How Can You Build a Better Employee Experience?

This is an article shared with me by our coach and mentor for managing conflict, Ros Kingsmill.
Her work with our team launched our organization's first intentional efforts to raise the bar on Psychological Safety at the Royal.

The success to date of our program, and this article confirm for us that we're on the right track.

How Can You Build a Better Employee Experience?

 “As employees, we’re all on a journey with our employer. Our experiences on this journey will strongly influence our attitudes; our attitudes in turn form our behaviours which ultimately drive outcomes. A poor Employee Experience (EX) naturally results in a poor outcome.” – Oracle

Employee experience is not just another buzzword created to jargonize the discipline of employee engagement. It is, in fact, the foundation for achieving differentiated and sustainable business results. This is hardly surprising when you consider its impact. When the employee experience is good, employees are happy, engaged, and able to get their work done efficiently. That delivers better bottom line results.

But what is employee experience? Is it the perks and benefits that you offer to your employees – the cherry on the top of the ice-cream sundae? Or is it something more? An important point to consider here is if the ice-cream sundae is appalling, the cherry will not make up for it. Your employee experience is like the sundae, it runs so much deeper than perks and casual Fridays!

When we talk about employee experience, we are also referring to the days where there are difficult performance reviews, or how well the manager supported an employee the day she learned her son had cancer? Or consider whether the organization acted upon the key areas of opportunities identified in the last engagement survey.

Designing the right employee experience

Employee experience is principally concerned with one of the essential questions in business: How do I create the right Employee experience (that is, the right employee operating environment) so I can help my people deliver great results? Once you accept this notion – that it’s all about your people – then you really begin to see how the right employee experience can be transformative. Hence, your most vital contribution as a leader is to design, build, and sustain the right employee experience so that the sum of your employees’ perceptions, whether across your organization, division or team, is such that it encourages and produces the very best in your people.

Here are our recommendations that can act as a roadmap to your organization’s employee experience strategy –

Tune into the voice of your employees using analytics

The subject of employee experience may suggest the softer disciplines of employee culture and perception, but enhancement efforts should start with analytics. Your organization can apply similar techniques to gauging employee experience as those you use to measure and evaluate customer experience. Traditional employee HR information, semi-structured engagement surveys and unstructured comments from internal and external social platforms can provide insights into potential solutions to experience challenges. Even the Internet of Things can generate useful data about working conditions and personal wellness. Analytics can help you develop insights about specific segments of the population, identify changes in physical and social environments, amplify employee voice and address issues associated with productivity and tool usage.

Invest in key touchpoints where employee experience has the greatest impact

Making changes to employee experience often requires investment. It forces you to think about the points in the employee lifecycle that truly make a difference —for employees and the organization as a whole. For some companies, particularly those in traditionally labor-intensive industries, recruiting and onboarding processes have a significant impact on attracting and retaining top talent. These organizations depend on recruiting experiences that reflect the employer brand and are able to rapidly absorb employees into the working environment.

For other companies, experiences related to project assignments and career development will more notably impact retention and productivity. Understanding the relevance of different employee experiences, and taking into consideration your organizational strategy and culture, will help you target investment in those areas that are most impactful.

Build an employee experience coalition that crosses traditional silos

Designing integrated experiences around the physical, social and task spheres requires a multi-functional perspective. In addition to tool design and development, IT needs to provide the hardware and help desk support that makes it easier for employees to perform their jobs. Facilities and real estate services are vital to delivering workspaces that enable individual productivity and collective innovations. Marketing must help amplify and communicate the connection between employee and corporate branding. And perhaps most importantly, leadership at the line-of-business level must oversee day-to-day employee activities and the overall work environment.

Employee experience cannot be delegated to a specific supporting organization; rather, it needs to be woven into the very fabric of your business. In the future, responsibility for the employee experience may fall under the umbrella of a Chief Digital Officer. While many of these digital leadership roles currently cover external customer experiences, it is not too far-flung to imagine them expanding to encompass employee experience issues, as well.

Design employee experiences using rapid, iterative design principles

Lessons from the world of customer experience point to the value of applying agile design principles to enhancing employee experiences. First, develop a deep understanding of your user population based on quantitative as well as observational data. Second, document the stages of the employee journey, highlighting the physical, social and task-related interactions that occur at each stage, as well as approaches for addressing limitations or bottlenecks. Third, rapidly develop solutions that solve parts of the puzzle over short time periods rather than creating one larger solution that may take months or years to execute. Finally, capture feedback and refine the original solution on an ongoing basis. Applying these principles to the design of employee experience can generate quick successes and prevent larger, more costly challenges in the future.

Conclusion:

If your aim is to create a thriving workforce, successful business, and happy customers, the obvious route is via your employees. How you treat them will have a knock-on effect that ripples throughout your company. It’s time to examine your employee experience and, where necessary, get started on making positive changes. Today.

References:

1. Christine M. “We all need friends at work.” Harvard Business Review.
2. Chiaburu, Dan S. and David A. Harrison. “Do peers make the place? Conceptual synthesis and meta-analysis of coworker effects on perceptions, attitudes, OCBs, and performance.”
3. IBM Institute for Business Value analysis based on client interviews and secondary research.
4. “Think Better: Neuroscience is the Next Competitive Advantage.” Steelcase. 2015. 
5. Hedge, A. “Linking environmental conditions to productivity.” Eastern Ergonomics Conference and Exposition. June 2004. 
6. King, Rachel. “IBM researchers try to measure employee well-being using technology.” Wall Street Journal. July 2015.
7. Luis Garza, Innovation Manager, CEMEX Research Group.
8. Pink, Daniel. Drive. Riverhead Books. 2009.
9. Accessibility Action Plan, 2015-2016. National Australia Bank.

 

My Mission at #ATA18: Develop New Lenses for Telemedicine's Future

 At this stage of my career, legacy is important to me as I try to shape Telemedicine applied to mental health one last time - for my great team at work, and for my daughter who may be able to do far more with her skills than she can imagine.

 I've worked in Telemedicine for over 20 years and in that respect I can't really say what iteration of Telemedicine we are working in today; TeleV2, TeleV3, TeleV7?  What I do feel is that every five years the advances in technology combined with healthcare's openness to care beyond the traditional settings seem to change the nature of this work.

 So when I attend an event like the American Telemedicine Association's annual symposium (ATA2018), my mission is to look for patterns and trends that will shape this industry in five years from now. By that time I hope to see my daughter, a young woman with aspirations in the field of Psychology, leveraging technology for care. That hits home for me because I got involved in Telemedicine around the time of her birth in the mid-90's.



  Are you heading to #ATA18 with an eye on the future of #Telemedicine #Telehealth? I look forward to all conversations on the future of this great advancement in healthcare!

As per our blog policy - the opinions and comments in this article represent those of the author and should not be considered representative of the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group.

National Family Caregivers Month

National Family Caregivers Month is designated as a time to thank, support, educate, and empower family caregivers.

 

Personally, it's a time to take a deep breath and take pride in accomplishments within my own family. Being a caregiver at home consumes an enormous portion of the "life" half of my work-life balancing act. My wife and I made the commitment in 2000 to make a difference in the life of an unfortunate child in the custody of Children's Aid. We have persevered through enormous mental health and physical challenges.

 

Today, we are very proud of what our child has accomplished, but we also will pause to acknowledge the difficult times we have, and will continue to experience as part of this commitment.

 

And we officially joined the "sandwich" generation recently as an elder now lives with dementia.

 

We know we are not alone with these struggles, which is why this is a very poignant month to be acknowledged. 

Sources indicate that there are around 6.1 million family caregivers in Canada who must balance their personal commitments, caregiving duties and work responsibilities for chronically ill, with disability, or aged family members or friends during any given year. Family caregivers are the invisible back bone of our health care system and provide over 80 percent of the care needed by individuals with long-term conditions. Today, 35% of the Canadian workforce are family caregivers. 

Over 50% of employee caregivers are between the ages of 45 to 65, in their peak earning years with valuable skills and experience. They provide between 16 to 28 hours of care per month over the course of 3 years. It is estimated that family caregivers contribute $25–30 billion dollars of unpaid care every year. As the time and physical demands experience as a caregiver are often equivalent to working two full-time jobs, family caregivers can experience negative effect on their financial, emotional and personal well-being. These negative consequences of not supporting family caregivers will not only be felt by the family caregivers and patients, but also to the Canadian employers and our economy (Schizophrenia.ca, 2015).

Below is a list of a few vital reminders to keep in mind when you are a caregiver or supporting a caregiver.

1.    Seek support from other caregivers. You are not alone!

2.    Take care of your own health so that you can be strong enough to take care of your loved one.

3.    Accept offers of help and suggest specific things people can do to help you.

4.    Learn how to communicate effectively with doctors.

5.    Caregiving is hard work so take respite breaks often.

6.    Watch out for signs of depression and don't delay in getting professional help when you need it.

7.    Be open to new technologies that can help you care for your loved one.

8.    Organize medical information so it's up to date and easy to find.

9.    Make sure legal documents are in order.

10.      Give yourself credit for doing the best you can in one of the toughest jobs there is!

For your own Family Caregiver Toolbox click here! Feel free to share with any family caregivers you know!

October is Patient-Centered Care Month

Patient-Centered Care Awareness Month is an awareness-building campaign commemorated globally every October to engage all healthcare stakeholders in adopting and advancing patient-centered approaches to care (Planetree.org, 2015). 

 

But what is Patient-Centered Care exactly? The IOM (Institute of Medicine) defines patient-centered care as: "Providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values, and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions." 

 

It has also been described as an approach to care that is 1) organized around the needs of the patient; and 2) promotes relationships between patients, their families and their healthcare teams that nurture trust, transparency and collaboration (Planetree.org, 2015). 

 

Here at The Royal our mandate is simple: to get more people living with mental illness into recovery faster. By practicing patient-centered care, we are able to fulfill our mandate every day!

 

During the month of October I'll share with you some of the ways we maintain our alignment with patients/clients because that is the key toward ensuring we are truly providing Patient-Centered Care.

 

Share your thoughts; what does Patient-Centered Care look like at your organization?

 

 



September 2015 National Recovery Month

 

 September serves as a month to educate people on the advancements of treatments for individuals with addiction and mental health issues.

 

 It is also a time for us to recognize the gains that have been made by people who live in recovery. Just as we recognize those managing other conditions such as diabetes, heart disease or a physical ailment, this month is dedicated to bringing awareness to the ‘positive message that behavioral health is essential to overall health, prevention works, treatment is effective, and people can and do recover’(NCADD, 2015).

 We asked some mental health staff and clients what their understanding of living in recovery is. You may be interested to hear what they had to say:

 

 

 'Living in recovery is a long process…All the work to get to this place is done by yourself; only you are responsible. Recovery is part of rehabilitation.' Client perspective

 

"Living in recovery is really living while acknowledging the fact you need some extra help. We could all use some extra help. It is essential to acknowledge that some mental health issues may be a lifelong process and we must help people who are in recovery to develop a sense of empowerment and confidence." Staff perspective 

 

There are millions of people living in recovery. September is about getting out there and educating others about recovery.

Join us in celebrating National Recovery Month everyone!

Recognition Helps Us Recognize We Can Do More

  Our Chief-of-Psychiatry, Dr. Raj Bhatla is deservedly recognized as a Clinical Champion of Telemedicine in Ontario. He's the most recent in a short line of people I've been inspired to work with in the Telemedicine path of my career.

 

And egad - next year I'll be quietly celebrating 20 years in Telemedicine development. During a brief conversation with a peer from the Ontario Telemedicine Network I realized a large portion of my vision in 1996 is a reality today. But as friends, regional partners and network colleagues gathered to celebrate, another highlight of the day was the revelation that there is still so much more we can accomplish.

The canvas of mental health care in 2002 seemed limited to eight colors. We can work with so much more today. A simple lunch hour with partners revealed potential to serve clients we may have overlooked over the past few years of rapid development.

And Telemedicine technology is now moving beyond what I saw in my crystal ball in 1996.

Our regional mental health care partners from across Eastern Ontario shed new light on patient treatment needs that remain untapped by our program today. Our team was energized emotionally with the prospect of exciting new Telemedicine development tasks for the summer and fall of 2015.

None of this may have happened if we had not paused to celebrate our accomplishments, even for two hours of a typical mid-week workday. For that we thank the team at Ontario Telemedicine Network. And again extend our gratitude and congratulations to our clinical champion, Dr. Bhatla.

It reminds us as leaders in this field that pausing to reflect and recognize often sheds light on new routes to travel.

As per our blog policy - the opinions and comments in this article represent those of the author and should not be considered representative of the ROHCG.

 

Appraisals - Who Serves First

 When a Performance Appraisal is scheduled at this organization (based on date-of-hire) it unfolds like a tennis match. Tasks are volleyed back-and-forth with the most important step, the vital employee-manager conversation situated in the middle of the exercise.

  The first serve goes to the employee, directing them to go to the online form and reflect on their skills, performance and achievements, and aligning them with the organization's core competencies. When completed, the assignment and form are lobbed over to the manager.

  I confess to being a bit surprised by some staff who thought this task order put them at a disadvantage.

  The tennis serve usually provides an advantage to the server, dictating speed, location, strategy for the competitive point. The Performance Appraisal isn't a competition, but completing the Self-Assessment before the manager is an opportunity to set the tone for the appraisal.

  Imaging what goes through a manager's mind when he sees the following:

• Each competency contains feedback journal notes from grateful clients and professional colleagues
• Each competency contains ideas for development plans that ensure the employee continues to develop their core skills and adapts to ongoing changes
• Comments sections are reflective and proactive, making it clear that the employee takes this assessment opportunity seriously and constructively

  I expect a good manager would dial up the commitment level to match that of the employee!

  Conversely, if the employee has quickly made the rating scale selection and hit the complete button, the manager could interpret that this feedback and reflection opportunity are nothing more than a distraction.

  Point-opportunity lost!

  The time spent with staff, introducing the system has been very rewarding. It has confirmed what they told us in our bi-annual Employee Engagement surveys:

• They want more feedback
• Many don't feel their efforts are recognized and valued
• The lack of feedback eliminates most desires to give that extra discretionary effort that they still have at their disposal

  Staff often confess to feeling like the underdog in the Performance Appraisal. Serving first gives them an opportunity to make this exercise an adult-to-adult exchange of perspectives, reflection, anticipation, and recognition.

As per our blog policy - the opinions and comments in this article represent those of the author and should not be considered representative of the ROHCG.