect feedback
- Analysis reporting
Every app tends to offer different features. As such, you really need to evaluate what your company needs before you invest in expensive apps. Moreover, it’s a good idea to do a test run first before implementing the digital tool on a company-wide basis. Doing so will give you a better idea if this is the right move for you. If not, you are free to explore other options available. There’s so much to choose from.
7. Always Engage Your Employees Through Various Activities
On top of all these, our final strategy is to engage your employees — even outside the workplace. A great activity is to encourage them to participate in your projects with non-profit organizations. If they like, they can choose to either donate money or devote their time to helping communities in need.
By encouraging your employees to participate in these types of activities, you can help them not only take a short break from work but, more importantly, contribute positively to non-profit organizations that need their time and money the most.
The best part is, your employees can choose the organizations they want to help. They can find causes that they’re passionate about and devote their time and money to these projects. Because of this, they will feel more involved and empowered to make a difference. And when they realize that you — as a company — support their advocacies and social efforts, they will be more inclined to remain loyal to you.
Transform Your Workplace with ReciprociT
Many third-party providers offer gift-matching services that help employers coordinate with a non-profit organization and assist employees in making a difference. The main problem is: these third-party providers tend to be inefficient and expensive. As a result, the donations tend to get stuck in the administrative process, leaving the non-profit organizations at a loss.
At ReciprociT, we understand how challenging it can be to find the right middleman for your company and non-profit organizations. That’s why we offer you an end-to-end digital solution that can benefit your chosen organization substantially and engage your employees. In fact, if you choose ReciprociT your employees are in control of the organizations your company supports, which promotes a lasting positive impression of employee-centric culture.
We can give your employees the opportunity to directly donate to their chosen charities. In addition, we can also automatically match your donations through simple payroll deductions. This is because, in our book, we believe that gift matching should always be a win-win situation for all.
How We Can Help You
To further understand how we can help you, let’s put our focus on the three pillars involved: the employer, the employees, and the non-profit organization.
- Employer: By using our digital platform, your company can match your employees’ donations to their chosen charities in a seamless manner. After every transaction is completed, we also provide a detailed report to see how you, your employees, and your company as a whole have benefited the organization of your choice. What’s more, this doesn’t have to be a one-time event. If you prefer to provide consistent donations throughout the year, we also have features that can help with that.
- Employees: We find that many employees tend to hesitate when it comes to donating money because they often don’t see their impact. With our services, we enable employees to participate proactively in various programs and let them see how their donations are impacting their chosen charities.
- Non-profit organizations: Non-profit organizations that have joined ReciprociT can increase their funding effortlessly and engage with companies that are interested in their cause. Through this, they can grow their network and achieve their mission with so much ease.
ReciprociT is your answer to increasing employee engagement and cultivating a healthy workplace culture where members will feel more inclined to stay. Through our state-of-the-art online platform, inclusive services, and low maintenance requirements, we can help you transform your workplace into something greater.
Contact us today to begin your journey to developing a strong employee-centric culture and a better corporate environment.
