Many organizations want HR to have greater influence on business growth or other strategic objectives. At its core, this primarily means recruiting the most suitable talent and developing employees in a targeted way. Gathering employee feedback and measuring employee loyalty are crucial to maintaining insight into their engagement, development needs and development opportunities. How do you embed this in the organization and your HR policy? Focus on the talent journey and continuously measuring employee feedback through short surveys.
The world, the economy and the labor market are changing rapidly. Organizations anticipate and respond to these changes, and their employees' talents and skills are their most important asset in doing so. HRM often needs to and can make a greater and more direct contribution to the organization's objectives and results, but how exactly should it do this? Many organizations and HR professionals struggle with this question. HR Analytics is on the rise and provides new insights. Ultimately, HR's impact and influence on business growth and business results are, of course, primarily determined by the extent to which HR can attract suitable talent, prevent unwanted turnover and enable existing employees to develop in a targeted way. In practice, the underlying question turns out to be how to gain and maintain control over this. These four steps are particularly valuable for this purpose, with employee feedback and measuring employee engagement as the common thread.
1. Map the Talent Journey
Companies that want to grow gain greater insight into their customers' needs by taking a close look at the customer journey. This enables them to better meet those needs. Recruiting, retaining and developing talent should be no different. This is where the talent journey matters. It begins with the exploration phase for (potential) employees, recruitment interviews and onboarding, but it does not end once someone actually starts work. At that point, it is important to track employees' experience and development and monitor when someone may begin to feel they have ‘nothing left to learn’. This makes it possible to rekindle the challenge in their work. Employee feedback is essential here. The exact talent journey varies from one organization to another. Map it together with colleagues from different departments and identify the important moments: the ‘moments of truth’. This is where embedding engagement, loyalty and development opportunities in HR and organizational policy begins.
2. Gain greater control over employee development and engagement
Gaining insight into and control over employees' development needs, loyalty and engagement is often considered difficult. The talent journey is important for addressing this in a targeted way. The traditional employee satisfaction questionnaire or MTO (Employee Satisfaction Survey) is not enough for this purpose. These often pay insufficient attention to the different stages of the talent journey and provide little insight into priorities and themes from the employee's perspective. Moreover, you want to be able to act on the employee needs and feedback you measure more quickly than once a year. Fortunately, online employee surveys now allow you to measure employee feedback continuously. Each survey is short and easy to participate in, resulting in higher response rates and more valuable employee feedback. An important prerequisite for HR to have greater influence on business growth.
3. Ask the right question: eNPS or other questions?
At important moments in the talent journey it is important to ask the right, well-considered question (or a few questions) in an accessible way. Measuring eNPS (employee Net Promotor Score) is a familiar metric for measuring employee feedback and engagement. But there are more metrics, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Think carefully about which survey questions are right for your situation at each moment, or seek advice on this. On one occasion, that may be eNPS, but on the next, a different metric may provide more valuable insights into employee feedback. GrowPromoter's online platform deliberately gives users the freedom and flexibility to ask multiple types of survey questions.
4. Embed actions and follow-up on employee feedback
Continuously measuring employee feedback is valuable because it provides more insights that are up to date, and because you can act immediately on individual feedback. You therefore also need to embed this in the organization and its policies. Determine internally how you will handle the continuous flow of employee feedback. This creates a uniform approach and a clear way of working. In doing so, carefully consider how HR can gain greater influence on business growth or other objectives. Start measuring employee feedback and the results of the actions taken, and use your online dashboard with up-to-date results to see where new actions are needed. This creates closed loop feedback and increases control over employee loyalty and engagement, as well as insight into development needs and development opportunities.
Maximizing HR's influence on business growth
These four steps increase HR's direct impact on business growth and other strategic organizational objectives, using employee feedback and through employee loyalty and employee engagement (employee experience). And this directly influences the customer experience (CX). I can hardly imagine a greater and more direct impact of HRM on business growth and other objectives.
